THE WESTERN ROMANCE with the TODA Anthony R. Walker
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THE WESTERN ROMANCE WITH THE TODA Anthony R. Walker INTRODUCTION In a largely Western-generated ethnographic record, certain peoples seem to stand out as having been especially attractive to European observers.1 People, for example, like the Maasai of East Africa, the Plains Indians of North America, the Naga peoples of the Indo-Burma frontier and the Balinese of Indonesia. Among the ranks of 'most-favoured peoples', we must surely include the Toda of south India. Of all the Nilgiri communities, they are the ones who have attracted by far the greatest attention. In the 'ethnology' section alone of Paul Hockings's Bibliography for the Nilgiri Hills of Southern India 1602-1978 (1978), over a quarter of the entries (not solely the works of Westerners, of course) deal exclusively with the Toda; a great many more deal substantially with them (along with other Nilgiri or non- Nilgiri peoples). By contrast, a mere 8 per cent of the entries focus exclusively on the region's dominant ethnic group: the Badaga (despite Professor Hockings's [1980a, 1980b, 1988, etc.] yeoman service to rectify the imbalance). But more than this, the Toda, for the most part, are also the ones who have received the greatest admiration. Let the words of William Yeatts (1932: 387), officer-in-charge of the Madras Presidency volumes of the 1931 Census of India, set the background for my paper: More has been written about this tribe, more theories have been evolved about its origin and more prophecies about its future, than about any other tribe or even caste of South India. Rivers' treatise, exhaustive and almost wearisome in its detail, is in itself an indication of the interest this people has aroused and that so many amateurs should have forced themselves to labour through his not very inviting pages is another. That the Todas should arouse such interest is not surprising for in the first Anthony R. Walker is on the faculty of The Ohio State University, U.S.A. SOCIOLOGICAL BULLETIN, 40 (1 & 2), March-September 1991 22 Sociological Bulletin circumstance of all, outward appearance, their departure from all South Indian types is marked. Even the most Gallio of Europeans observes the Toda, or at least the Toda male, as something different. The greater stature, the erect carriage, the luxuriance of hair and beard, the clear and generally lighter skin, the almost Semitic cast of face, the distinctive garment, the easy shepherd's gait that comes from generations of walking over springy down grass, all form a type that even the most unobservant could hardly fail to register. When peculiar customs, uncertain origin, unusual houses set almost always in beautiful surroundings are added and also the melancholy interest that attaches to alleged decay and approaching extinction, it would be strange if the Todas were not a Nilgiri institution. They are known far beyond India and the undesirable side of this fame is shown by the Todas near Ootacamund having sunk to be a globe-trotters' showpiece. Certainly the Toda were the focal Nilgiri community for the first Westerner known to have climbed these mountains, now almost 400 years ago; and I suspect there can be little argument that, even now, they attract the greatest attention from casual visitors — Western or Indian — to this corner of south India. The (undated) guide I picked up on my most recent visit to the mountains begins its description of the Toda as follows: 'When the Toda men stalk along the countryside roads twitching their mantles, the effect is startlingly patriarchal. They are most dignified in their bearing with well marked facial features' (Halayya n.d.: Ch. 6:2; the first sentence, incidentally, is copied verbatim from page 22 of Mollie Panter-Downes's [1967] book Ooty Preserved: A Victorian Hill Station)! More than once I have heard Indian anthropologists talk of avoiding Toda research because, so they say, these people have been 'spoilt rotten' by excessive Western interest. But this is a view that is neither particularly new, nor, for that matter, confined to those of Indian nationality. The epitome of 19th century British orientalists, Sir Richard Burton, wrote in his book Goa, and the Blue Mountains (1851: 351-52): Covetousness is now the mountaineer's ruling passion: the Toda is an inveterate, indefatigable beggar, whose cry, Eenam Juroo, 'give me a present!' no matter what, - money, brandy, cigars, or snuff- will follow you for miles over hill and dale .... And a couple of decades later, Dr. John Shortt of the Madras Medical Service could write (1869: 230): The Todas, as a class, are much spoiled, so much so, that nobody now-a-days can go to see them without paying a douceur, which, if not gratuitously offered, is sure to be asked for and expected as a right... The Western Romance with the Toda 23 In this paper I wish to examine the history of relations between the Toda community and various categories of Westerners (in the Toda language, generically ars, the original meaning of which was 'king' [cf. Tamil- Malayalam, aracan; Kannada arasa]) with whom they have been associated over the past four centuries. Particularly, I am interested in exploring Western attitudes to the Toda. I am not so much concerned here with the socio-economic and cultural changes the former have so frequently helped propagate among the latter, a subject I have dealt with at some length elsewhere (Walker 1986: 240-93). Because the first Westerner known to visit the Toda was a Christian priest, I shall begin with the Christian missionaries. The next Europeans to come to the Nilgiris, several centuries later, were officials in the employ of the British East India Company; then, not long after them, a whole posse of explorers, adventurers, and amateur ethnologists. The reactions of some of these men and women will be my next focus of interest. Finally, I shall turn to members of the academic fraternity. WESTERN MISSIONARIES AND THE TODA In 1584, a 26 year old Italian Jesuit priest, a native of Capua, arrived in Malabar, where he was destined to remain until he died nearly half a century later, in 1632 (Ferroli 1939: 250, 390-91). His name was Giacomo Fenicio and, because he wrote his missionary reports in the dominant secular language of the Roman Church in the India of his time, he is often, mistakenly, credited with Portuguese ethnicity. Fenicio is a very important figure in the history of the Toda. Not only was he the first Westerner to report on these people, but his was the first substantial ethnographic account of them from any source whatsoever. In a very real sense, Toda history (contra proto- and pre-history) begins with this Jesuit priest's 1603 visit to the Nilgiris. Fenicio, then based in Calicut, climbed up onto the high Nilgiri plateau at the command of the Bishop of Angamale, following a less- than-fully satisfactory 1602 expedition to these mountains by a Malayalee priest and deacon. The clerics were investigating rumours circulating among the Roman hierarchy in Malabar that living in these Nilgiri mountains was a lost community of back-sliding Christians of the Malabar Syrian rite (Whitehouse 1873: 132). A translation of Fenicio's report, from a manuscript presently in the British Museum (Fenicio 1603), appears as Appendix 1 of W.H.R. Rivers's classic study, The Todas (1906). Fenicio met and conversed with a (the highest-ranking grade of dairyman-priest [Rivers 1906: 83-122; Walker 1986: 149-56]) and visited a Toda hamlet. His largely descriptive report provides us with valuable data on the Toda as they were at the beginning of the 17th century: on the institution of the on the Toda's buffalo-based economy, their eating habits, their marriage and funerary customs, and on their political subordination to Badaga headmen. It is a pity, however, that he says so little about his personal reactions to the 24 Sociological Bulletin Toda. It is clear, of course, that the Jesuit's interests were essentially evangelistic and his observations, as one might expect, thoroughly coloured by his own religious ideology. When the asks after Fenicio's welfare he replies (Rivers 1906: 724): well and all the better for meeting him for it proved to me that God was my guide, since I had come so far to see the Thodares and immediately met with their chief. He describes the as 'a huge man, well proportioned, with a long beard and hair like Nazarene (emphasis added)'; he takes the opportunity to show the dairyman-priest his Christian icons and Bible. Later he preaches to a party of Toda, but is clearly not sufficiently enthused by their response as to wish to embark on any programme of active evangelism. On the contrary, he advises his superiors not to undertake work in these hills: 'I do not think that the present is a suitable time for the Company to undertake such out- of-the-way enterprises', he writes, 'since it cannot attend to others of greater importance which are close at hand for want of workers' (Rivers 1906: 729, emphasis added). This advice, incidentally, was to give the Toda community a two-and-a-half-century-long reprieve from evangelistic Christianity-. The next Christian propagandist to strive for 'Toda souls' was more earnest than Father (Fr.) Fenicio, but no more successful. He was the German Protestant, Johann Friedrich Metz, who worked for the Swiss-based Basel Evangelical Mission Society, which in 1846 established a base for its itinerant preachers in the Badaga village of Ketti (Hockings 1980a: 188). Hockings (1989: 354) sketches a nice portrait of Metz tramp[ing] from village to village — a different one almost every day — preaching as he went'.