Between Tradition and Modernity and Other Essays on the Toda of South India

By Anthony R. Walker

Subjects: Toda (Indic people)

Description: Collected essays on the Toda people of the Nilgiri Mountains in Tamil Nadu, South India. The first essay, "Toda Society Between Tradition and Modernity" provides the background for all that will follow. The second essay "A Thousand Out of Eight Hundred Million: Who Cares?" is an attempt to explain just why the Toda, despite being one of India's smallest communities, are yet among the best known in the ethnographic record, not only of India but of the whole world. The next two chapters deal with aspects of Toda ethnography, but in radically different ways. Chapter Three is a polemical essay, attacking some and supporting other modern secondary analyses of the Toda marriage and kinship systems. Chapter Four is a straightforward account of a famous Toda ritual: the giving by a man of a symbolic bow-and-arrow to a woman and thereby establishing paternity of her still-unborn child.