The Unknown facts about Thodas (ancient people in Nilgiris)

The Toda people are a Dravidian ethnic group living in the Nilgiri Mountains of Tamil Nadu, India. Prior to British invasion in the 18th century, the Toda coexisted with other ethnic groups like as the Kota, Badaga, and Kurumba in a loose caste-like society, with the Toda at the top. Throughout the twentieth century, the Toda population has fluctuated between 700 and 900 people. Although the Toda make up a small percentage of India's population, they have received "a highly disproportionate amount of interest" because of their "ethnological aberrancy" and "their unlikeness to their neighbours in look, manners, and customs" since the early nineteenth century. Anthropologists and linguists studied their culture, which aided in the development of the fields.

Toda people used to reside in mund villages, which were made up of three to seven small thatched huts built in the shape of half-barrels and placed across the grazing slopes where they kept domestic buffalo. Their economy was pastoral, focused on the buffalo, whose dairy products they traded with the Nilgiri Hills' neighbouring inhabitants. Toda religion venerates the sacred buffalo, so rites are done for all dairy activities including the ordination of dairymen-priests. The social environment in which elaborate poetic songs about the cult of the buffalo are produced and recited is provided by religious and burial rites.

In old Toda civilization, fraternal polyandry was fairly frequent; however, this practise, as well as female infanticide, has since been completely abandoned. Some Toda grazing area was lost in the last quarter of the twentieth century due to outsiders exploiting it for agriculture or afforestation by the Tamil Nadu State Government. This has posed a danger to Toda culture by drastically reducing buffalo herds. Toda civilization and culture have been the subject of an international effort at culturally sensitive environmental rehabilitation since the early twenty-first century.

The Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve, a UNESCO-recognized International Biosphere Reserve, currently includes the Toda plains, which have been inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.