Life Of A Toda Essay
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Brianna Wattie
October 27, 1999
Sociology, Period 6
Toda Project
Toda Life versus American Life
Every culture in the world is made up of six different stages of life. The stages consist of birth, childhood, adolescence, courtship, marriage, and adulthood. Each stage differs in each culture making that specific culture unique. Two cultures that display this thesis best are the Toda and the American culture.
The Toda’s are people of the Nilgirl Hills in southern India, thought to be of the Dravidian stock. There are only about 1,000 of these people left in the world today. The men have full beards and wear flowing robes, and the women have long, curled hair and are tattooed. Their economy is based on buffalo herding and the manufacture of dairy products. The religion of the Toda’s centers on ceremonies involving the buffalo, the ordination of the dairymen-priests, and funeral rituals.
When a Toda child is born, they spend the first month of their life in a seclusion hut made of mud and sticks, located outside of the village. The meaning behind this is that the Toda’s had a strong belief in the ideas of impurity. The hut is extremely significant because it is the same hut in which his/her mother spent four moths of her pregnancy. This hut served as a place for ritual and ceremony.
When fertility is discovered, a meal of cereal is cooked and eaten. After the meal, the future mother makes a small roll of threads, puts it into the fire and burns herself with the roll twice on each hand. This ceremony is called “giving the bow”. It is a tradition that is said to establish a legal fatherhood. After the father is declared, the woman can return to her home. When delivering, the woman kneels with her head on her husband’s chest. The husband holds the woman’s head as she delivers. A child is born within a Toda family on an average of one every three years. Each wife gives birth to about three or four offspring in her lifetime. There is no formal ceremony associated with the actual birth although prayers are said to facilitate a difficult delivery.
There was a time when female infanticide was practiced among the Toda’s. During this period, a large percentage of female babies were smothered and buried without ceremony immediately following birth. Also, if twins were born one of them would be killed, even if the both happened to be males. Even though this tradition is not very common anymore, a large number of males still exist in the tribe today.
The first month of a Toda’s childhood of course begins with the intimacy of a seclusion hut. For the next three months, the child’s face is revealed to no person but it’s mother. The nursing of a child lasts about two years and with this time, a strong psychogenic attachment forms between the mother and child. After three months, an uncovering ceremony is preformed. With a male, the child is taken in front of the diary and his head is touched to the threshold. Then he is taken to where a buffalo is standing and his face is turned to the sun. Finally, he is uncovered. With a female, the child is taken to a location where women receive buttermilk from the dairyman and there the mother will uncover her face. In both ceremonies, the reflection of the buffalo’s significance can be seen.
Naming a child is a very important ceremony in the lives of Toda’s. The father of the child first shaves the child’s head. Then, the male is taken before his maternal uncle who will then name him and promise him a calf. In the case that the child is female, she would be named by a female relative of the father but no calf is promised to her. The names of the children can derived from many things, such as prayer words, gods, hills, villages, dairies, buffalo pens, dairy vessels, and stones. After a child is named, it is given its first prepared food, which is usually gruel made of rice or millet and milk.
The childhood of a Toda is basically cheerful and carefree. Parents are usually indulgent and exhibit great fondness for their children. Although a brother may not be the legal father of a child, he still looks out for the child’s well being. Most of a child’s life is taken up with the playing of a variety of games. The children also build artificial buffalo pens and fireplaces for sport. The most prized possession of a Toda child is a small imitation buffalo horn. The horns carry a great significance because they are to be burned with the bodies of males at cremation ceremonies. A very dangerous sport that is practiced among the children is hanging onto the horns and around the necks of buffalo. Almost every game that a Toda child plays has some relation with the significance of the buffalo in their culture. Although there was no organized sports and competition, adults did enjoy watching children imitate serious occupations of the elders.
An adolescent male finds that he really has no adolescence. He would find that he is already participating in the adult world. As soon as he was capable of being of any assistance, he would have been taking to the herding grounds to learn the herdsman’s duties. He also would begin to learn some of the dairying rituals and routines. If the male happened to have an older brother that already brought a wife into the family then he would have had marital privileges extended to him as soon as he was physically able to accept them.
Again, the female Toda would have already mastered a few domestic arts practiced by Toda women upon reaching adolescence. These tasks include, pounding grain, fetching water, sweeping, cleaning, mending, and embroidering. The only “fine art” that Toda women can really produce is embroidering. By this time in a female’s life, she would probably already be married to a husband and most likely living with him. She would have already had a variety of sexual contacts. The concept of virginity has no defined significant value to the Toda's. From the stage of adolescence to the stage of motherhood, the time period is very short.
Infant marriages are very important in the lives of the Toda's. Sometimes a child would be married as young as two or three years of age. The father of the male arranges the marriages. It is the father of the male that seeks a suitable mate for his son. The father observes prevailing marriage regulations and taboos. First, the father will visit the female’s parents and stay the night in the village, making all necessary marriage arrangements. He will be in the village of another clan due to clan exogamy. The father will return to his own village the next day. A few days after his first visit, the father and his son travel back to the village of the intended wife, taking with them a loin cloth as a preliminary wedding gift. The male then would salute the father, mother and brothers of the female, kneeling forward to be touched on the forehead with each individual’s feet. The gift is then presented to the female. The father and son stay the night once again and return home the next day. Sometimes the girl will return home with the father and son to live with the family of her soon to be husband. But, usually the female will remain with her family until she has passed the age of puberty.
Twice a year after the first visit, until the female is ten years of age, the male will bring her a loincloth as a gift. After that, the male will bring a cloak, which is considered the common gift of the Toda. Before a female reaches puberty, a very strange ceremony is preformed. A man from the opposite mointy comes to the female’s house during the day. He then lies down beside her and cover both him and her with a cloak. The two remain there for a few min. Two weeks later, a young man that is not in the same clan as the female comes to her village for one night and has intercourse with her. This ritual must take place before the female reaches puberty.
A year after the defloration ceremony, the female joins her new husband in his village. A group containing the husband, his parents, and a relative belonging to the same clan brings her there. Before leaving the female’s village, he places five rupees into the female’s mantle and then the group departs. Other than a simple feast and wedding gift, there is no ceremony. Both the male and female have the option to veto the marriage. If either choose to do so, fines are levied, one buffalo if the male refused and five to ten buffalo if the female refuses. Usually, the marriage goes on as planned with the woman taking with her personal possessions.
Wife transfer and consort-mistress arrangement is also used in the Toda culture. Not every Toda is married in childhood. If a male reaches the age of fifteen or sixteen without having been married, he may go ahead and marry without his father’s consent. Many times there is a shortage of wives and men have to be satisfied with a child-wife.
The Toda life of an adult male is basically uneventful. Stewardship of the buffalo organizes the daily activities. The buffalo are often expressed by the Toda’s as the buffalo being the substance and the man as the shadow. In the morning, the animals are unpenned, driven to the grazing areas, grazed, driven back to their pens and then milked. Each day, the milk of the past evening is churned and made into ghi. When the change of wet to dry season occurs, the buffalo herds may need to be driven to better pastures. When this occurs, the Toda’s move with them. Or, one brother will follow the buffalo while another stays home to take care of the family. In one month, the brothers switch roles.
The Toda cosmology does not have any great spirits or uncontrollable forces that man must look up to. Their religion has formalized and stylized rituals devoid of mythical or spiritual substance. The hour, day, year, the changes, cycles and crises all evolved...
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