Blue Mountains Revisited: Cultural Studies on the Nilgiri Hills.

• Author: ZVELEBIL, K.V.
• Position: Review

Blue Mountains Revisited: Cultural Studies on the Nilgiri Hills. Edited by PAUL HOCKINGS. Delhi: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 1997. Pp. xii + 345; 35 figures, 8 plates. Rs 660.

According to the editor of this volume, the regional scientific and historical literature on the Nilgiris is so extensive "that one could almost literally paper the Nilgiri district with the pages of its publications! Let us hope that does not happen" (preface). And yet, we have here a second tome following an already voluminous predecessor, Blue Mountains: The Ethnography and Biography of a South Indian Region (1989). As Marie-Claude Mahias says on p. 316 of the present volume, "the case of the Nilgiris has been used to construct very different sociological models. It has been equally easy to prove that the inhabitants were isolated tribes or that they were part of a jajm[bar{a}]n[bar{i}]-like system of interdependence, with either the Todas or the Badagas as the dominant caste ... the same data were ... sufficient to lend themselves to diverse elaborations, which clearly points to theoretical and ideological bias in the construction of those models," The same author writes on p. 328: "The Nilgiris c onstituted a true laboratory for observation and experiment. They presented salient features allowing the observers to infer that some of the Nilgiri people were either a 'hardly modified sample of the first human races' (Marshall) or 'representative of an exceptional type, remained in a pure condition' (de Quatrefages)." Among the inhabitants of the Nilgiris, the Toda buffalo pastoralists "were romanticized as holdovers from a more glorious past. They were compared to the lost tribes of Israel, to the Romans, to the Sumerians of southern Iraque," to the lost soldiers of Alexander the Great, or were considered "remnants of the ancient buffalo herders of neolithic South India," writes Allen Zagarell (p. 23), who continues: "The assumption of the antiquity, the primitiveness of the highlanders was contained in the suggestion that the well-known economic and tribal symbiosis of the various highland communities, the agriculturalist Badagas, the pastoral Todas, the crafts-oriented Kotas, the hunting/gathering Kuru mbas and Irulas, possessed a jajmani-like relationship. These groups were seen as being proto-like in form." According to Nurit Bird-David (p. 7), there are significant differences between two systems: the Nilgiri Plateau, i.e., the "intertribal" world of the Toda, Badaga, Kota and Kurumba, on the one hand, and "that of the Mullu Kurumba, the Betta Kurumba, the Nayaka, the Paniya, and the Chetti on the other." Subsequently, she considers the "little-known isolated communities of the Toda, Badaga and Kota who live in the Nilgiri-Wynaad," who "bear the marks of the intertribal arrangements" of a different sort. According to her, Region N constitutes one system of "intertribal world" (on the Nilgiri Plateau) characterized by "organic solidarity," whereas Region W (Nilgiri-Wynaad) constitutes a different system, characterized by "mechanical solidarity" of multi-ethnic interspersed clusters.

Thus, as the editor says in his introduction, "any one of the chapters in the present book can and should be regarded as only one person's view of the subject." However, at the end of the twentieth century, we are able to offer, thanks to the unprecedented flourishing of Nilgiri areal studies in its second half, an "informed understanding" not only of the Todas, Kotas, and Badagas, but also of "the various Irula and Kurumba groups living on the extremities"--an age-old picture which survived until the middle of this century, but is fast changing and disappearing, as may be seen from some of the essays in this volume.

I shall now consider critically the contributions one by one, starting with the editor's introduction (pp. 1-4). Sadly enough, he is right when he says, "the accounts we have published will quite literally become history, a view of things as they were but no longer are," There is an urgency to proceed in an intensive way with Nilgiri areal studies, studies of what Hockings calls "Nilgiri society" in all its aspects, including its areal linguistics (cf. my paper, "A Plea for Nilgiri Areal Studies," IJDL 9 [1980]: 1-22). I felt this urgency as early as in 1955 when I published (in Czech) an article on the socioeconomic relations of the Nilgiri tribes and their disintegration.

On p. 3 Hockings mentions "seven different groups of Kurumbas and one of Irulas." This is not quite precise. As I have repeatedly shown, there are three Irula groups in the...