Just because the Badagas arrived in the Nilgiris much later than other tribal groups, like the Todas and the Kotas, it does not discredit their claims of indigeneity to the Nilgiris, said Paul Hockings, Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the University of Illinois and the Editor of the Encyclopedia of the Nilgiri Hills.
Mr. Hockings who is in the Nilgiris, recently participated in NilgiriScapes, a conference on a sustainable future for the Nilgiris, organised by KREA University, Keystone Foundation, Edhkwehlynawd Botanical Refuge, among others. Other attendees included Dr. Tarun Chhabra, author of The Toda Landscape, Explorations in Cultural Ecology, anthropologist, Nurit Bird-David and others.
“Firstly, all of the information that I give in the book is information given to me by Badaga elders who were growing up around the early 20th century. I have no interest in this. I don’t care where the Badagas came from, but after doing linguistic research, I and my colleague Christiane Pilot-Raichoor find that there is a lot of Kurumba input into the Badaga language as well, which means that early Badagas were close to Kurumbas, taking wives from Kurumbas,” said Mr. Hockings in an interview with The Hindu.
Mr. Hockings said while a population of Badagas did migrate to the Nilgiris from Southern Mysore during the fall of the Vijayanagara Empire around 400-year-ago, that they did have existing ties to the Kurumbas in the Nilgiris.
“Those who did come from Mysore, we know exactly which villages they came from. We know from certain clans came from Nanjangud (in Mysore), and elders told me which villages they came from and there was no reason for them to make that up,” said Mr. Hockings.
Mr. Hockings said what can be clearly said was that at least “some of the ancestral Badagas came from Southern Mysore in a very restricted area near Nanjangud, while others are descended from the unions of Badagas with women who were indigenous to the Nilgiris.”
The renowned anthropologist said the Badagas are an indigenous group. “Indegeneity does not mean that they were here forever. For example, the English— the Anglo-Saxons came from the border between Denmark and Germany about 1,400 years ago. Most English people don’t know that because they think they belong in England, but the Anglo-Saxons have been in England only as long as the Parsis have been in India. But we do accept the English are indigenous to England,” he said.
Mr. Hockings argued in a similar vein, the Badagas are indigenous to the Nilgiris and to nowhere else at this point. “If you want to push it back, the Kotas were brought to the Nilgiris around 700 years ago and the Todas came here around 2,000 years ago. It was a very gradual migration (by the Badagas) and they had to leave Mysore because there was a lot of violence and rioting, especially at the beginning of the 17th century. Just because they came at a later date it doesn’t mean they aren’t indigenous,” he said.
Mr. Hockings said anthropologists have a specific definition of tribes worldwide and that the Badagas fit into the standard anthropological definition—“a defined territory, very often a separate language, a distinct culture and a head who might be a chieftain but not higher than that, like a king, or political organisation. We have that definition, and the Badagas fit that definition,” he said.
He is to release his most recent book, The Nilgiri Hills: A Kaleidoscope of People, Culture and Nature during the Ooty Literature Festival in September.
