Poetry and Music
I have given two samples of Toda poetry in the chapter on funeral ceremonies. These are the chief occasions on which songs are composed, but they are also made when a new dairy is being built, and may be composed and sung on any festive occasion. The general name for compositions of this kind is kunedsti, and certain men have special reputations as composers. The most noted of recent times was a man named Mervoin belonging to the family of Kiugi.
Of those now living, Teitnir, whose two funeral songs I have given, is a noted composer, and I was told of six other men who were especially gifted in this way.
Though I have called these compositions songs, they should, perhaps, rather be called recitations. They are certainly not songs with any musical accompaniment. I understood, though I am not clear about this, that the clauses, or kwarzam, of the funeral poems are said in a low voice “in the throat,” so that they are not understood by the people who hear them. If this is correct, the funeral kwarzam resemble in this respect those of which the prayers consist.
The Toda poets also compose songs on any festive [[601]]occasion, and Mr. Thurston[10] has recorded examples of several such compositions.
Dancing takes place at the funeral ceremonies, and exhibitions of these or other dances are sometimes given by the Todas. The only dancing I saw was at a funeral and it was of the simplest possible description, the men who took part forming a circle and moving slowly round and round.
The only musical instrument of the Todas is a simple flute, called the buguri. It is shown in [Fig. 68], where it is being played by the man on the right. The instrument is not much used by the Todas and is not, so far as I know, played on any ceremonial occasion. The music at the funeral ceremonies is always performed by Kotas. [[602]]
[1] Some patterns are given by Mr. Thurston, Bulletin, i. 1896, pl. xii. [↑]
[2] This is the fruit of one of the plants (Rubus lasiocarpus) of which the leaves are used in the ordination ceremonies of the dairymen of Taradr and Kanòdrs. [↑]
[3] Bulletin, vol. iv., p. 16. [↑]
[4] Ashk is one of the Toda words for rice, and the name of the food is therefore derived from this substance. [↑]
[5] It might have been expected that the part of the floor near the door used for the dairy operations would be the meilkuter, but it is not so. Meil also means ‘west’ and the explanation may be connected with this. [↑]
[6] See Crooke’s Popular Religion and Folk-Lore of Northern India, 1896, vol. ii pp. 187–191. [↑]
[7] In India the marks on the moon are frequently supposed to represent a hare. [↑]
[8] For another version of this story obtained by Mr. Thurston, see Bulletin, iv. p. 1. [↑]
[9] The game is described by Breeks and Thurston under the name of ilata, but this again is certainly not Toda. [↑]
CHAPTER XXV
LANGUAGE
My chief purpose in writing this chapter is to give information which, I hope, may increase the value of the linguistic material which is scattered throughout this book, and especially to describe some of the doubts and difficulties which I encountered in my attempts to reduce the Toda language to writing.
At the end of the chapter I give some new facts relating to the sacred and secret languages of the Todas, and I will begin with a brief sketch of the views commonly held on the linguistic position of the Toda language.
The Nilgiri Hills are situated at the point of junction of three of the chief linguistic districts of Southern India. In the country on the South and East, Tamil is spoken; on the West, the language is Malayalam, and the people of Mysore to the North speak chiefly Canarese. The Todas live at this meeting-place of three languages, but owing to their isolated position their language is not a blend of these, but has very definite and distinctive characters of its own, as might, indeed, be expected from the character of the people. The Badagas with whom the Todas have much intercourse speak a corrupt form of Canarese, and the Todas have undoubtedly borrowed many words from their language.
Previous writers have differed in their views on the special affinities of the Toda language. No one has now, I think, any doubt that the language is Dravidian. Bernhard Schmid,[1] who wrote in 1837, appears to me to have known more of [[603]]the true Toda language than anyone who has written since, and he ascribed two-thirds of the Toda vocabulary to Tamil and was unable to trace the remaining third to any other language. Caldwell[2] believed the language of the Todas to be most closely allied to Tamil. According to Pope[3] the language was originally old Canarese with the addition of a few Tamil forms, but he has included in his vocabulary words which have probably been borrowed from the Badagas.
The linguistic material which I have collected is far more extensive than that which was available at the time Pope wrote his sketch, and though the material is in one way less satisfactory since it has been collected after thirty more years of Toda intercourse with the outside world, it is in another way more satisfactory than any previous material in that by far the larger part of it is derived from the formulæ used in the religious ceremonies and in magic. It is, of course, well known that an ancient language may linger on in religious and magical formulæ long after it has disappeared from ordinary speech, and when I discovered how many of these formulæ were preserved by the Todas, I made a point of collecting as many as possible in the hope that they might preserve relics of the ancient speech of the Todas.
In collecting this material I suffered under grave disadvantages; firstly in not being a phonologist, and secondly, in my ignorance of any Dravidian language. I had had, however, a fairly large experience in taking down unwritten languages phonetically, and, whatever the errors into which I have fallen, I hope that they are consistent throughout my record. As a matter of fact, I find my spelling to be fairly constant, words taken down from different individuals and on different occasions being written in the same way.
From one point of view my ignorance of Dravidian languages is not an unmixed evil. When anyone hears a language which is allied to one he knows, it is almost impossible to avoid being influenced by this knowledge. This [[604]]influence has not been escaped by some of those who have previously recorded words from the Toda language. Thus in his Comparative Dictionary of non-Aryan Languages of India and Higher Asia,[4] Hunter gives two vocabularies from different sources which he calls Toḍuva and Toḍa, and from the differences between these he thought they might be different dialects. According to Breeks these differences are due to the fact that the compiler of one vocabulary paid exclusive attention to the sounds he heard, while the compiler of the other was influenced by his knowledge of the derivation of the words. I have very little doubt that many of those who have recorded Toda words have not written them down exactly as the Todas said them, but as they ought to have said them according to the usual rules of Dravidian pronunciation.
We find, in consequence, very great diversity in the spelling of Toda words, and when there is agreement, it is of very little value, for many of those who have written on the Todas have evidently adopted the spellings of previous writers, even when they quite misrepresent the real sounds.
Another difficulty which besets the investigation of the Toda language is the presence of dialectical differences even in the small community of only eight hundred people. Metz[5] noted such differences, and I found undoubted variations in the vocabularies of the two divisions of the Todas (see p. [687]) and suspected variations in pronunciation.
Still another difficulty is the large use of sounds, chiefly sh, ch, and th,[6] euphonically inserted in words. Pope notes this as quite a Toda peculiarity, and it adds greatly to the formidable character of this language, though a word of the most appalling complexity may become quite simple when these euphonic (!) sounds are eliminated.
Another of the sources of discrepancies in Toda vocabularies is the influence of the Badagas to which I have already referred. The Todas are a bilingual people speaking Badaga in their intercourse with other races and keeping Toda for [[605]]themselves. I have already pointed out that the great majority of the names of Toda places and institutions which have been recorded by previous writers are the Badaga names and not the Toda names, and, as might have been expected, many Badaga words have found their way into previously published Toda vocabularies.
In my own work my procedure was to take down a sentence first through the interpreter, then to go through the words of the sentence one by one asking the Toda to say each word carefully, and often he had to repeat it many times before I could satisfy myself about the nature of the sounds. Often I would get a second or third Toda to say the word, and I have frequently spent many minutes over one word, and have perhaps then been baffled in my attempts to write the word satisfactorily.
I noticed continually that the Toda words as pronounced by my interpreters were quite different in sound from those which came from the mouths of the Todas themselves. This was especially the case with the vowels, and in the addition of the initial y, so well known in the Tamil pronunciation of English. So far as I could detect, there was no trace of this initial y in Toda, although it occurs occasionally in some of the previously recorded Toda vocabularies.
These differences between the pronunciation of my interpreter and that of the Todas may often be the source of inconsistencies in my record, for on some occasions, owing to lack of time, I was unable to listen carefully to the Todas themselves, and had to content myself with the words given to me by the interpreter.