The Todas

by W. H. R. Rivers

Of these deified mortals one became associated with a definite hill while the other was not assigned any special hill, but it was believed that all places should form his province.

There is little doubt that these mortals were deified as heroes and not as ancestors, and there is little to indicate that ancestor-worship has played any part in the evolution of the Toda religion. When a person dedicated a buffalo on account of some fault committed, it seemed that the action might be spoken of indifferently as dedication to the gods or to the ancestors of the dedicator. Thus, when Teitnir gave a [[447]]buffalo after the death of his wife, some said it was given to the gods, while others said it was given to Teitnir’s grandfathers, and when I tried to inquire more definitely into this point the two things were said to be the same. The ideas of the Todas seemed to me, however, to be so indefinite and vague on this point that I am inclined to attach little importance to this one piece of evidence.

Against the identification of gods with ancestors is the fact that the dead go to another world, and are believed to return to this world after a long interval as ordinary mortals, while most of the gods belong to this world and are believed to have belonged to this world before death came to either gods or men.

There is little to support the idea that the gods are personifications of the forces of nature. There is no evidence whatever that any of the gods are personifications of the sun, of other heavenly bodies, of thunder, lightning, or other elemental forces.

We have already seen that there is evidence that light is reverenced, and that this reverence extends to the sun, and it is probable that definite worship of the sun may at one time have formed a prominent part of the religion of the Todas. But there is not the slightest evidence which would lead to the identification of any one of the Toda deities with the sun.

There is no evidence of phallic worship among the Todas. One of the ti villages in the Kundahs is known to the European inhabitants of the Nilgiris as “Ling mand,” but the supposed Ling stone at this place is evidently a neurzülnkars.[2]

In the last chapter we have seen that it has been supposed that divinity attaches to some of the sacred objects of the Todas, and especially to the dairy and the mani or bell. I cannot say definitely that the dairy and the bell are not regarded as gods, but I do not believe that they are so, and, as I have endeavoured to show in the last chapter, I think it probable that the sanctity of the bell has arisen by a gradual [[448]]process of transference of sanctity from the buffalo to the object worn by it, and I think it not unlikely that this transference may have reached its full development in comparatively recent times.

If my view be accepted, it would still leave open the religious status of the buffalo, and especially of the bell-buffalo, and here, scanty as the evidence is, it seems to me probable that the buffalo was never regarded as a god in the same sense in which this word is used for the anthropomorphic beings of the hill-tops. In the oldest legends, in which the buffaloes spoke like men, it is clear that they were in subjection to the gods, and were in no way regarded as themselves divine.

Some writers on the Todas have supposed that the palol is regarded as a god, but at the present time it is certain that he is in no way divine. He is treated with respect, but nothing of the nature of worship or adoration is paid to him. His position among the Todas is exactly that of a priest upon whom it is incumbent to maintain a very high degree of ceremonial purity. That his isolation is not a sign of divinity is, I think, shown by the results of infringement of his isolation. If the palol is touched by an ordinary man he loses his office and at once ceases to be a sacred personage, but the person who touches incurs no penalty. The sacrilege, according to Toda ideas, would attach not to him, but to the palol who, in spite of being touched, should persist in performing the duties of his office.

Whether the palol may ever have been more sacred in the past I cannot say. An indication that he may at one time have been regarded as divine is to be found in the special clauses of the Kiudr prayer which are uttered on the occasion of the migration of the buffaloes of the Nòdrs ti. Here the kwarzam of the palol is eupalol, which stands for teupalol, or “god palol,” but in the next kwarzam the same prefix is given to his garment, the tuni, and I have little doubt that these kwarzam simply refer to the sanctity which attaches to the palol and his garment as part of the sacred institution of the ti. There is no doubt, however, that, according to tradition, the gods held the office of palol and that the palol of the [[449]]Nòdrs ti is the direct successor of the god Ön, but to whatever extent Ön may have passed on his divine character to his immediate successors, there is little doubt that at present the palol has lost any divinity which may at one time have been ascribed to him.