The Todas

by W. H. R. Rivers

At the present time none of the gods are ever seen by mortals. As we have already found, the hills where they are supposed to dwell are, in some cases, regarded with reverence; but I obtained no evidence that the Todas avoid the summits even of those hills where the most important deities are supposed to be, though unfortunately I omitted to put this to the test by asking any of the more scrupulous Todas to accompany me to these places. The god-inhabited hills, however, are, in most cases, the sites of cairns and barrows, and the whole experience of those who have excavated these sites seems to show that the Todas exhibit no special reluctance to visit these dwelling-places of the gods.

I think that there can be little doubt that most of the individual gods of the Todas are becoming very unreal beings to those who talk of them. The stories of the earlier gods are now being forgotten, and the ideas of the Todas about them are [[452]]very vague. On the other hand, certain gods of obviously more recent origin seem to be replacing, to some extent, the older gods. The lives of Kwoten and Meilitars can be related by many in great detail, but though they seem to inspire more interest among the Todas I cannot say that I observed anything to show that they receive any special worship or reverence. Meilitars is especially mentioned in the Kanòdrs prayer, but this would only put him on a level with many objects of no great amount of sanctity. The attitude of the Todas towards these two beings seemed to me to be rather that of people towards heroes than towards gods, though the mythology has raised them to the level of the gods.

Nevertheless, the idea of “god” is highly developed among the Todas and I am inclined to believe that the most satisfactory explanation of the Toda deities is that the people came to the Nilgiri Hills with a body of highly developed gods; that round these gods have clustered various legends connected with the Toda institutions; that these old gods have gradually through long ages lost their reality; that certain heroes have been raised to the ranks of the gods and that the lives of these heroes, founded to some extent on actual fact, have more interest to the Todas and are remembered and passed on while the legends of the older gods are gradually becoming vaguer in the progress towards complete obliviscence; that the gods as a whole, however, are still regarded as the authors of punishment and that there is a tendency to make an abstraction of the power of the gods.

The Todas, then, show us a stage of religious belief in which gods once believed to be real, living among men and intervening actively in their affairs, have become shadowy beings, apparently less real, invisible and intervening in the affairs of men in a mysterious manner and chiefly in the case of infraction of the laws which they are still believed to have given.

The present state of the Toda religion seems to be one in which ritual has persisted while the beliefs at the bottom of the ritual have largely disappeared. The Todas are an example of a people whose lives are altogether dominated [[453]]by custom and tradition, and on the religious side this domination has taken a form in which ritual has become all-important, while the religious ideas which underlie the ritual have become blurred and unreal or have disappeared altogether. It seems to me that the Todas have had a religion of a comparatively high order for people living in such simple circumstances. During a long period of isolation there has come about an over-development of the ritual aspect of this religion. Year after year, and century after century, the priests have handed on the details of the ceremonial from one to another. The performance of the prescribed rites in their due order has become the all-essential of the religion and the ideas connected with it have suffered. This is shown most clearly in the prayers, in which we have seen that the prayer proper has gradually come to take a relatively subordinate position, and is even in danger of disappearing altogether, while the importance of the kwarzam by which the sacred objects of the dairy are mentioned has been magnified. The dairy utterances, which were probably at one time definite prayers calling on the gods for help and protection, are now on their way to become barren and meaningless formulæ.

Just as the prayer of the Todas seems to have almost degenerated into the utterance of barren formulæ, so is there reason to believe that the attitude of worship which is undoubtedly present in the Toda mind is becoming transferred from the gods themselves to the material objects used in the service of the gods. I acknowledge that I am here on less sure ground than in the case of the dairy formulæ, but the general impression left on my mind by the study of the beliefs and sacred institutions of the Todas is that the religious attitude of worship is being transferred from the gods themselves to the objects round which centres the ritual of the dairy. If I am right in these surmises, we find the Todas to possess a religion in process of degeneration. I do not suppose that this degeneration has been in progress only during the short time that the Todas have been exposed to the injurious contact of the outer world. The study of the Toda religion makes it seem to me most probable that the Todas came [[454]]to the Nilgiri Hills with a religion of a higher order than they possess at present, with a developed system of gods who were believed to direct and govern the affairs of men, and that by a long and slow process these gods have become unreal, the supplications of the people for their guidance and assistance have become mechanical, and worship has been transferred from gods, not to stocks and stones, but to bells and dairy vessels.

At the present time it would seem that even the ritual of the Toda religion is often carried out less carefully than of old. Among the former occupants of dairy offices of whom I made inquiries, I found some who gave accounts so full of inaccuracies and omissions that it seemed unlikely that they could have performed the duties of their offices in a satisfactory manner, and when I had the opportunity of observing parts of the dairy ritual it seemed to me that the ceremonial acts were performed by some of the dairymen in a very perfunctory and slovenly fashion. We have already seen that some of the features of Toda ritual have entirely disappeared, and it seems not unlikely that the same fate may overtake the whole at no great distance of time.

In the case of both custom and ritual, the Todas are now often content if they keep the letter of the law, and several examples of the evasion of ceremonial laws have been recorded. We have seen that several of the laws concerning the madnol are certainly not kept in the spirit, and only by a stretch of imagination, in the letter. A woman evades the law that she may not leave the village on the madnol by leaving it before daybreak and returning after daybreak till her work is done. A man takes money out on the day before the madnol and, burying it elsewhere, is able to carry out business which the spirit of the law forbids. In ceremonies, ritual duties which involve discomfort or restraint are assigned to young boys, to whom the restraint is no restraint. A man goes near the palol whom properly he should not approach, but since he does not speak nor is spoken to, he is regarded as ceremonially absent.

Objects of value which should be burnt for the use of the dead are sent to the next world ceremonially by swinging [[455]]them over the fire, and are then removed. The emblems of womanhood are taken out of the hut when the wursol goes there to sleep, but the women themselves remain. Probably the behaviour of the kaltmokh in the sleeping hut during the ceremony after migration (p. 142) is a sign that he should not be there, and is evading an uncomfortable and perhaps dangerous custom.

The Todas seem to show us how the over-development of the ritual aspect of religion may lead to atrophy of those ideas and beliefs through which the religion has been built up and then how, in its turn, the ritual may suffer and acts which are performed mechanically, with no living ideas behind them, may come to be performed carelessly and incompletely, while religious observances which involve trouble or discomfort may be evaded or completely neglected. The Todas, in fact, show us, in little, the general traits characteristic of the degeneration of religion.