If one may speak of social organisation among buffaloes—and in the case of the Toda herds we are justified in doing so—we have a state of society in some ways analogous to that which many sociologists suppose to have existed at one time in the early stages of human society. We have various groups of buffaloes, and each buffalo—certainly each female buffalo—belongs to the same group as its mother. There is complete promiscuity, and the buffalo belongs to its mother’s group because paternity is unknown or disregarded.
It is true that this condition is artificial, but it is this very artificiality which gives it its interest, for it shows that people like the Todas, whose whole lives are devoted to the buffalo, to whom the breeding of the buffalo should have the deepest interest, have allowed this state of things to come about. If they had attached importance to paternity nothing would have been easier than to regulate breeding, to record paternity, [[549]]and even to have developed a system of male descent among their buffaloes such as exists among themselves.
The nature of what may be called the social regulations of the buffaloes shows that the Todas take little interest in the part played by the male in the process of mating, and, as we have seen, this lack of interest is almost as great among themselves. Side by side with the strictest regulation of marriage as a social institution, such great laxity prevails in regard to sexual relations that the Todas may almost be said to live in a condition of promiscuity, though, as I have endeavoured to show, the degree of promiscuity is in practice perhaps hardly as great as their statements would lead one to expect.
Adoption
It is clear that the custom of adoption of children is not practised by the Todas. They denied its existence emphatically, and I met with no instance which led me to suspect its presence in compiling the genealogies.
If a child is left an orphan, it is looked after by the people of its clan, but it is always clearly recognised that the child retains the father’s property, and belongs to the madol and pòlm of the father.
There is, so far as I could ascertain, no religious custom which makes it necessary that a man should have children. The duties of a child at the funeral ceremonies can quite well be performed by some other member of the clan.
There is a social reason which makes it inconvenient in some cases that a man should die without male issue. If a man is the only representative of his kudr, and has no children, the kudr will become extinct, and the clan will be put to the trouble of rearranging the families of which it is constituted. If such a man is childless he may take another wife in the hope of having a son to carry on the kudr, but the adoption of a child for the purpose is never thought of. A good case is that of the two brothers Mudrigeidi and Odrkurs in Table I. They are the last two representatives of one kudr of the Nòdrsol. They have had two wives, one of whom has had a daughter and a boy who died, and in the [[550]]hope of having a son, one of the brothers had recently married a young girl, Obalidz, as his third wife, the others being still alive, though one had been taken by another man.