19th century the Toda have attracted "a most disproportionate amount of attention because of their ethnological aberrant ' and their up likeness to their neighbors in appearance,manners, and customs.
The study of their culture by anthropologists and linguists proved significant in developing the fields of 'social
anthropology and ethnomusicology.
Toda, pastoral tribe of the Nilgiri Hills of southern India. Numbering only about 800 in the early 1960s, they were
rapidly increasing in population because of improved health facilities. The Toda language is Dravidian but is the
most aberrant of that linguistic stock.
The Toda live in settlements of from three to seven small thatched house scattered over the pasture slopes, built
on a wooden framework, the typical house has an arched roof in the shape of a half barrel. The Toda traditionally
trade dairy products, as well as cane and bamboo articles, with the other Nilgiri peoples, receiving a Badaga grain
and cloth and Kota tools and pottery in exchange. Kurumba jungle people play music for Toda funerals and supply
various forest products
Toda religion centres on the all-important buffalo. Ritual must be performed for almost every dairy activity, from
milking and giving the herds salt to churning butter and shifting pastures seasonally. There are ceremonies for the
ordination of dairymen-priests, for rebuilding dairies and for rethatching funerary temples. These rites and the
complex funeral rituals are the major occasions of social intercourse, when intricate poetic songs alluding to the
buffalo cult are composed and chanted.
Polyandry is fairly common; several men, usually brothers, may share one wife. When Toda women become pregnant
one of the husbands ceremonially presents her with a toy bow and arrow,thus proclaiming himself the social father
of her children.
Some Toda pasture land has come under recent cultivation by other peoples and much of it has been re-forested.
This threatens to undermine Toda culture by greatly diminishing the buffalo herds. A separate community of Toda
(numbering 187 in 1960) converted to Christianity during the 20th century.