Origin of the sacred buffalo

At a Glance

• Central figures: Goddess On, creator of the Toda world; Teikirshy, goddess of the sacred dairy; the first buffalo, shaped from clay and breath on the Nilgiri plateau.
• Setting: The Nilgiri hills of Tamil Nadu, in the pastoral Toda tradition; the high grasslands above the shola forests where Toda munds (hamlets) still stand.
• The turn: On shaped the first buffalo from Nilgiri clay, but the creature would not breathe until Teikirshy sang over it and gave it her own milk to drink.
• The outcome: The buffalo lived, and from it came the entire sacred herd - the foundation of Toda life, economy, ritual, and identity.
• The legacy: The poh - the sacred dairy temple where the palol (dairyman-priest) tends the buffalo herd and performs the rituals of churning and offering that sustain the relationship between the Toda and their animals.

The grass was already there. The hills were already there - the high rolling nadus above the tree line where the shola forests stopped and the sky opened out into mist and wind and pale green distance. On had made these things. She had set the stones in the earth and pulled the streams down from the ridges and planted the grass that moved like water when the southwest wind came across it. But the grass stood untouched. Nothing grazed. Nothing moved across the meadows except cloud shadow, and On watched this and found it incomplete.

She knelt on the highest ridge of the Nilgiris, where the red laterite clay lay close to the surface, and she dug.

The Clay on the Ridge

On’s hands were large. She scooped the red clay out in heavy fistfuls - clay mixed with root fiber and the small white stones that sit in Nilgiri soil - and she pressed it between her palms until it warmed. She shaped the body first. Broad across the ribs. A deep chest. She worked the legs thick and short, built for standing in mud, not for running. She curved the horns wide and swept them back, the way a river curves when it reaches flat ground. She pressed her thumbs into the skull and left two shallow depressions for the eyes.

The figure sat on the grass. It was the size of a real animal. It was red, wet, heavy. It did not move.

On breathed on it. She breathed the way a fire breathes when you blow on coals - long, steady, hot. The clay dried in places. The surface cracked and darkened. But the buffalo did not stir. The eyes she had pressed stayed empty. The legs she had shaped stayed stiff.

On tried again. She breathed harder. She breathed until the air around the figure shimmered. Nothing happened. The thing she had made was only a thing.

She sat back on the wet grass and looked at it. The mist was coming up from the valleys. She could smell the shola - the dampness of moss and bark and rotting leaves rising from below the grassline. The buffalo shape sat in front of her, cooling, going gray.

Teikirshy’s Milk

Teikirshy came up from the eastern slope. She had been walking in the shola, where the light fell in columns through the canopy, and she carried a vessel - a small pot of bamboo, lidded with a broad leaf and tied with grass cord. Inside it was milk. Not buffalo milk, because there were no buffalo yet. It was her own milk, drawn from herself, warm and thick and sweet in the way that first things are sweet before the world has learned to dilute them.

She saw what On had made. She walked around it twice, slowly, the way you walk around a house you are considering entering. She touched the horns. She touched the chest where the ribs pressed against the drying clay. She looked into the empty eye-hollows.

It needs a voice before it needs breath, she said.

Teikirshy began to sing. Not words - the Toda do not say she sang words. She sang the sound that grass makes when wind crosses it, and the sound that water makes when it falls from stone into a pool, and the sound that rain makes on the broad leaves of the shola trees. She sang these sounds together, layered over each other, the way a valley holds echoes from three directions at once. The song was low. It moved through the clay the way moisture moves through clay - not fast, but everywhere.

The buffalo’s nostrils opened. Two small wet holes in the red-gray face, flaring and closing.

Teikirshy poured the milk. She tilted the bamboo vessel and let it run across the buffalo’s mouth - over the lips she had not shaped, because On had not thought to give it lips, and down across the chin and chest. The milk soaked into the clay. The clay darkened where it touched. And the buffalo drank. The tongue came out first, thick and dark, lapping at the rivulet of milk running down its own chest. Then the legs moved. Then it stood.

The First Herd

It stood badly. The legs were stiff and the joints did not bend well and it swayed on the hillside like a drunk man. But it stood, and it breathed, and its eyes - which On had pressed as hollows - were now dark and deep and wet, and they looked at Teikirshy with the look that buffalo have always given the people who tend them. Patient. Unblinking. Measuring.

The buffalo took three steps and lowered its head to the grass. It ate. The sound of its teeth tearing grass was the first sound of that kind on the Nilgiris, and it has not stopped since.

On shaped more. Now that she knew the method - the clay, the song, the milk - she shaped them quickly. Twelve buffalo by evening. Twelve dark shapes moving across the pale grass in the last light, their breath rising in the cold Nilgiri air. Teikirshy sang over each one and fed each one from her vessel, and the vessel did not empty.

The twelfth buffalo was different. Its milk was richer. Its hide was darker. Teikirshy set this one apart, on a patch of grass fenced by stones, and she said to On: This one is for the poh. Its milk is not for drinking. Its milk is for offering.

The Poh and the Palol

On built the first poh with her own hands - a small structure of stone and thatch on the slope below the ridge, facing east, where the sun hit it first. She placed the dark buffalo inside. She chose a man from among the first Toda and told him: You will tend this animal. You will churn its milk. You will not cut your hair. You will not leave this place for longer than the time between two milkings.

This man was the first palol. He did as On instructed. He milked the sacred buffalo in the dim interior of the poh. He churned the milk with a stick of shola wood. He made ghee and buttermilk and offered them back to the earth and to On and to Teikirshy. He did not leave. His feet knew the path between the poh and the grazing ground and no other path.

The other eleven buffalo went to the munds. Toda families divided them, tended them, walked them across the high grasslands from pasture to pasture as the seasons turned. The animals were wealth and kinship and calendar. When a buffalo calved, the mund celebrated. When a buffalo died, the mund mourned it as they mourned a person - with fire, with song, with the slow procession to the funeral ground.

What Remained on the Grass

The Nilgiri grass grows the same way now. The wind crosses it the same way. In the munds that still stand on the upper plateau, the buffalo graze in the early morning mist, dark shapes against pale green, their breath visible. The palol still tends the sacred dairy. The milk is still churned. The offering is still made.

The red clay is still there too, just below the surface, on the ridges where On first knelt. It holds the shape of whatever you press into it. The Toda know what it held first.