The divine brother-sister myth

At a Glance

Central figures: Teikirzi (also called Teikirshy), the goddess of the Toda people, and her brother On, the first divine man; together they are the origin pair from whom the Toda descend.
Setting: The Nilgiri hills of Tamil Nadu, among the Toda pastoral community; the story belongs to the oral tradition preserved by Toda elders and documented by early ethnographers visiting the Toda munds (hamlets).
The turn: Teikirzi and On, created together on the Nilgiri plateau, must decide how to populate the world - Teikirzi crosses a river to create the necessary separation between them before they can become the first couple.
The outcome: From their union the first Toda clans are born, the sacred buffalo herds are established, and the division between the two Toda moieties - Tartharol and Teivaliol - is set in place.
The legacy: The sacred dairies (poh) of the Toda, tended by consecrated dairymen (palol), trace their origin to the buffalo Teikirzi brought into being; the river crossing remains embedded in Toda funeral and marriage ritual.

The plateau sat above the clouds. Below, the plains shimmered with heat, but up here the grass was short and wet and the wind came through the shola forests cold enough to sting. There were no people yet. There were no buffalo. There was Teikirzi, standing in the grass, and her brother On, standing beside her, and between them a river that had not yet been given a name.

They had been made together - not born, not shaped from clay, but present when the hilltop became itself. Teikirzi was the first woman. On was the first man. They knew each other the way the left hand knows the right. And that was the difficulty.

The Hilltop and the Unnamed River

Teikirzi looked at the plateau and saw that it was empty. The grass grew but nothing grazed it. The springs ran but nothing drank from them. She said to On: the hills need more than the two of us.

On agreed. But they were brother and sister, made from the same moment, and the Nilgiri world they stood in had rules even before it had people. A brother and a sister could not simply decide to become husband and wife. Something had to change between them first. A distance had to be crossed.

The river ran between two ridges. It was not wide - a person could throw a stone across it - but it was deep and fast with rain. Teikirzi told On to stay where he was. She walked down the slope to the water’s edge, stepped in, and crossed to the far bank. The current pulled at her but she did not fall. When she climbed out on the other side, she was wet and cold and standing in a different place from her brother.

She was no longer only his sister. The river had made her something else. She was now also the woman on the far bank, the one he would have to come to, the one who had chosen separation so that union would be possible.

On crossed after her.

The First Buffalo

Their children needed milk. Teikirzi knew this before the children existed, the way she knew many things - not by reasoning but by the knowledge that was in her when the hilltop made her. She went to a place where the grass was thickest and the ground was soft, and she called the first buffalo out of the earth.

It came up slowly, the way a root pushes through soil. First the horns, curved and heavy. Then the broad dark head. Then the shoulders, the barrel body, the legs caked with red mud. It stood in the grass and blinked at her and she put her hand on its flank and it was warm.

She called another. And another. Seven buffalo came out of the ground that day. They were not ordinary animals. Their milk was sacred - not because someone declared it sacred, but because it came from creatures Teikirzi had called into being with her own voice. The milk could not be handled carelessly. It required a person set apart, a man who would tend the dairy and touch nothing else, who would sleep in the poh and keep the vessels clean and speak the words over the milk before it was given to anyone.

That was the first palol. On appointed him from among their sons. The palol shaved his head and entered the dairy and did not come out for the duration of his service. The buffalo knew him. They came to him when he called.

The Two Clans

Teikirzi bore many children on the Nilgiri plateau. They grew up in the wet grass among the buffalo, and as they grew they divided - not by quarrel but by temperament and by the places they chose to live. Some stayed on the higher ridges where the wind was strongest. Others moved down toward the edges of the shola forests where the ground was warmer and the trees gave shelter.

The ones who stayed high became the Tartharol. The ones who moved down became the Teivaliol. Each group had its own mund, its own buffalo herd, its own palol. They married across the division - Tartharol men took Teivaliol women, Teivaliol men took Tartharol women - and in this way the river that Teikirzi had crossed was crossed again and again in every generation. The separation she had made was remade each time, and each time it was bridged.

The two moieties did not worship in the same way. The Tartharol kept certain prayers the Teivaliol did not know. The Teivaliol performed certain rites at the dairy that the Tartharol performed differently. Neither was wrong. Teikirzi had made both, and both carried something of her.

The River in the Funeral

When a Toda person died, the body was carried to the cremation ground, and somewhere along the path the bearers crossed water. It did not have to be a great river. A stream was enough. A channel dug for the purpose was enough. What mattered was the crossing - the moment when the dead person passed from one side to the other, from the world of the living to whatever lay beyond.

This was Teikirzi’s river. The same crossing she had made when she walked away from her brother to become something more than his sister. The dead were doing what she had done: leaving one state to enter another. The water was the threshold. It had always been the threshold, since the first morning on the plateau when the river had no name and Teikirzi stepped into it with no certainty about what she would be when she came out on the other side.

The Dairy on the Hill

The poh still stands in some Toda munds - a small stone-and-thatch building set apart from the houses, its entrance low, its interior dim. The palol still enters. The buffalo still come. The milk is still handled with the old care, the old words spoken over it, though fewer young men now take the palol’s vow and fewer buffalo graze the Nilgiri grass.

Teikirzi is not worshipped the way a temple deity is worshipped. There is no idol. There is no festival day with her name on it. She is in the dairy and in the river and in the buffalo’s flank and in the crossing that every Toda person makes, living or dead. She is the woman on the far bank. She is still there.