The first Toda settlement
At a Glance
- Central figures: Teikirshy, the goddess who shaped the Toda world; On, the first Toda man; and the first sacred buffalo, whose milk established the ritual life of the people.
- Setting: The Nilgiri hills of present-day Tamil Nadu, in the Toda pastoral tradition; the story is preserved orally among Toda elders and varies between mund (hamlet) lineages.
- The turn: Teikirshy brings On and his buffalo down from the peak of Mukurti and tells him where to build the first mund, establishing the pattern of settlement, dairy ritual, and sacred grazing that would define Toda life.
- The outcome: On built the first barrel-vaulted hut, milked the first buffalo in the first poh (sacred dairy), and the Toda became a people bound to the grasslands and their herds.
- The legacy: The poh - the sacred dairy temple where the palol (dairyman-priest) milks the temple buffaloes according to strict ritual - remains the center of Toda religious life, and the Nilgiri grasslands the Toda still tend are understood as the land Teikirshy gave.
The buffalo would not move. On pulled the rope, spoke to her, put his shoulder against her flank. She stood on the ridge of Mukurti with her legs planted and her nostrils wide, breathing the cold air that came off the peak. Below them the grasslands ran in every direction - pale green, rippling, treeless for miles. On had never seen flat ground before. He and the buffalo had come from the top of the mountain, where Teikirshy had made them, and every direction was down.
Teikirshy stood behind them. She did not help. She watched the man and the buffalo and the grass, and she waited.
The Peak of Mukurti
On had no memory of being made. He remembered waking on the summit of Mukurti in fog so thick he could not see his own hands. The ground under him was rock and short moss. The buffalo was already there, lying beside him, warm, her breath making small clouds in the cold. He knew her. He did not know how he knew her, but when she turned her head and looked at him, he understood that they belonged to the same arrangement.
Teikirshy came out of the fog the way a person steps through a doorway. She was not tall. She carried nothing. She looked at On and at the buffalo and said the buffalo’s name, which On heard but could not repeat - it was a sound that belonged to the goddess and could not be held by a human mouth.
She told On three things. First: he was to go down from the peak. Second: the buffalo would show him where to stop. Third: he was to build a house and a dairy, and the dairy was to be kept apart from ordinary life. The milk of the sacred buffalo was not food. It was something else. On did not ask what. Teikirshy’s face made it clear that asking was not the correct response.
The Buffalo Chooses the Ground
They descended through cloud forest and stunted rhododendron, past black rock faces wet with seepage. On walked. The buffalo walked behind him, then beside him, then ahead of him. By the time they reached the first wide grassland - the shola-edged plateau where the wind tasted different, green and open - the buffalo was leading and On was following.
She crossed one meadow without stopping. Crossed a second. At the third, where a spring surfaced between two low stones and the grass grew thick enough to hide a man’s feet, she stopped. She lowered her head and grazed. She did not look up again.
On understood. This was the place.
He looked around. The plateau ran gently south and west. The shola forests - dark, dense patches of evergreen - bordered the grassland on three sides. Water was close. The wind came from one direction and the sun from another. It was not a dramatic place. It was a good place. The buffalo had chosen well, or Teikirshy had chosen well through the buffalo, which On suspected was more likely.
The First Hut and the First Dairy
On built the hut from bamboo and grass thatch, bending the frame into a half-barrel shape so the wind would pass over it. The doorway was low - a person had to crouch to enter. This was deliberate. You came into the house with your head bowed, whether you meant to or not.
He built the poh twenty paces from the hut. The dairy was smaller but made the same way. He set a stone at the threshold. He did not know why he set the stone - the knowledge was in his hands, not in his thinking. When the dairy was finished, he led the buffalo to it and milked her for the first time.
The milk came into a vessel he had made from bamboo. It was warm and thick and it smelled of the grass the buffalo had been eating. On held it and looked at it and did not drink. He poured it onto the stone at the threshold. The stone darkened where the milk touched it. Something shifted - not visibly, not audibly, but the poh became a different kind of building. It was no longer a small hut. It was a place where something was kept.
On stepped back. He understood, without Teikirshy having to appear and tell him, that the poh was now consecrated. Ordinary people - when there were ordinary people, when there were other people at all - would not enter it. Only the one who milked the sacred buffalo. Only the palol.
The Other Families
Teikirshy made more people. She did not make them all at once. She made them in pairs - a man and a woman - and she made them in different places on the Nilgiri plateau, each pair with a buffalo. Each pair found its own spring, its own meadow, its own place where the buffalo stopped walking. Each built a mund.
On did not meet the other families for a long time. When he finally did - walking south along a ridge trail and seeing smoke from a cook-fire he had not lit - he was not surprised. He had heard the other buffaloes lowing across the grassland at dusk. He had known.
The families were distinct. Each mund had its own poh, its own palol, its own herd of sacred buffaloes separate from the ordinary ones that gave milk for drinking. The sacred herds grazed particular meadows and no others. The palol of each mund followed particular procedures that were almost but not exactly identical to On’s. On did not correct them. They had learned from Teikirshy in their own way.
The Grasslands Held in Trust
The Nilgiri plateau was not empty land waiting to be used. It was the place Teikirshy had prepared - the grass grew because she had intended buffalo to eat it, the springs surfaced because she had intended people to drink. The shola forests were boundaries, not obstacles. The Toda did not cut them. They did not farm the grasslands. They did not fence them. The buffalo moved and the grass recovered and the cycle held.
On grew old in the first mund. He trained his son to be palol - the milking, the prayers spoken at the threshold stone, the particular way to hold the bamboo vessel so the milk did not spill. The prayers were not long. They named Teikirshy and the buffalo and the grass and the water. They named what was present. That was enough.
When On died, they carried him to a place apart from the mund and performed the rites the way Teikirshy had shown - which is another story, and not this one. The buffalo he had milked first was already gone. But her daughter was there, and her daughter’s daughter, standing in the same meadow where the first buffalo had lowered her head and grazed and refused to move any further.