The Badagas of Nilgiris

When eight-year old Akkamma Devi walked the long road from Bearhatti to St. Joseph’s Convent in Coonoor, it was not just an 8 km walk; she was a blazing trail for other Badaga women.

It was her father, Motha Gowder, a lab technician at Pasteur Institute, who was determined that his daughters should get a good education. So, one winter morning, he walked through the imposing gates of this European girls’ school, up the cobbled drive to meet the French Mother Superior, and fulfilled his dream of securing admission for his eldest daughter, Akkamma. His younger daughter, who also joined the school, would travel on her father’s shoulders. Akkamma was the first Indian girl to join this missionary school and the first Badaga woman to graduate.  She had an active political career winning the Nilgiris seat in the 1962 Indian General Election.

Many years later, Akkamma Devi, in an interview to The Hindu, attributed her success to her father who had made a number of sacrifices to ensure she would get the best education available. His dictum, she said, was ‘educate a woman and she will educate her entire family’.  

The early years of the 20th century saw the Badaga community, which was secluded from the rest of world until the advent of the British in 1819, harnessing the winds of change which were blowing across the hills.

Paul Hocking in his book Ancient Hindu Refugees: Badaga Social History, writes, “… it was only after 1856, that the Badaga perceived some value in education. This value lay in Tamil literacy which was slowly becoming the one sure passport to coveted official positions.” Once the earlier reservations were overcome, the Badagas threw themselves into the maelstrom and merged into the mainstream of Indian ethos.

“The Badaga community is a territorial group confined to the Nilgiris. There is no other place outside the Nilgiris where the community shares a definite locale,” writes B. Balasubramaniam in his book, Paame – The History and Culture of the Badagas of the Nilgiris.

Balasubramaniam calls the Badagas ‘the largest group of indigenous people in the Nilgiris’. Their origin is a hotly debated topic among historians and anthropologists. There are a number of theories; the most prevalent being the migration of people from the Mysore plateau to the hills. The word Badaga means “northerner” which supports the migration theory.

Balasubramaniam dates the first Badaga migration with the incursions into South India in 1311 AD by Malik Kafur, one of the generals of Alauddin Khilji, the Sultan of Delhi. Initially, the migrations to the hills were small in number but the subsequent ones were larger.  Doubtless, they were encouraged by the Vijayanagara Kings of the Deccan Plateau region, so that their economic activity, either by agriculture or prospecting for gold, would benefit the rulers by way of taxes.

Archival photos of Rao Bahadur Ari Gowder and his father, Rao Bahadur Bellie Gowder. Photo courtesy Wing Cdr Bellie Jayaprakash.

The barter system gave way to a cash economy, followed by World War I, which saw the Badaga shift cultivation from the traditional millet to potatoes and by 1920, to tea. Hocking says that their initial interest in tea cultivation was merely a method of increasing the value of the land before selling it off to an English planter.

Real progress, however, came with education, especially, of women. The Badaga community owes a lot to leaders such as Rao Bahadur H. J. Bellie Gowder who played a pivotal role in steering the Badagas into the modern age. 

Rao Bahadur Bellie Gowder’s story is one which is often told and retold in the Nilgiris. As a young lad of 14 he was able to negotiate a contract with the British to supply labour to build the Nilgiri Mountain Railway. Later, he became a major railway contractor. A great believer in education, he encouraged the Badagas to educate their children. He was acknowledged as the leader of all the hill tribes in the Nilgiris and in 1916 organized the first conference of hill tribes to highlight their problems. After his time, the mantle of leadership fell to his son, Rao Bahadur Ari Gowder, who continued the social reform started by his father.

He had placed great importance on the value of education and insisted that the Badagas educate their children. Balasubramaniam talks of how Bellie Gowder hired a minstrel to visit each of the 370 Badaga villages and sing songs creating awareness about the importance of education. He established a school in his village, and housed and paid the scholarly Brahmin teachers from his earnings.  

Rev. Philip K. Mulley, anthropologist, historian and a Badaga himself said that one of the reasons for the high literacy rate among the Badagas was because of the 30 village schools established by missionaries of the German Basel Mission.  Besides village schools, English medium schools for the children of the English, Anglo Indians and affluent Indians sprang up all over the Nilgiris. This proved beneficial to the Badaga community as well. These schools, most of them modeled on British public schools, were the making of many Badaga sports men and women.

But it is the Badaga women who were the mainstay of the community and known for their hard work, both at home and in the fields.  “In the old days, groups of women from the hatti (village) would walk all the way to the temple at Nanjungud near Mysore and back, a distance of 200 km or more, depending on where their villages were. This walk would take nine days and was considered a holiday away from house and field work,” says Gayatri Balasubramaniam, school teacher and artist.

Rao Bahadur Bellie Gowder also told the Badaga women “to change their traditional dress – the thundu mundu – the white unstitched waist cloth, upper body cloth and head dress – and adopt the sari”, says Balasubramaniam. Most of them did listen and changed accordingly. Today, the traditional dress is seen only in some hattis and that too worn by older women.

Unlike the other hill tribes: the Todas, Kotas, Kurumbas and the Irulas, the Badagas embraced change that came with the British. The Todas, who had top ranking in the order of things, have not fared as well, socially or economically. Their numbers are dwindling and they are in danger of becoming extinct. The Badagas, on the other hand, have been inter-marrying with later immigrants such as Wodeas, Haruvas, Toreas and some Lingayat sects such as the Adhikaris, Kannaks and Kaggusis for a long time, hence their larger numbers.

As you drive around the Nilgiris, you can see the small hattis; the picturesque clusters of houses nestling on the slopes surrounded by tea and then you notice the women working among the tea bushes and in the potato and cabbage fields. More than 80% of the community still remains connected to tea. On an optimistic note, many Badaga youth who had left the Nilgiris to lead lives in city are now making their way back home, ready to take up the mantle of their unique identity once again. 

Photographs in the featured banner by Mahesh Bhat.

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