The people of the hills

Numbering only around 1,600 people across some sixty-nine settlements known as munds, the Toda are among the most distinctive communities of the Nilgiri plateau. Their language, Toda, is a separate South Dravidian tongue, and their world is built around the buffalo. Herds are divided into secular and sacred animals, and almost every important institution — religion, kinship, the calendar of festivals — turns on the buffalo and the dairy it provides.

Toda sacred life centres on the dairy-temple, or paluvarsh, tended by priest-dairymen who follow elaborate rules of purity as they process the milk of the sacred herds. Their half-barrel or tunnel-shaped huts, thatched in a curved sweep and built nowhere else in India, are an architectural signature of the hills. Around them, Toda women practise pukhoor embroidery — the reversible red-and-black geometric needlework on white cotton seen on the puthkuli shawl, which was awarded a Geographical Indication in 2013.

For centuries the Toda have grazed their herds across the shola-grassland mosaic of the plateau, and their pastoral cycle is closely bound to the health of that landscape. As the grasslands have come under pressure, the community has become widely associated with efforts to conserve the high-altitude shola and grassland on which both buffalo and people depend.

With a population well over 300,000 spread across roughly three to four hundred villages called hattis, the Badaga are by far the largest community of the Nilgiris. Their language, Badaga (Badugu), is a Dravidian tongue closely related to Kannada and traditionally unscripted; the name itself derives from the Old Kannada Badagana, meaning "north", pointing to the community's traditions of descent from the plains to the north.

Historically the Badaga have been the farmers of the hills. They first cultivated millets — ragi, samai and foxtail — and later became central to the potato and hill-vegetable economy that still shapes the terraced slopes around Ketti, Coonoor and Kotagiri. Their most important festival is Hethai Habba, honouring the ancestress-deity Hethai Amma, celebrated over roughly a month across December and January with fire, processions and offerings.

Badaga identity is carried in dress and dance: the men's striped seelae wrap and turban, the women's white mundu, and the slow communal dance performed at festivals and weddings. The community remains a living, everyday presence across the plateau rather than a relic of the past.

The town of Kotagiri — "street of the Kotas" — carries the community's name, a reminder of how central the Kota once were to life on the hills. In the old Nilgiri order each community had its role, and the Kota were the makers and musicians: potters, blacksmiths, goldsmiths, carpenters, leather- and rope-workers who supplied tools and crafts to the Toda, Badaga and Kurumba alike.

Pottery has always been the work of Kota women, who alone in the community make the vessels by hand. The men worked metal and wood, and Kota musicians provided the ceremonial music for the festivals of the other communities — playing the kol, a double-reed instrument, alongside an array of drums. This web of mutual obligation tied the Kota into the social and ritual fabric of the whole plateau.

Today the Kota are one of the smallest communities of the hills, concentrated in a handful of villages, yet their craft traditions and music remain a vital thread of Nilgiri heritage.

The Kurumba are the forest specialists of the Nilgiris, living on the lower shola and jungle slopes below the plateau. Above all they are honey-hunters, scaling steep cliffs to harvest the combs of the Giant Rock Bee, Apis dorsata — a skill bound up with song, ritual and an intimate reading of the forest's seasons.

Beyond honey, the Kurumba gather a wide range of non-timber forest produce and hold deep herbal and medicinal knowledge, long sought by neighbouring communities. In the old order of the hills they were also regarded as ritual specialists, their forest knowledge carrying both practical and spiritual weight.

That expertise has made the Kurumba central to contemporary efforts to harvest the forest sustainably, and their honey is now a flagship product of the region's indigenous social enterprises.

The Irula live along the forest edge of the eastern Nilgiri slopes, between dense jungle and cultivated land. They are traditionally associated with snake-catching and foraging, but also with agriculture and the keeping of livestock, moving fluidly between the forest and the farm.

Near Kotagiri rises Rangaswamy Peak, which the Irula revere as the home of their deity Rangaswamy. The peak and its temple are among the community's most sacred sites, drawing pilgrimage and ceremony, and visitors are asked to treat the place with the reverence it holds for the Irula.

Like their neighbours, the Irula carry a detailed working knowledge of the plants and animals of the slopes, knowledge that today feeds into conservation and livelihood work across the biosphere reserve.