The people and place
The Toda are a small pastoral community of the Nilgiri Hills, whose social and ritual life centred on buffalo herding and dairy temples. Their embroidered shawl, the puthukuli, is today the best-known expression of Toda visual culture.
Marks on women
Late nineteenth and early twentieth century records describe Toda women tattooed with dots and small rings on the chin, chest, upper arms, hands and legs. Some descriptions link the tattooing of women to adulthood and marriage. Men, by these accounts, were rarely tattooed.
Silences in the record
The written sources say little about who made the tattoos or what the patterns were called, and they rarely quote Toda women at all. Any account of meaning must therefore remain cautious. Echoes between tattoo geometry and the dotted and banded patterns of Toda embroidery have been suggested, but they are not established.
Continuity and change
Tattooing among the Toda has largely ceased. Embroidery, by contrast, has become an important source of income and recognition, granted Geographical Indication status in 2013. The pattern-making knowledge of Toda women continues, but on cloth rather than skin.