The Badagas today have no cultural roots outside the district, which is also true of the Kotas and Todas, and it is in this sense that all three communities are indeed indigenous,” he says. “The length of time in their abode has no particular bearing on their indigeneity. In a recent communication to the Nilgiri Documentation Centre (NDC), Hockings said, “the tribe despite its sketchy history is as indigenous to the Nilgiris as the English are to Britain”. The most circulated one says the Badagas were natives of Mysore who took refuge in the Nilgiri hills to escape Tipu Sultan.Īt a time when the tribe is virtually secluded from its peer tribes, a clarification from American anthropologist Paul Hockings, who has researched on the Badagas for nearly six decades, comes as a relief for the community. Of late, social media has also been spinning stories about their origin. Later, publications termed the tribe ‘immigrants from Mysore’, while NGOs excluded them from welfare programmes. While the tribe was listed a backward class community in the state, the 1873 book ‘An Account of the Primitive Tribes and Monuments of the Nilgiris’, by J W Breeks, the first commissioner of Nilgiris excluded Badagas from the list of primitive tribes while classifying Todas, Kotas and Kurumbas under it. Ever since the Badaga tribe of the Nilgiris was removed from the scheduled tribe list in the 1950s, questions have been raised about its origin and nativity to the Nilgiris.
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