This was the home then to several different groups of people living symbiotically here...
The Todas were perhaps the oldest inhabitants- a people of great dignity who wandered across the grasslands with their sacred buffalo.
The Kotas were blacksmiths & musicians. Their beautiful dances restored & regenerated the earth each spring.
The Irulas & Kurumbas were the magicians & sustainers of rituals important to all other groups.
The Badagas who were cultivators & generally thought to have migrated or been driven up the hills from Karnataka.
Their cycle of ritual, music & dance created a powerful web involving the landscape, the afterlife, their birth, life passage & death and marked or empowered the hill deities & devas in the landscape itself.
In the spring each year the tall Toda priests would stand on hill tops to direct the
ritualized firing of the grassland. As among the Australian aborigines, the Todas had their
songlines & spirit paths which sang the stones, the trees, the streams & the curves of hill
and followed the spirit journeys & meetings after death until that final leap into the
afterworld with their buffalo from the great Nilgiri Peak towards the setting sun.The other groups also had their ceremonial routes & paths of the dead & the drummed routes of the regenerating Gods.
Still there are places where the grasslands swing & sing around you as far as the eye can see & the tahr graze on far ridges & it is still possible that a tiger is nearby.
But around the edges of the parks where the damage is so raw and the springs are drying & the elephants die from e-coli or get skin damage because there is no clear fresh water left without its load of chemicals or sewage.
Somewhere where the people call themselves “Sons of the soil” and do poojas to their local Goddess.
Somewhere there, is it possible that there will be others who will be ready to help with the healing?