Local Labor History as Historical Sociology: The Challenges of Scale

Historical sociological studies include critical cases, phenomena that occur over time, and phenomena for which changing historical context constitutes explanation.Footnote ⁵ The labor history of the Toda qualifies, albeit with scale caveats, as a historical sociological project. In its own “micro” scale the Toda experience is a critical one given singular patronization by the colonial state, inequitable in comparison with how other Adivasis –indigenes listed as “tribes” colonially—in the region and nation were treated. While Toda transformation from pastoralists to peasants was a phenomenon that occurred over time and for which the transition from colonial to independent state rule constitutes historical explanation, shorter temporal windows are also analytically productive in configuring changing historical context for a phenomenon of interest—for our purposes, the Second World War (prewar and wartime) and how ameliorative policy changed with these events.

The Toda labor narrative also fits within the character of historical sociology's third wave, namely, one of “substantive fragmentation” and lacking a “dominant paradigm.” A categorized six-fold focus of this wave includes institutionalism, rational choice, the cultural turn, feminist challenges, and colonial scholarship that studies racial formation of empire.Footnote ⁶ The Toda narrative configures institutional influence, takes the “cultural turn,” identifies “rational choice,” and critiques the “empire.”

Colonial ethnography in the Nilgiris can be located alongside colonial geography in general to understand how race, labor, and capitalism interfaced. Race was a “working model” that ethnographers “operated with” in their judgment of the Toda as being lazy, averse to profitable labor, commercially incapacitated, and disdainful of manual labor. Colonial ethnographers used labor capacity as a crucial measure of civilization. For the English who productively engaged with the region's edaphic endowments, indigenes like the Toda had a “non-productive relationship with nature.” This marked “inferior civilizational status.” Civilization, as a “high” status was dually constituted by beauty and utility, two tropes whose use in colonial ethnography contains evident contradictions. For if the “tasteless” Toda “omitted all notice” of the beautiful Nilgiri landscape, as one Marshall, an ethnographer, wrote in 1873, but focused instead on grazing and fuel collection, what are we to make of his other argument, that the Toda were lethargic?Footnote ⁷ Dualism is central to the colonial nature-culture discourse in which labor plays a substantive role. “Low” natives failed the modernity transit that would have “cultured” them through a separation from nature; a separation that enables nature's “taming.” Once tamed, nature can be “gazed upon” “with cultured appreciation.” The “indolent” and “undiscriminating” Toda “low cultures” were, as Marshall's amateur ethnography typically and hierarchically theorized about the pastoralists in juxtaposition to productive and discriminating high cultures, “oblivious” to the landscape's beauty and “incapable of labor.”Footnote ⁸

The colonial ethnographer's partiality towards productivity and profit is linked to a Social Darwinist discourse on the life struggle that colonial geographers also participated in by conveniently extracting the notion of “struggle” from Darwin's more long-drawn and generational exposition of change. Social Darwinism—an apology for imperial capitalism's excesses—can be located alongside environmental determinism. In a world divided into “winners and losers,” the former were the ones who adapted well to environmental circumstances. “Cross-cutting” this “naturalizing” discourse about adaptive and productive races, which legitimated capital and empire, was a “binary logic” central to the European enlightenment. The rational mind was set opposite the natural body. An undeveloped mind lacked sense control. Women and lower classes were more “embodied.” “Lack of control over the body by the mind”—that is, “embodiment” by working classes, for instance, meant that they lacked in intellect and were “driven by bodily passion rather than higher goals.”Footnote ⁹

A brief sociological detour on the naming or labeling of people is in order here. Pejorative evaluations are common to the colonial encounter and may appear to convey a message that colonial subjects are deviants. Deviance is usually considered an “infraction of some agreed-upon rule,” moral or legal, and “requires the search for the factors in the personalities and life situations that might account for the infractions.” However, ignored is “the central fact about deviance: it is created by society.” This is not meant to suggest that “the causes of deviance are located in the social situation of the deviant,” but “rather, that ‘social groups create deviance by making the rules whose infraction constitutes deviance.’” Deviance is created “by applying those rules to particular people and labeling them.”Footnote ¹⁰ Similarly, the colonial labeling of Toda as indolent, lazy, and conservative entails deviance construction.

How modernity tackles the “indolent and docile” Tamil workers in erstwhile Ceylon is useful in illuminating our discussions of Toda labor. “The flawed worker's body” was disciplined by abstracting it as per “Europeanised ideal.” Work timing was strictly enforced. Worker bodies were abstracted in conformity to the abstraction of space.Footnote ¹¹ These abstract spaces substituted “absolute spaces” or natural areas that bore context to bonds of consanguinity, soil, and language. Seemingly objective, formal, quantitative, and authoritarian, abstract spaces signify the working of capitalism. An abstract space is thus a “representation of space.”Footnote ¹²

The production of productive and profitable space typically requires reorganization or intensification of existing resource-use, which will have biophysical consequences. Here, labor as a commodified resource becomes crucial. Environmental historians have sought comparative or complementary relations between labor and environmental history. So while “environmental history probably lends itself to work at a global scale more readily than does, for example, labor history, women's history, or intellectual history,”Footnote ¹³ “the engagement of environmental historians with contemporary issues could, with a few adaptations, prove just as rewarding for historians of race, family, labor, cities, and international relations.”Footnote ¹⁴ A recent special issue of ILWCH on the environment and labor history is evidence of a complementary and rewarding historiography. The global narratives in this special volume “all in some way approach the question of how to write labor history as environmental history or, depending on your disciplinary inclination, how to write environmental history as labor history.” They force a rethinking of common historiographical wisdom that tends to view “conservationist and environmentalist movements as antagonistic to labor, their preservationist impulse dictating a distrust of labor as destructive of a putatively pristine natural world.” Some other essays in the volume that adopt James Scott's “arguments about simplification and rationalization echo earlier analyses going back to writers like Harry Braverman about deskilling and the rationalization of the labor process.”Footnote ¹⁵

The Toda narrative strengthens the wisdom of conservationist disdain for labor. It also provides an interesting variation to the labor deskilling process. The colonial administration was disparaging in its view of the prospects of migrant, not Toda, labor defacing grasslands tenured to the Toda by cultivating them. While for the late twentieth century Marxist scholars the capitalist degradation of work entailed routinized deskilled labor, in colonial Nilgiris, a farming economy was thriving and the Toda were being “reskilled” as farmers. Degradation did not lie in deskilling in the factory, but in the rationale for reskilling the Toda as farmers, namely, the pejorative depiction of pastoralism.

Pastoral Amenities Trump Grazier Amelioration

Numbering all of 1,500 people, the Toda are ethnographic darlings,Footnote ¹⁶ and their interactions with anthropologists alone are worth historical-sociological scrutiny. Socially organized into two subcastes, the “Toroas” and “Towfily,” Toda kin locate themselves in exogamous patrilineal clans of which ten belong to the Toroas and five to the Towfily. Their religious orientations are that of a dairy cult. But the links with the larger Hindu society are evident in notions of purity and pollution.Footnote ¹⁷ The purity of dairy institutions or “temple-houses,” as the Todas commonly claim, is keenly and symbolically maintained. A patriarchal people, the Toda purify pollution, some of whose sources are attributed to womenfolk, through elaborate ritual. Only Toda men free-range herd and milk the buffaloes, an Asiatic water buffalo species, Bubalis bubalis. A singular genetic species, the livestock have been culturally classified into two lineages: the secular household stock (or Pithi Ir) and the sacred temple stock (or Posti Ir). A buffalo census in 2000 found a total of 915 buffaloes, 78 percent being of the secular grade.Footnote ¹⁸

Their once-robust physique, a tongue that seemingly differed in sound and syntax from Dravidian languages, barreled and thatched houses that appeared architecturally atypical,Footnote ¹⁹ and pastoral routine and ritual, all influenced the way the Toda were imagined by a racially-conditioned British. The Toda were speculated and spoken about as different from the more “timid” natives. Speculative hypotheses were formulated regarding their Greek, Scottish, and Biblical origins. The benefits were the bestowal of autochthony and immemorial geographical rights. Colonial narratives and counternarratives on ancient rights, absolute proprietary right, and mere prescriptive right, etc., resulted in these land grants.Footnote ²⁰

This “uncommonness” of the Todas resulted in their being endowed with a codified common land tenure called “Toda Patta Land” (Patta or title; henceforth TPL). There were land grants in 1843 and 1864. In 1893, when these lands were included in the Madras Forest Act of 1882 (MFA) for management, the total landed extent stood at 2,949 acres.Footnote ²¹ Lands fall under the control of the clan to which they were unequally assigned. In addition, Todas have grazing and ritual privilege over 1,900 acres of Reserve forests and revenue lands. Today the Todas reside in fifty-six munds, or hamlets. Toda geography and tenure is historically and spatially important for our labor narrative. Nearly forty Toda munds and 1,319 acres of TPL lie in the western and northwestern portions of the Nilgiris. This once grassy, now woody, geography of 19,637 acres has been called the Lord Wenlock Downs since 1900, when they were reserved as forests for pasture and recreation. While the Nilgiri plateau is spread much wider and higher, and Todas have another 1,179 acres outside the Downs, policy to conserve the amenities that the Downs offered bore crucially upon Toda amelioration policy. These Downs were “Toda heartland,”Footnote ²² but they were imagined and appropriated as English heartland, for their grassy character meant that they were potentially a riding and hunting ground.

The landscape's biophysicality merits brief discussion for how it figures in labor histories. Elsewhere the extraction of a forest's timber either pushed or pulled indigenes who had been farming and foraging in the area, into a commodified and exploitative labor market. On the Nilgiris, this labor process with respect to the Toda played out differently. It was the afforestation of grasslands with blue gum, wattle, pine, and thorny-flowery brush and the gradual ecological establishment of an exotic and invasive forest that provides the context for understanding the pastoralists turning to the plow, however belatedly or reluctantly. Environmental historians pay obeisance to labor's role in deforestation, or the reclamation of wetlands, and many forested landscapes in South America that have been converted into pastures through manual and mechanized labor. But what about the role of labor in creating or maintaining a “natural” grassy biome? I make a brief foray into the outdoor world of the grasslands before venturing indoors to the archives.

Known as the shola-grassland complex, the plateau's ecosystem has interested ecologists for the coexistence of vast undulating grasslands in whose folds grew stunted evergreens called sholas. Two schools of thought exist in explaining the emergence of this landscape: the frost and the fire schools. Ground frost, it is believed, prevents the growth of tropical species in the sholas from establishing themselves in the grasslands. The fire school emphasizes the role of annual firing in maintaining the grassland.Footnote ²³ Today fires only pose incendiary risks and official sources claim that the plateau has a 56 percent forest cover, thanks to afforestation policies institutionalized in the colonial period, which intensified in the postcolonial period. “The area under grasslands in the upper Nilgiri plateau has been reduced by a staggering 84 percent between 1849 and 1992, mainly lost to plantations of tea introduced in the 1830s.”Footnote ²⁴ To this I would add wattle and blue gum plantations.

Labor, in its pastoral forms of grazing and firing, must have had a role in influencing, perpetuating, or maintaining the grassy ecology of the plateau, especially in the northwestern Downs where Toda production and reproduction was concentrated. But environmental determinism raised its reductionist head even at those moments when experts discussed the role of Toda labor in influencing the ecology. Ranganathan, a forest bureaucrat, wrote that the Downs were heavily grazed and the “grass is kept low and is only a few inches high.” Then in explaining the connection between grasslands being confined to Toda country and the fact of Todas grazing and regularly burning these areas, the forester became environmentally deterministic. The Todas were not practicing agriculture, and “there is no reason to suppose that their habits and mode of living were ever other than they are now.” “It is far more likely that their pastoral mode of life was evolved by the environment in which they found themselves, rather than that they created a suitable environment for a deliberately selected mode of living.” And then, while suggesting a potential Toda agency in influencing the grassy biophysicality of the Downs, the forester dismissed the possibility through identity aspersion: a reduction of the pastoralist to a pejorative state that was common in colonial discourses in India. “It is possible” for the Toda, “through the means at their disposal to bring about such a change in the vegetational cover.” But their “character and temperament” along with “available historical evidence contradict” this supposition. Subscribing to stereotyped labeling that had its origins in racism, Ranganathan went on to firmly state that the relative distribution of shola and grasslands “is governed by a natural factor, the incidence of frost.”Footnote ²⁵

Bestowed with inalienable commons at the turn of the twentieth century, the Toda continued with their pastoral ways. The rules to manage the TPL provided the necessary safeguards. In an institutionalized landscape where no person shall even “strip off the bark or leaves” of trees or light a fire, the Toda were “at liberty to graze their own buffaloes,” and “remove fuel and grass for their domestic requirements.” However such liberties, including exemption from precautions and prescriptions on the making of fires that were set by the Collector, did not include the right to cultivation.Footnote ²⁶ The Collector had the “power to issue annual permits for the cultivation of grasslands only in Toda pattas by Todas themselves,” but “no Toda shall be at liberty to permit any other person except a Toda to cultivate or assist in the cultivation of such lands.” It appears that regulation of Toda cultivation stemmed from the fact that nearly half of all TPL occurred in what was to become the Wenlock Downs. The reserved forest status of the Downs was an expedient legal measure to secure a public recreation spaceFootnote ²⁷ for horseback riding, jackal hunting, and golfing, not to mention picnicking and satiating one's anthropological curiosities by studying the Toda.

Let us begin the analysis of administrative discourse in 1928, when historical-bureaucratic stock was being taken of the TPL tenure. A secretariat note cited above constructed the legal and institutional history of the TPL tenure from 1843 onward. The history, based on dispatches of the Court of Directors Revenue Department Government Orders (GOs) and letters from the district Collector and the Special Assistant Commissioner, Revenue, sought to clarify whether the Toda had full rights in all land comprised in the original “three bullahs' grant” made in 1843 by the Court of Directors. Also, it sought to determine if this grant had been demarcated from the later grant of nine bullahs in 1864 by the Board of Revenue (henceforth the Board).Footnote ²⁸ This legal history, while illustrative of official calculations for Toda amelioration, also reveals how bureaucracy sought to rationalize contradictory tenurial prescriptions. It also reveals Toda decisions regarding lands assigned to them. Most crucially, this episode gives insight into how, by referencing stereotypical synonyms of laziness, the TPL tenure, originally the revenue bureaucracy's bailiwick, came to be managed under the MFA.

In 1928 the Board's secretary agreed that the government's 1864 order, which restricted the power of the Todas to sell three bullahs of land which they had been given absolute rights to in 1843, was “open to criticism.” Nevertheless, the Secretary defended the government's 1864 order because it “aimed at protecting the rights of the Todas” and argued that it was “unnecessary to revise it until it is questioned by the Todas in a Court of Law.”Footnote ²⁹

In 1843, the Toda were deemed by the Court of Directors to have absolute rights over lands under permanent occupation, such as their munds and religious spots, but with regard to surrounding pastures they had only grazing privileges and no proprietary right over the soil. These pastoral lands could be available for the Todas to cultivate in the future. In 1863, the district Collector felt that grazing lands were diminishing, and an additional nine bullahs of land were reserved for the Toda on the condition that the land could not be sold and that no right accrued over the sholas in them. What the Toda did to the sholas that occurred in glens and hollows became significant in official decisions that bore on the TPL's character. Under the Waste Land Rules of 1863, these sholas and grasslands became “waste lands” if no proprietary right or occupancy existed over them, and they were sold to the highest bidder. This system was frustrating for claimants who identified land and awaited delayed surveys only to be outbid and, as a consequence, it became unpopular.Footnote ³⁰

In 1871, Nilgiri Commissioner Breeks “called in” all Toda pattas. The discounting of grassland rates and remitting assessments for forest land—sholas—for a five-year period until land bore crops, along with the possibility of “purchasing,” and avoiding “bidding” for grasslands and sholas presumed to be under Toda proprietary, plausibly resulted in this decision. An amateur archeologist, Breeks also possessed a conservationist bent. He was of the opinion that conservancy needed to be organized efficiently. If not, the destruction of sholas was a “question of time.” He issued new pattas upon realizing that the Toda, contravening the rules, had sold grazing lands. Under the new orders, the pattadar (title holder) had no right to sell the lands or fell sholas, “thus limiting the rights of the Todas in regard to the original three bullahs as well as the later grant of nine bullahs.” One of his successors noticed in 1879 that the Todas evaded the land alienation and sale prohibition by leasing long term. A manipulative push-and-pull mechanism was operating at this juncture. The Toda, habituated to herding and not interested in farming, could have calculated commercial gain in leasing their grazing grants. Settler and other cultivation interests could have exploited Toda disinterest in cultivation and their ignorance of a speculative and lucrative capitalist land market and leased their lands at cheap rates. However calculative the Toda may have been in their interactions with others, the government, also wary of manipulative land interests, continued to patronize them. Even as the local administration suggested replacing favorable assessments of grasslands sholas with full assessment levies, and a Board member suggested cancellation of grazing patta and the levy of highest estate assessment on those who leased from Todas, the government instructed that care be taken “not to invade or restrict or disregard Toda privileges” in the settlement process.Footnote ³¹

Sholas in TPLs fell outside the jurisdiction of two conservation measures. First, the transfer of woodlands and plantations from a conservancy establishment set up in 1852, to the Commissioners' control in 1869. Second, their retransfer to the forest department in 1875 and demarcation and reservation under the 1882 MFA. In 1891 the presiding Collector pointed out that despite Todas being prohibited from felling sholas that occurred in TPLs and surrounding Toda grazing reserves, these sholas were not under regular conservancy. Complaining that the Toda were “too idle and careless” in protecting the sholas from woodcutters and charcoal burners, he recommended that TPLs be reserved as forests. But the TPLs were not at the disposal of the government and thus could not be reserved. They could be protected, however, by issuing regulations for their management under the MFA. In 1893 TPLs were brought under government management by Section 33 of the MFA. Rules were formulated and Toda rights protected under them. The most pertinent for our narrative was a regulation that denied the Toda the right to allow a non-Toda to cultivate or to assist in cultivation of the protected lands.

This legal history of the TPL reveals a pastoral focus. But Toda cultivation was less a matter of present importance than a future prospect. However, in 1892 a concession to cultivate was made, and the government allowed the Collector to grant permits to bona fide Toda applicants to grow vegetables in grasslands that were reserved for pasturage.Footnote ³²

But there was also resistance within the colonial administration to attention that the Toda were receiving. The lands for which the Toda sought cultivation permits had to be inspected and their debts to LabbaisFootnote ³³ had to be overseen. More importantly the Special Revenue Inspector who was attending to these ameliorative activities had to arrange for the harvest, storage, and sale of Toda agricultural produce. The Inspector was overburdened, and the Collector requested the appointment of an agricultural demonstrator and the sanctioning of two demonstration plots for the Toda. Anstead, the Director of Agriculture, in reply to a government memo on the costs involved, argued that the lone agricultural demonstrator in the district could not be deputed just for the Toda. The Badagas, a local farming community, also needed attention. The administration had for many years “been working for and with them,” and this work “cannot and should not be stopped in favour of the Todas.” While the Director was in agreement with the Collector that “special attention should be devoted to the Todas” and that “a great deal lot can be done with these people,” he nevertheless felt that the agricultural demonstrator could develop and expand district work of all kind.Footnote ³⁴

Indeed, the Board and the district administration were doing a great deal that contravened fiscal and ameliorative logic. Official largesse seemed to encumber attempts to establish Toda labor as farmers. In acknowledging this, the district administration took nuanced and sensitive stock of the situation. Under a cooperative scheme, two loans and two free grants were sanctioned in 1928 and 1930. The grants were for potato cultivation. One loan was to liquidate Toda debts. The second financed potato cultivation expenses. The Toda defaulted, and Collector Woods recommended a loan waiver with reasoning that provides insight into why the Toda were reluctant to sow and reap collectively as well as the risky conditions that shaped their cultivation. The loan to liquidate Toda debts only benefitted Toda creditors. Creditworthiness thus improved, and the Toda borrowed afresh, wrote Woods. The loan for potato cultivation went bad because it was a “very speculative” crop and the price fell. Government officers occupied a position of “active confidence,” he wrote, “inducing” the Toda into “speculative business.” Subjecting the Toda to market risk was a well-intentioned measure, was the argument. But the Toda do not come across in Wood's letter as a risk-inclined folk. The speculation had also failed due to an “absence of aptitude” among the Toda. While it was usual to find fault for a scheme failure in a constructed character trait such as indolence, mentioning an absence of aptitude emerges at best as an objective assessment of inclination or, at worst, as an empathetic feeling for incapacity. That the Toda persisted primarily as pastoralists in the mid-1930s despite agriculture being privileged as an ameliorative panacea is evident in Wood's recruitment of equity and futility in making a case against enforcement of loan payment. The market for Toda buffaloes, a stock supposedly amenable only to them, did not exist. Their only “asset,” if sold, would be of little value and deprive the Toda of their only means of livelihood. This contravened the very purpose of the loan grant. Recovering even a small portion of the grant would “ruin” the Toda, and was not “right.”Footnote ³⁵

Toda indebtedness, which has persisted well into the twenty-first century, was considered a “chronic” condition even in 1934. As an ameliorative scheme, the Cooperative Society appears to have been sanctioned for more pressing concerns than prospective economic possibilities. The budgetary allocation for Toda solvency was higher than the budget allocated for building any other productive capacity among them. The Toda were allocated 7,500 rupees “to wipe off the debts,” while only 5,000 rupees was allocated as a “free grant” with which potato growing was to be encouraged. The Revenue Secretary's opinion on the Collector's recommendation to write off Toda debts reinforces what can be called a credit or solvency theory for why the Toda were reluctant or uninterested in laboring as potato farmers. The Secretary was not surprised that this “benevolent” scheme had “proved an almost complete failure.” As an unintended consequence, the debt payoff was “to the great advantage of creditors, and the Todas were then free to submerge themselves in debts afresh.” The cultivation of potatoes that was to “regenerate these pastoral tribe, came to grief.”Footnote ³⁶ The administration's decision to pay off Toda debts created scope for these pastoralists to continue borrowing money and avoiding cultivation. The “benevolent” bureaucracy comes across here as irrational and soft while the Toda come across as strategic and opportunistic.

But rationality alone does not explain the Toda avoidance of the spade. In the late 1930s their robust vitality, which had once sparked British special interest, was being sapped by a transmittable ailment. Here amelioration found anthropological urgency. Peters, a Greek prince, an anthropologist, and a normatively and taxonomically inclined academic patron of the Toda, warned Lord Erskine, the governor, that “the extinction of this interesting tribe” was a possibility. Peters' census returned 518 Todas in July 1939, and he, along with some Toda elders he interacted with, was disturbed. The “interesting and original” Toda were “dying out.” Farming and tenurial rights figure in Peters' recommendations for instilling “new life” into a “moribund” community. While liberal in his criticism of forest regulation of wood cutting, thatch collection, and weed burning, Peters became conservative in blaming what he classified as the Toda's relaxed and regular customs, the former including methylated spirit consumption, and the latter including polyandry. While he believed that Christianizing the Toda would save them, Peters ruled out proselytization. The more effective solution, he wrote, was to grant individual rights to land with the rider that permission for any land sale was to be obtained from a Toda body constituted for that purpose.Footnote ³⁷

It was resolved in 1940 that the Toda could be “preserved and improved” by preventing their consumption of denatured spirits and appointing a touring doctor to treat syphilis and gonorrhea. Disease, alcohol abuse, monetary need arising from conditions that compromised any inclination to labor as farmers, and the cycle of solvency and insolvency all converged to prolong the pastoral ways of the Toda. Certain ruling class interests also preferred keeping the Toda pastoral. If the Toda were to be maintained in their “existing state of civilization,” it was “doubtful” that efforts to permanently settle them would have “the desired effect,” wrote Collector Macqueen in reply to a government memo on the prince's report. The Toda were “entirely pastoral,” and if they were to become agricultural, some of their “chief social characteristics” would be lost. Curtailment of grazing areas had damaged the Toda in ways that even monetary compensation could not “counter-balance.” Proposals had been made in April that year to protect the Wenlock Downs from further alienation, wrote Macqueen.Footnote ³⁸ These proposals reflected the explicit interest of certain elite British and Indian interests, including clubs and planters associations, in maintaining the Toda as pastoralists. Macqueen proposed to the Board that the “natural features” of the Downs be “preserved in perpetuity.” As “splendid riding country,” they provided “great opportunities for the naturalists to study” “interesting flora and fauna; and for the anthropologist to study unique primitive races.”Footnote ³⁹ The Toda entered the 1940s as frail and vulnerable graziers at a moment when pressure on resources was intensifying with the onset of the Second World War. While vaccination restored Toda health during the decade, a war time scheme to plant the Downs with eucalyptus, wattle, and pine trees, transformed a grassy biome into a forested one.

Grasslands did not require much labor to clear for cultivation, and they became coveted spaces during the early 1940s. The plateau's grasslands were being leased for cultivation of vegetables, especially potatoes for military and civilian markets. The Toda intermittently petitioned the government to complain that their lands, which they wanted to cultivate, were being clandestinely rented by government officials to others. There is a basis for such complaints, even if, as we shall discuss shortly, the supposed motives were questioned by the government. The political economy of potato cultivation and the cultural politics of the organized sale of potatoes illuminate the Toda's situation. The rounded Nilgiri potato, called the “great Scott” and graded “Agmark” was grown by farmers who were members of credit societies, twenty-eight of which sold their crop to the Nilgiri District Potato Growers Sale Society (NDPGSS). By the end of 1939, the NDPGSS sold 8,765 bags of potatoes, mostly to agents in the foothill town of Mettupalayam, but also to agencies in Madras, Bombay, and Calcutta. Mettupalayam prices were the highest, and the NDPGSS began selling most of the harvest to agents in this town. The Registrar of Cooperative Societies however noticed a “factious spirit” in two unions because they were inadequately represented in the NDPGSS Board. One Union was from Kotagiri, a hill station to the east of the district, and the other from Todanad, the western portion of the district named after the Toda who principally grazed and resided here.Footnote ⁴⁰ So, much of this tuber was grown in Toda geography, and its profitable trade was organized through the institution of the NDPGSS. Membership in the Society's board was of status significance. Cultivation of potatoes was also cultivation of prestige, as it were, but the Toda did not partake in either this profit or prestige.

The government cast aspersions on the motives behind Toda petitions. Non-Todas were behind these petitions, it was alleged.Footnote ⁴¹ The aspersions were reasonable. There was enhanced demand for cultivable grasslands, but it was matched by plentiful supply. The Second World War, however, triggered a run in the market, and development and conservation assumed a “militarized” character. Under a wartime scheme sanctioned in March 1943, the government issued five-year leases over forest and even revenue lands. By the end of 1943, a total of 3,763 acres of land had been leased.Footnote ⁴² Potatoes were planted along the slopes and eroded the soil. A Development Department of the Madras Provincial Government even sought to enforce contour planting through the Defense of India Rules and make noncompliance a penal offense. The government of India agreed.Footnote ⁴³

The prince left the Nilgiris to join the Greek regiment when the war began in late 1939. But a self-effacing and sentimentally extortive Toda petition to the Governor in October 1942 bore uncanny resemblance to his 1939 petition, which warned of anguished lives and a potential die-out.Footnote ⁴⁴ As usual, the Governor's clarifications triggered bureaucratic back and forth, only this time, barring some conservation-related disagreements, a more stern and practical tone replaced the pondering and patronizing one that marked official deliberations following Peters' 1939 petition. Prewar efforts to convert the Toda into farmers were used as evidence against envisaging a farming future for them. A bureaucratic tendency to label the Toda was conspicuous at this juncture. Wartime administration, hemmed in by fiscal austerity and military urgency, was the context for these changes in bureaucratic deportment. The war had increased living costs, and the Toda found it difficult to continue “eking out a miserable living” for which they had to “humbly beg” the government to sanction money “to start any work” for their livelihoods, such as buying “seeds and manure” to cultivate or to “purchase buffaloes.” If the government was not “merciful,” their “race will gradually dwindle by death caused by starvation and finally become extinct,” the petition declared. The document, signed by eighty-one Todas, also conveyed an eagerness to work, as their livelihoods would “contribute to the war effort.”Footnote ⁴⁵ The Board referred the matter to the district's revenue and forest officials. The District Forest Officer's (DFO) articulate reply, attuned to the difficult conditions of the Toda, was wary of attempts to lease TPLs to non-Todas.Footnote ⁴⁶ There was “chronic backwardness” among the Toda, who faced additional wartime hardships, and special wartime measures needed to be related to the “general problem of permanent improvement.” But leasing Toda lands to non-Todas to alleviate wartime hardship was in the long term a “palliative of doubtful value.” Suggesting amendments to regulations that restricted who could cultivate on TPLs, Davis wrote that all accruing revenue should be allotted for “Toda relief.” While this suggestion was generally unfair to non-Todas and ordained the Toda as temporary state-propped landlords, the DFO's opinion on how proceeds were to be distributed indicates a rare understanding of inequalities and divisions among the Toda themselves. It serves as a rare instance where the unequal distribution of TPLs among Toda munds and clans, with some munds suffering spatial disadvantage because of their location, was recognized. The DFO called for “discretional allocation” of benefits, which if small could be distributed within the mund; if larger munds realized more rentals, the benefits could be “equalised” and funds from remunerative munds could be used to buy buffaloes for munds that had grazing land but could not cultivate because of transportation difficulties.Footnote ⁴⁷

But such sensitivity to class asymmetries was compromised by an ignorance of kinship asymmetries. A Toda clan cannot have access to the lands allotted to another Toda clan. The DFO's argument also reveals insensitivity to issues of gender, which is surprising given his progressive views on laboring Badaga women. The gender angle plays a crucial role in the critique of Toda amelioration policy, where the lack of participation by Toda women in pastoral tasks is used to criticize pastoral practices in general. As if to echo an institutional, but nevertheless reductionist, mantra, the DFO writes that “all reports agree that the Toda [are] essentially pastoral, conservative and indolent” and “the Toda knows” that agricultural conversion would radically change “his whole manner of life” and that it was hopeless for him to successfully compete with other agricultural communities. The Badaga “chiefly” owed “his success as a cultivator” to his “women folk,” but Toda women “will never submit themselves to hard manual field labor.”Footnote ⁴⁸

Demography and geography—“too few and too scattered”—are then cited as reasons why the Toda “obstinately remain herdsmen.” Davis then writes, whether the intention is to “preserve” them as a “separate race” or merely improve their “physical standard of living,” “it can be best done by organizing their undoubted ability as cattle farmers,” a field that “the Badaga knows little” about, eliminating the possibility of competition with the Toda. In concluding his argument, Davis maintains that conversion of pastoral land into arable land, even if to “alleviate present distress,” was “a step in the wrong direction.” He goes on to present a “dole mentality” that could intensify among the Toda if they were afforded the status of “landlord” by being allowed to lease their grasslands for cultivation by others. In addition to leasing land for cultivation in munds with sparse pasturage, Davis recommended training the Toda in improved dairy methods.Footnote ⁴⁹ Collector Crombie also quoted Davis in claiming that such schemes could produce a “dole mentality.”Footnote ⁵⁰

Dyson, the Chief Conservator of Forests (CCF), concurred with the DFO's views. It is not difficult to gauge the influence of the Downs on the positions these foresters took on pastoralism and grassland conversion. CCF Dyson, interpreting the purpose of TPLs and access grants to neighboring forest reserves as preserving the “undisturbed” pursuit by Todas of their “traditional mode of life,” stated that Rule 4 of the TPL was to provide for the “exceptional Toda who wanted to cultivate.” The relaxation of this rule would bring “fugitive benefit” for some Toda but “is extremely dangerous” for their long-term “wellbeing.” He warned that the “ever present danger” of “outside interests” encroaching upon Toda “grazing areas and dwelling places,” had to be guarded against.Footnote ⁵¹ This stress on pastoral tradition and the concern that cultivation would be only fleetingly remunerative for only the rare and, by implication, “modern” Toda is Dyson's textual technique to maintain a lifestyle that secured the Downs, a landscape that Dyson, like most of his British civil, military, and official contemporaries, had an interest in preserving. However TPLs were also found outside the boundaries of the Downs, and those grasslands came to the rescue of both Davis and Dyson in ways that helped these foresters appear sensitive to, and liberal during, wartime exigencies. Thus, while for DFO Davis sholas needed to be protected, scrub lands opened up, and agriculture permitted in munds with little grazing ground, for his superior Dyson, “in some cases grass and scrub areas” could be cultivated in TPLs by “outsiders” “without serious harm.”Footnote ⁵²

That the British desired to secure the Downs from agricultural development finds support in the resistance that Davis put up the following winter to a proposal to locate fish guano fertilizer production in the Downs.Footnote ⁵³ With the cultivated area on the plateau increasing to 5,000 acres, manure companies could not keep up with demand. Five acres in Rees Corner, a hallowed Downs spot where Governors took walks and Ooty gentry picnicked, were identified as a site for a manure mixture plant. In his letter to the Ootacamund Conservator, Davis, mentioning that the Downs had been declared a National Park in the 1940s, argued that graziers and horseback riders used the proposed spot every day and that manure manufacture there would be an offense to Ooty residents who walked and rode in the area.Footnote ⁵⁴ Rees Corner was convenient in terms of approach, location, and facilities. But “mere convenience” alone did not suffice as criterion for disposing lands for “purposes having no greater justification than ours,” reasoned Davis.Footnote ⁵⁵

In its resolution in June 1943, the Board opined that the “prospects” of Todas becoming cultivators were “remote” and that cooperative schemes were “not for such an indolent lot.” It recommended a temporary relaxation of Rule 4 with conditions as suggested by the CCF and the Collector. Out of 2,795 acres of TPL, 800 to 1,000 were identified for lease to non-Todas and lease amounts were to be used for amelioration.Footnote ⁵⁶ But the government ordered in January 1944, via the Development Department, that the Toda be assisted though advances or grants for buying cows and buffaloes. The Director of Veterinary Services was instructed to consult the Collector about such grants and to submit proposals to improve Toda dairying methods. The leasing of TPLs to either the government itself or to outsiders for cultivation was not approved, however.Footnote ⁵⁷

The war ended and India was officially and symbolically decolonized in August 1947. A month later, Collector Ramachandran wrote to the Board that he had formed a Toda Welfare Committee, which resolved to ask the government to increase the agricultural permit period for Toda cultivation of their TPLS from one to ten years. This would give them time to “stabilize any permanent cultivation.” Also, as rights to TPLs were held in common by each clan, the “incentive to improve the land was lacking.” The government granted the request.Footnote ⁵⁸ Even the prince, who returned in August 1949, recommended Ryotwari or individual title. The Toda continued to lease their lands and accumulate debts. The Downs were afforested with wattle and blue gum from the early 1950s, as was most grassland in TPLs that lay outside the Downs. Toda pastoralism now persists more ritually and symbolically than materially. The Toda, including many of their women, are agriculturalists today, whether cultivating their own lands or working for wages on both Toda and non-Toda farms.