This course offers an in-depth journey into the Toda people of the Nilgiri hills — their society, sacred geography, pastoral economy, ecological knowledge, ritual life, material culture, and language.
Across twelve units, learners move from the broader landscape of tribal Tamil Nadu and the Nilgiris into Toda social organisation, sacred institutions and ceremonial life, dress and architecture, and finally into the structure, vocabulary, and oral traditions of the Toda language itself.
This interdisciplinary course prepares students, researchers, and community practitioners for “language work”—an integrated framework that brings together documentation, description, analysis, advocacy, and reclamation within multilingual and socially stratified contexts such as India.
Drawing on Wesley Leonard’s conceptualisation of language work, the course re-imagines language documentation as a collaborative partnership grounded in relationships, mutual accountability, and shared authority.