Note 26 — Chapter XXII · MARRIAGE

Previous writers have found no special reason to link the customs of the Todas with those of Malabar, and, so far as I am aware, no one has considered how far the Todas may be of the same race as any of the inhabitants of this district.26 In considering this matter, we may anticipate that even if the Todas and any of the tribes or castes of Malabar had the same origin, marked differences would have been produced by the long sojourn of the former on the Nilgiri plateau. How long the Todas have been on the Nilgiri Hills no one can say, but we may safely conclude that a very long time must have been necessary to produce the wide divergence in custom and belief which is found to separate them even from those other inhabitants of India whom they most closely resemble. If the Todas came from Malabar, they came from a country differing enormously in temperature and in general physical and climatic characters from the Nilgiri plateau. Life on the hills must almost certainly have altered the physical characters of the people, and it is perhaps now hopeless to expect that any exact resemblance would be found with the existing races of Malabar even if the Todas are an offshoot of one of them. Nevertheless, in comparing the physical measurements of the Todas, which we owe to Mr. Thurston, with those of various Malabar races taken by Mr. Fawcett, it would seem that the differences are not very great, and in the measurements to which anthropologists attach most importance, those of the head and nose, they are very slight.