The Hidden Coorg,Culture & Tradition

The Hidden Coorg,Culture & Tradition

Without any doubt, Coorg is unique. It’s a place everybody has heard about, wants to visit, but doesn’t exactly know where it is situated or how to get there.


But the common consensus is; it has lovely weather, is green and dense coffee plantation land. True, but there is a lot more to it, notwithstanding the Kodavas, the proud and dignified people of the land. Elegant women with sharp features and daring and handsome men. A place steeped in old customs, where cultural norms are strong, where ancestors are worshipped.

Coorg, or Kodagu which is it´s original name, has green rolling mountains, 4,102 square kilometers of it, lies in the Western Ghats. The easiest way to reach there is to fly into Bangalore and drive down the distance of 240 kms. Or from Mysore, 120 kms away, where there is a railhead.

Kodagu comes from Kodimalenad, which translates as ‘thick forestland on the hills’. Coorg was the Anglicized name which came into usage after the area was annexed by the East India Company in 1834. replica rolex submariner watches, rolex replica uk sale, replica rolex uk, panerai watches for sale.

At the edge of a clearing in a forest, a man kneels, holding two flaming torches crossed over his head. The deep, powerful cry that rises from his throat, summoning the God of the Hunt, reverberates for a moment, and then disappears into the darkness of the trees. He is a spirit-medium, and in the high hills that surround the shrine, are small, hidden villages, from where men, women and children have walked miles, to worship in the forest. Several miles south, at another village, I watch a linked line of men in sacred white, sacred dress, in a strange, solemn dance, stag horns from old hunts held to their heads, swaying to persistent drumbeats. This time there is a tarred road a stone’s throw away, and to emerge from the shelter of the trees into the 21st century is a disorienting experience.

There are many such extraordinarily beautiful, and poignant fragments of the lives of the clans of warriors and hunters who once held this land, an evocation of a world almost dissolved by modernity. It is a world of masked and costumed spirit-mediums who prophesy and heal; of ancestors who protect and guide and, the myths and legends of a people who fought bitter battles through the centuries, to preserve the land they loved. Beneath the neat greenery of coffee, the heady fragrance of its blossoms, its showy berries, the clubs and colonial plantation bungalows, lies another, submerged Coorg.

When my ancestors found their way to the hills of Coorg, over a thousand years ago, they found a wilderness so sublime, that they built small, open air shrines, and set aside large tracts of land for worship, and the land itself became for them, sacred. The only hint you will receive of this world today is the faint rhythm of drumbeats from forest groves, carried on the clear air from the valleys to the hilltops.


Where the Coorgs came from, the enigma of their customs, social traditions, laws and dress are questions that have been debated to exhaustion. “Are you Greek?” is a question I have been asked so many times, even by Greeks themselves, that sometimes I have been tempted to say yes! But I was born Coorg, and would never exchange that identity, with all it means for any other. One winter, in the decade I spent researching and documenting in the villages of Coorg, a Professor of Archaeology from Athens, Antonios Vasileiadis, asked to accompany me on several field trips I was going to make. He was overwhelmed by what he saw, overcome with excitement, as he pointed out one similarity after the other that he perceived, between ancient Greek custom, and the celebrations we were witnessing. At one point, I felt I was in the middle of a Coorg version of My Big Fat Greek Wedding – everything led back to Greece!

Like the ancient Greeks, we have oracles, and mysteries, sacred groves and sacred springs, hilltop shrines where we worship, and like Greece, an ethereal light, under which every leaf glistens, every shrub comes alive. It is a connection highly plausible, but difficult to prove with any certainty, as battles and massacres have left gaping gaps in our genetic inheritance and history. I would not place my faith in the remnants of Alexander of Macedona’s army, but rather, in the very ancient, much-used sea trade route between the Mediterranean, familiar for over five millennia to the scores of Greeks, Romans Arabs and Persians who landed on the coast of Malabar. If you follow the clues scattered in the legends and customs of these small village shrines, they will lead you, inevitably, to the Malabar Coast, from where waves of people most likely made their way to the rugged hills of Coorg, in multiple migrations, over the millennia. Whatever links we have with our past, remain in these ancient celebrations.

The beauty of Coorg is a wounding kind, snagging your soul, breaking down all defences. It seeps into the soul, and made poets of the rough warriors who settled there, every man a poet and singer, accompanying himself on a small, hand-held drum. They composed endless ballads, recording battles and feuds, tales of love, sorcery and magic, and the heroes of the land. And they never tired of singing of the beauty that they breathed in the landscape. You can still hear them singing these songs, at festivals and gatherings of the clans, moving and faintly melancholy.

Mandalpatti is a ridge that looks backwards at the western hills of Coorg, where the river Kaveri rises, sacred, dazzling, and east, to the imposing bulk of Kotebetta, where Coorg men, women and children gather twice a year, to dance and sing their old songs. The Pushpagiri peak rises to the north -west, presiding over waves of purple and silver hills, and great clusters of pink-tinged clouds, looking down on a patina of green forest and field that lies across the land, close set, like moss – if this is not heaven, it is certainly halfway there.


This beauty the Coorgs held in great awe, setting aside hundreds of acres as sacred groves, and for those who believe, we still remove our footwear when we enter these lovely old sanctuaries. This was what they loved more than anything else, and the tenacity with which they fought to preserve it against invasions, even when outnumbered, astonished many historians and commentators through the ages.
More than two centuries of Hindu, Shaivite rule did little to change their beliefs, but coffee, which was already grown in small quantities, introduced by Mappila traders, became a commercial crop under the British, and changed life in Coorg forever. The British planted the first estate in 1854, near Madikeri, cleared thousands of acres of jungle to create plantations. They hunted, rode and shot, and the inevitable clubs sprang up. They found the Coorgs “… haughty in bearing, very intelligent and keenly interested in education.” They endured drunken cooks, malaria, loneliness, the loss of crops to pests, and bankruptcy. But Coorg ensnared them, and on their return, they found England “unsatisfactory and alien”.

Amongst the Coorgs, a new elite emerged, of those willing to move with the times, westernised, smart, and breaking with tradition. But the spirit of Coorg survived, continuing to live in her villages. Men and women still remain fiercely loyal to their clans, and although the fighting stopped generations ago, there are echoes of history everywhere – a man’s everyday dress, now worn only on formal occasions, includes a short dagger tucked into the waistband, ready for use. A bridegroom arrives armed with a heavy war knife, putting it aside only while being blessed by elders and guests, or eating, and even within the premises of sacred shrines, there are warlike dances, striking and parrying with knives. Hunting and battle
was the heart of their world, and is still reflected in many of their customs, even today.


Coorg draws many visitors now; its people are generous and hospitable by tradition and the land has a rough beauty that is haunting – in a way, this spells its own, sad end. The place I love draws further away each time, but I persist in seeking it out, and find it - at the source of the Kaveri, groups of bards sing, invoking the Goddess, and as we watch, we are finally answered, in an out of season storm, of thunder, lightning, and blinding rain – and then the peaks emerge again, indigo, under a wash of cloud, sublime. An oracle, face painted in dizzying swirls turns, elaborately outlined eyes, fierce, intent, and disconcertingly, picks me out from the crowd. The words are unintelligible; a headman intervenes and translates – a prophecy, and a blessing.

Walking up the rocky slopes of the Kotebetta peak, to a sweep of hills that takes all words and thought away, except one – the understanding of why my ancestors held this land sacred. And then, I don’t envy the Greeks their famous, radiant, attic light – just grateful I have Coorg. cartier watch, cartier replica watches, cartier tank watch, tank watches for sale.




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