Badaga Godroads

Samuel Mulley grew up in the small village of Kairben, and in 1858 he became the first Badaga convert to Christianity in the Eastern Nilgiri Hills of south India. Philipp Mulley is his great-grandson and a retired pastor of the Church of South India. He recalls that one day when he walked into his forefather's village, elders showed him the tracts of lands that once belonged to his family. They told him that all this could have belonged to him if his forebear had not converted. Generally, there remains a clear memory of property and village affiliation. My Badaga friends usually add the village name of Christian Badagas when we talk about individuals in the small town of Kotagiri. The successors of the early converts explicitly call themselves ‘Christian Badagas’ and not ‘Badaga Christians’ to place the emphasis on the religious orientation (Karl 1950: 15). They live around the first mission stations in Ketti, founded in 1845, and Kotagiri, opened in 1867, in other Badaga villages such as Kalhatti, Kannerimukku, Milithen, Thandanadu, and Tuneri, and in the two British hill stations, Coonoor and Ootacamund. Today, the Christian Badagas number roughly three thousand persons. In this chapter, I confine my analysis to the spread of the gospel before Indian Independence in 1947 and focus on the first Badaga conversions of the Basel Mission (BM).

The Badaga were – and are – peasants and constituted the largest precolonial group in the Nilgiri region. Friedrich Metz (1864), one of the early missionaries of the BM, estimated that they numbered 12,000 and that each of the neighbouring Toda, Kota and Kurumba counted a few hundred. The Badaga lived in more than 300 small villages, each often inhabited by 20 or 30 people. In the twentieth century, they became successful farmers, cultivated ‘European vegetables’ and turned to tea production after Independence. The number of villages has hardly increased, but Badaga demographic growth is impressive. From a mere 2,207 in 1812, the population grew to 222,117 in 2001 (Hockings 2012b: 244). Irrespective of this dramatic change, today the social and religious systems in the villages, kinship rules and legal and political orders refer clearly to sociopolitical formations that we recognise from early ethnographic accounts (Metz 1864).