Kurumba

Clans and Kinship

Each Kurumba group marries within itself, and the groups are generally organised in exogamous, patrilineal clans; marriage between cross-cousins is common (Kapp and Hockings, in the Encyclopedia of World Cultures). Offices include the village headman (maniagara) and his assistant, which pass in the male line, and the priest (mannugara), who may be a man or a woman. On the Nilgiri hills a Kurumba settlement, called a motta, was a hamlet of four or five wattle-and-daub houses with thatched roofs (Thurston, quoting Grigg). In the Wynaad the Malabar Gazetteer recorded headmen called Muppan among the Mullu Kurumbans and Mudali among the Ten Kurumbans, and none among the Urali Kurumbans (Thurston).

No list of Kurumba clans was found in the sources used: Thurston names the larger groups (Mullu, Betta, Urali, Ten) but not clans within them, and the Encyclopedia of World Cultures mentions clans without naming them.

In the Official Lists

• Scheduled Tribe

  Tamil Nadu, Kerala

  Listed as: Kurumbas

  Tamil Nadu: 'Kurumbas (in the Nilgiri district)'. Kerala: 'Kurumbas'; the Census 2011 entry reads 'Kurumbas, Kurumbar, Kurumban'.

In both Tamil Nadu and Kerala the Kurumbas are one of the Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups (PVTGs). Related groups have entries of their own and are not counted here: the Kurumans (Mullu Kuruman and others) in Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka, the Jenu Kuruba and Kadu Kuruba in Karnataka, and the Kattunayakan in several states. Checked against the Census 2011 tables and Wikipedia's compilation of the order.

Checked on 2026-11-07 against the sources below. The lists are amended from time to time and can differ by district; for a certificate, the current order or the state's list is what counts.

Name and Origin

Thurston (1909) quotes the Madras census report of 1891, which took the Kurumbas for descendants of the Pallava kings scattered by the Cholas, and that of 1901, which treated Kurumban simply as the Tamil form of the Kannada and Telugu Kuruba, the name of the shepherd caste of the plains; whether the forest Kurumbas and the shepherd Kurubas are one people was already disputed in his day. Kapp and Hockings, summarised in the Encyclopedia of World Cultures, leave open whether the Kurumbas descend from early gatherers of the hills or from later farming settlers.

History

The Kurumbas long supplied their Nilgiri neighbours with forest produce, baskets and the tall poles used at Toda funerals, played music at Badaga and Toda festivals, and served Badaga villages as watchmen and as assistant priests at sowing and harvest. Their neighbours also feared them for supposed sorcery, and the Encyclopedia of World Cultures records killings of Kurumbas by neighbouring peoples during the nineteenth century over such fears. As plantations spread and the forest shrank, most Kurumbas moved to lower ground and took work on tea and coffee estates. The Madras census of 1891 named the Mullu, Betta, Urali, Ten and Tachchanadan Muppan as the chief divisions of the Kurumbas of the Nilgiris and Wynaad (Thurston).

Faith and Worship

Kurumba religion centres on the ancestors, with rules of purity and pollution like those of their Hindu neighbours (Encyclopedia of World Cultures). Thurston, quoting Breeks, records the worship of a rough stone called Hiriadeva, set up in a cave or in a circle of stones, with offerings of cooked rice at sowing time, and among some groups the worship of Siva; the Malabar Gazetteer names Masti as the deity of the Ten Kurumbans. Kurumbas near Rangaswami peak and Barliar placed a bone and a small round stone of the dead in an old dolmen (Breeks, quoted by Thurston). Many younger Kurumbas now follow Hinduism or Christianity as well.

Deities named in the sources: Hiriadeva

Customs

Kurumba diviners (kanigara), exorcists (devvagara) and curers (maddugara) were consulted by all the Nilgiri peoples (Encyclopedia of World Cultures). Kurumba musicians played pipes, drums and tambourines at the weddings and funerals of other Nilgiri peoples, and Kurumbas made rattan baskets, bamboo milk vessels and nets, collected honey, resin and gall-nuts, and trapped game in nets (Thurston).

Festivals

Stories and Legends