Accidental Blogger

I had been recently asked to translate the lines from an 18th century Tamil poem, written in the lingo of the Koravas or Narikoravas, an itinerant tribe often termed the 'Gypsies of South India'.As I researched verse after verse, I found some very interesting essays and commentaries about their history and traditions.

Today Kurava people in the area are officially prohibited from even going
into the mountains to collect materials for basketry and broom-making, an
occupation that provides a large portion of their meager income. Did the
differential literary portrayals, in works like Kutrala Kuravanji, of
Kurava people and of wealthy, powerful landowners and little kings factor into
justifications for dispossessing real people from their ancestral homes?
Literature and entertainment styles and forms from other times and places have
clearly played such a role in justifying dispossession. Might Kavirayar’s
portrayals have served the expansionist needs of little kings and big landowners
by painting Kurava people as so markedly different from those powerful people,
indeed painting them as untamed, independent, and silly, that they might seem
perhaps unworthy of ownership rights?

Here is a more recent article about their current status as a protected tribal group.

Many
hundreds of years ago, they claimed hunting-gathering rights in the
hills of what are now Tamil Nadu,Kerala, and Karnataka states, awarding the rights over the hills to the various clans in their tribes, a fact frequently referred to in the poem, as well.

Now, they have in general, been banned from
those very hills, as practitioners of slash-and-burn style agriculture
and inveterate hunting, detrimental to the beauty of the forests, never
mind that their numbers are too small to cause significant damage.

Many in this group
have been cut off from their nomadic ways, and lead more settled lives,
but at the cost of taming the wanderlust which still holds a strong sway
over them.

I still remember the harshly musical "Kallukothanundo, ammikal kothanundo, aattukal kuthanundo" 
(Do you have grinding stones to be resurfaced?)that the korava woman used to call out, walking the streets of the
neighborhood in her swinging skirts, baby with sun-browned hair peering
out of the sling on her back. Despite the life of dire poverty, there
was always a gracious beauty to these women, going house to house
selling small trinkets or resurfacing granite grindstones with their
little iron awls and mallets, watched over with an eagle eye by the housewives,
who mistrusted their reputation for 'light fingers'. Work done, they
would haggle over the price, finally settling for whatever they could
extract, milking whatever pity they could muster for their runny-nosed
little ones.

They were soothsayers too.

I vividly recall the time
when I visited Thiruchendur, a seaside temple, with my parents. We were
enjoying the bracing sea breeze one evening when a kurathi came up and
insisted on reading my mother's palm. I was about 13 years old at the
time. She took a look at my mother's palm and had us close to
collapsing in laughter when she predicted that my mother would have
another child.
"Look at her," my mother said, pointing to me.
"That's my child, and my only one." I was taller than her at this age.
"Are you saying that I will have another after all these years?" We
were incredulous.
"Amma, I have never made false predictions in my
life. You will see. You will be back here in two years to look for me
and thank me."
Two years later, we were there… for my baby
sister's first birthday ritual hair offering. We looked for the
kurathi, but never did find her. She must have moved with the wind, in
the manner of her people.