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Dhoda (Toda)Dancers, originally uploaded by ramesh_lalwani.

The Toda people are a small pastoral community who live on the isolated Nilgiri plateau of Southern India. Prior to the late eighteenth century, the Toda coexisted locally with other communities, including the Badaga, Kota, and Kurumba, in a loose caste-like community organization in which the Toda were the top ranking.[1] The Toda population has hovered in the range 700 to 900 during the last century.[1] Although an insignificant fraction of the large population of India, the Toda have attracted (since the late eighteenth century), "a most disproportionate amount of attention because of their ethnological aberrancy"[1] and "their unlikeness to their neighbours in appearance, manners, and customs 9Wikipedia)