The Todas are a small pastoral community that inhabit the Nilgiri Plateau in South India, and at last count, they number somewhere between 700 to 900 individuals. Ashwin PK, a visual artist and the co-founder of Visual Entity, decided to document them via a photo series as a part of a larger project he’s currently undertaking to explore India’s vanishing cultures called A Visual Memoir Of The Bygone Era.
Ashwin picked up the basics of photography in his early teens and has continued to be fascinated by the craft. However, he has only markedly honed his skills over the past two years. For the project, Ashwin initially planned to photograph tribes in his native Kerala, but having chanced upon information on the Toda community online, changed his focus. “Their peculiar features immediately grabbed my attention and I started to read more about them. Everything about them was fascinating,” he says.

But when Ashwin and his team set off into the Ooty highlands to find the tribe, he found that things hadn’t remained quite as untouched as one would imagine. Instead, everything that they had heard about the Todas’ way of life had more or less given way to the unchecked march of progress, most notable in the fact that their traditional homes were replaced by more modern constructions. The team discovered that despite this, the Todas still held on to their culture, rituals and ceremonies. Towards the end of their trip, they met Thortey, a young Toda, who along with his mother Vasamalli, told them about Toda culture and history, regaling them with folk stories and explaining rituals and ceremonies.

Ashwin and his team eventually returned to Bangalore but soon returned and with Thortey’s guidance, they managed to locate a few Todas who continued to live in obscurity. They undertook long, strenuous walks through forests and valleys before stumbling upon a Toda community and the photos below are the result. Ashwin admits that the photos are stylised and attests that he was inspired to create this series after he saw Jimmy Nelson’s now famous photo series documenting 30 of the world’s remotest tribes. “Our objective is not to document tribal people. We want to create visuals that are aesthetically rich,” he stated clearly.

Scroll down to see photos from Toda People, click here to view the entire series. 

All photographs courtesy Ashwin PK