Malnad · Deccan Inland Plateau

The small things

Seven and a half metres of rainAgumbe's mean annual rainfall is about 7,620 mm, and the station recorded 4,508 mm in the single month of August 1946. The nickname "Cherrapunji of the South" attached to it decades ago and has outlived the record — other stations in the same range, including some in the Udupi hills, have logged higher annual totals in recent years. The village is still where the rain is measured against.
A souring agent nobody else makesKachampuli is the juice of Garcinia gummi-gutta boiled down for days into a black syrup. Every other region that uses this genus dries the rind instead — kokum in the Konkan, uppage on this same slope, kudampuli in Kerala, which is smoked over a fire before drying. Kodagu is the only place that extracts and reduces the juice, which is why its sourness is sharp and immediate rather than slow and astringent, and why a teaspoon does the work of a fistful of rind.
Seven beans and a mountain named after the man who carried themThe traditional account has Baba Budan bringing seven coffee seeds out of Yemen in the seventeenth century and planting them on the hills near Chikkamagaluru. The account cannot be documented, but the hills carry his name, Indian coffee starts there, and in 2019 three of the five Indian coffees granted geographical indications — Coorg Arabica, Chikmagalur Arabica and Bababudangiris Arabica — came from within this region.
A house that belongs to a clan, not a personThe Kodava ainmane is owned by the okka, the patrilineal clan, and not by any individual within it. It cannot ordinarily be partitioned, marriages and funerals attach to it, and members living in Bengaluru or abroad return to it at Puttari. The jamma tenure works the same way for land, holding it to a family line rather than to a name on a deed — a form of property almost nowhere else in India in this shape.
An exemption from the gun licenceKodavas and jamma landholders in Kodagu are exempt from firearms licensing under Section 41 of the Arms Act, by a central notification renewed periodically; the current extension runs to 2029. Guns are fired at Puttari to mark the cutting of the first sheaf and are laid out and honoured at Kailpodh. It is the only community-specific exemption of its kind in the country.
Two rivers from one hill, and a dry plateau downstreamThe Tunga and the Bhadra both rise at Gangamoola in the Kudremukh range, run separately across the Malnad and rejoin at Kudali near Shivamogga to become the Tungabhadra — which then leaves the hills and waters the driest districts of the Deccan three hundred kilometres east. The rice grown at Gangavati is grown on rain that fell on this crest.
The Hoysalas got their listing in 2023Belur, Halebidu and Somanathapura were inscribed together on the World Heritage list in September 2023 as the Sacred Ensembles of the Hoysalas, India's forty-second inscription. Two of the three are in this region; the third is out on the Cauvery plain. The carving is as fine as it is because the stone is chloritic schist — soft enough when freshly quarried to be worked almost like wood, and hardening on exposure.
A theatre form that stops for the monsoonYakshagana is performed on open ground with no set and no roof, so its season runs from about November to May. What fills the monsoon is talamaddale — the same story, the same singers and drummers, the performers seated in a row in a room, arguing the episode out in speech with no costume and no dance. Audiences judge it purely on rhetoric, and a reputation made in talamaddale carries onto the field stage.
A village of a few thousand running a repertory companyHeggodu, near Sagara, has a theatre institute, a touring repertory, a film society and a publishing house, grown out of a village drama troupe started in 1949. Its founder received the Magsaysay Award in 1991. The annual culture course brings several hundred people to the village each October, which is a meaningful fraction of its population.
A cow bred for rainThe Malnad Gidda is a dwarf cattle breed of these hills — small, sure-footed on steep wet ground, resistant to the tick load of a high-rainfall forest, and giving very little milk of very high fat. It is a recognised indigenous breed, and it is the reason Malnad ghee has the reputation it does: the yield is poor and the fat content is not.
One tree, four foods and a year's insuranceA jackfruit tree yields a vegetable when the fruit is tender, a fruit when it ripens, dried sheets and papads from the boiled pulp, and flour from the seed. In a place where nothing dries outdoors for four months, the sheets and the papads are what carry a household through the monsoon. It is planted before anything ornamental and it is not counted as an orchard crop.
Two Jnanpith laureates from one talukKuvempu was born at Kuppalli and U. R. Ananthamurthy at Melige, about twenty kilometres apart in Thirthahalli taluk, and both received the Jnanpith — in 1967 and 1994. Tejaswi, who wrote the region a third time and quite differently, farmed near Mudigere over the district line. Malnad has been written about from inside more consistently than almost any other Indian region.

Small local details of Malnad — customs, quirks and things that are not in any guidebook. (12)