Tulu Nadu · Western Coastal Strip

The small things

One estuary, four namesThe city is Kudla in Tulu, Kodial in Konkani, Maikala in Beary and Mangalapuram in Malayalam. Four communities named the same sandbar independently, and the English name the railway prints is a fifth. Which one someone uses places them before they say anything else.
A script almost nobody readsTulu was written for centuries in Tigalari, a script of this coast used for Sanskrit manuscripts and for the Tulu epics on palm leaf. Everyday Tulu today is written in the Kannada script; Tigalari survives in manuscript collections and among a handful of specialists, and revival classes now teach it to people whose grandparents could not read it either.
Five banks from three townsCanara Bank (Mangaluru, 1906), Corporation Bank (Udupi, 1906), Karnataka Bank (Mangaluru, 1924), Syndicate Bank (Udupi, 1925) and Vijaya Bank (Mangaluru, 1931) were all founded on this coast within a generation. The mechanism was not wealth but its absence: areca growers, beedi rollers and weavers had no access to credit, and the banks were raised by subscription to collect deposits in coins, daily, at the door.
How Udupi food became national foodThe Krishna Matha fed pilgrims free, which required a permanent professional kitchen and a caste of Shivalli Brahmin cooks trained in it. From the 1920s those cooks migrated — first to Bombay, then everywhere — and opened eating houses that could serve strictly vegetarian food to anyone. The menu they standardised, idli and masala dosa and a coconut-ground sambar and filter coffee, is what most of India now means by South Indian food. There was never a franchise; there was a kitchen, a network of mathas and a name anyone could put over a door.
The nephew inheritsUnder Aliya Santana a man's property passed not to his son but to his sister's son, and the household was headed by the maternal uncle. Land has been divided for two generations and modern succession law applies, but the guttu name persists, the annual Kola is still hosted by whoever holds the house, and family genealogies are still recited through the women.
Roofs from one river bankGeorg Plebst of the Basel Mission opened a tile factory at Mangaluru in 1865 using clay from the Netravati and Gurupura banks. Within decades the interlocking Mangalore tile was the standard roof of southern and coastal India, exported as far as East Africa and Australia, and specified for government buildings. An entire architectural look came out of two riverbanks and a mission workshop.
The buffalo track is a paddy fieldA Kambala track is a working paddy field flooded to a fixed depth. In the kane palayi category the runner stands on a round wooden block and is judged partly by how high his buffaloes throw the water up a marked pole — so the sport measures a spray, not only a time. Banned in 2014 and restored by a 2017–18 state amendment, it runs under conditions today.
A temple with four traditions running itDharmasthala is a Shiva temple owned by a Jain family, with Vaishnava Madhva priests conducting the worship and daivas guarding the precinct. Nobody there treats this as unusual, which is the most Tulu thing about it.
The mirror before the god arrivesBefore a Bhuta Kola performer becomes the daiva he is handed a mirror and looks at his painted face. Across the state line, a Theyyam performer is handed a mirror at the same point in the same sequence. The two traditions have different languages, different costumes and different patrons, and the same instrument at the same moment.
Medicine on an empty stomach, once a yearOn the new moon of Aati, households pound and soak the bark of the paale tree and drink the bitter decoction at dawn before eating. The whole month is treated as inauspicious — nothing is begun in it — which is an honest description of the wettest, hungriest weeks of the year on a coast that used to run out of food in them.
A performance ordered, not programmedMost Yakshagana performances are harake aata — a household commissions the night in fulfilment of a vow made at a temple, and the mela travels to wherever the vow was made. The season's schedule is therefore built out of private promises, which is why a mela can play a village of three hundred people and a city hall in the same week.

Small local details of Tulu Nadu — customs, quirks and things that are not in any guidebook. (11)