Toda Embroidery Pukhr Ooty Nilgiris

Toda embroidery (pukhr or pokhir) is the traditional textile art of the Toda pastoral community of the Nilgiri Hills, worked by Toda women on coarse white cotton cloth using a specific red and black cotton thread to create bold geometric patterns in a technique that involves working from the front of the fabric with a running stitch and a counted thread approach, producing the distinctive Toda pattern vocabulary of triangular, chevron, and stepped border patterns that decorate the edges of the Toda putukuli shawl, the primary garment of Toda men and women. The Toda community are a small pastoral group of approximately 1,500 people in the Nilgiri Hills who maintain their traditional buffalo pastoral economy and their distinctive cylindrical barrel-vaulted thatched dwellings, and the Toda embroidery shawl (putukuli) is the central material cultural object of Toda identity, used at ceremonies, as a burial wrapping, and as a gift exchange between clans. Each pattern motif has a specific name and some patterns are reserved for specific ceremonial uses. Toda embroidery has received UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage attention and the Nilgiris Tribal Welfare Department supports a Toda embroidery cooperative at Ooty.