Documenting Kodava Culture: A Trip That Rearranged Something in Me

Under the “Enhancing Indic Oral Culture” initiative on Wikimedia Projects

For the past two years, our team (Mr Santhosh Notagar and Mr Hariprasad Shetty) has been part of the Enhancing Indic Oral Culture on Wikimedia projects initiative, travelling across North Karnataka to record folk traditions before they quietly slip out of living memory. I had already written about our time with the Lambani community for this same project. When it came time to choose a language for Phase 2, our team settled on Kodava — the language of Coorg. And if I’m honest, this one felt personal long before it felt like work.

I’ve lived in Mangalore for four years now, and in that time I’ve crossed paths with more students and colleagues from Madikeri and the wider Coorg region than I can count. There was always something different about them — an energy I couldn’t quite name. Part of it, I think, was how close they lived to nature. Part of it was the quiet pride with which they carried their traditions, their attire, their food, into every room they walked into. When we realized how little of Kodava language and community history existed online, it felt less like spotting a gap and more like being handed a responsibility.

A Sunday in Madikeri

On June 21st, 2026, a Sunday, we drove up to Madikeri to meet Mr. Bopanada Poonacha—a man who earned a Master’s degree in the Kodava language in his late fifties, not for a career, not for a title, but purely because the subject wouldn’t let him go. I haven’t stopped thinking about that. Most of us spend our fifties trying to hold on to what we’ve already built. He spent his time learning something new, just because it mattered to him. He and his family welcomed us the way you’d welcome someone you’d been waiting for, not strangers arriving with a camera. His home stopped me at the doorway—Kodava architecture everywhere, warm and lived-in, nothing performative about it. But it was the small temple space inside that undid me a little. It wasn’t like any traditional temple space we would usually find in other parts of Karnataka. Just a single traditional lamp, kept burning, representing Kaveri Amma. No face, no form — just light, quietly doing the work that a thousand statues elsewhere try to do. Standing in front of it, something in me went still. I understood, in a way I hadn’t before, why the river and the mountain and the forest hold the place they do in Kodava belief. Nature isn’t decoration for their faith. It is the faith, unguarded and unadorned.

Small details kept finding me after that, the way they do when your heart is already open. None of the homes had ceiling fans—they’d simply never needed one, the climate having always taken care of that for them. It was only with the creeping heat of climate change that families were beginning to bring in stand fans, almost reluctantly, like admitting something they didn’t want to admit. And every home had a garden, not manicured for show but genuinely alive—flowering plants, fruit-bearing saplings, and soil that clearly got tended to before breakfast. Nature at home first, in the plainest, most literal sense I’ve ever seen it practiced.

History, Food, and a Marriage That Belongs to No One Else

Mr. Poonacha spoke for hours, and it never once felt like an interview. It felt like being let into a room we hadn’t yet earned entry to. He told us how Talakaveri came to be and why nature is the most celebrated god in Kodava belief and walked us through their food and their history of hunting. He described their attire in loving detail. And then he told us something that quietened the whole room: a Kodava wedding has no priest presiding over it at all. No outsider is called in to make the moment official. It’s the community itself, the family itself, that carries the ceremony from start to end—and it’s the mother who ties the mangalasutra on her daughter, no one else, no exception. I’ve sat through weddings my whole life where the most sacred moment is handed to someone outside the family to perform. Here, it never leaves the people it belongs to. I didn’t expect that detail to move me the way it did, but it did.

One of the things Mr. Poonacha spent the most time on, almost like he wanted to make sure we got it exactly right, was the story behind the Kodava logo. It comes from the region’s martial heritage, he explained, and brings together three objects that have carried Kodava identity for generations: the Peeche Kathi, a traditional dagger; the Odi Kathi, a broad-bladed war sword; and a thok, a gun. Listening to him lay out each piece—what it was used for, what it meant to carry one, and why all three together and not just one—I realized the logo wasn’t a design choice at all. It was a whole history of a warrior community, folded down into a symbol small enough to wear.

By the time we were ready to leave, the family sent us off with homemade wine—brewed from betel leaves, from grapes, or whatever the season had given them that year. It felt less like hospitality and more like being fed by people who had quietly decided, somewhere in those few hours, that we were worth feeding properly.

Why This Stayed With Me

I’ve documented culture before, but this trip sat differently in my chest. Maybe because Kodava is endangered enough that almost none of what we recorded — the lamp, the wedding customs, the mangalasutra tradition, Mr. Poonacha’s own story—existed anywhere online before us. Maybe because somewhere between the doorway and the temple lamp, I stopped thinking of this as fieldwork and started feeling like a guest who’d been let in on purpose.

Two years into this project, I’ve learned that the folk songs and oral histories we record are never really the whole story. The whole story is also in the fan that isn’t there yet, the lamp instead of the idol, and a man who decided in his late fifties that a language still deserved his full attention. I came back from Madikeri a little quieter than I left, in the good way—the way you get when something has genuinely rearranged a small part of how you see the world. If our footage means even one more person online meets Kodava culture the way we got to meet it—with warmth and without a screen standing between them and it—then this trip did exactly what it set out to do.