Update 13

Agricultural Development of the Past
Our knowledge of agriculture and its development in the Kollihills cannot be described with any exactness. The tribe, who claims to have come from Kanchipuram in the 16th century, were essentially plains people who knew agriculture of particular value. However, the fact is that, until the beginning of the 19th century, the agricultural operations in the hills were anything but shifting cultivation, known as 'Podu' or 'Kumari' cultivation.

The First Malayali Cultivators, Prior to 1900:
Prior to the advent of permanent settlements and agriculture, some 300 years ago, the landscape of the Kollihills presented a picture of gently rolling, forest-covered slopes, but not since then. The transformation from food gathering before the 18th century and hunting to shifting cultivation during much of the 18th and 19th centuries, and then to settled agriculture in the early part of the 20th century occurred in the Kollihills in a combination of ways.
     In some instances, the Malayalis thought, when hunting became hard because of difficulty in finding the game, it might be possible to grow crops on cleared forest patches. In other instances, an intelligent Malayali or a group of them might have suggested the possibilities of growing food crops, on a smaller scale, in the fashion of the plains. Or a few Malayalis had brought, and carefully preserved, ideas from their ancient parentage on lowland acquaintance which, when they put to practice, proved successful in satisfying their day-to-day subsistence requirements. By these various means, it would appear then, that the cultivation of crops was introduced.
The estimation for this activity was undoubtedly a mixed one. In the first instance, it stemmed from the constant internal pressures generated by the value system and the rule that everyone of the group should be fed by all means. Or it came about by the Malayalis who caused continual pressures to be exerted against the prevalent economic milieu within which they were housed.
     And whatever the population pressure, and conversely the need to go in for food production, exerted influence, the tribe felt that the food situation could be improved by economic functions similar to those with which the people of the plains, the tribe's own, ancient parents, were rather familiar. Thus, factors both internal and external to the tribe provided the basic motivation for economic ventures, mainly cultivation of food crops, within the by-now innovative social system.
     A second and associated motivation was the desire of many Malayalis to gain economic subsistence and self-sufficiency. This was certainly a two-fold desire: First, there was the wish to be in greater control of their individual and family economic future. Second, there was also the feeling of risk and uncertainty associated with food-gathering and hunting, and the attendant wish for lesser dependence upon a nomadic way of life, probably grazing cattle, and shifting cultivation.
     The overall desire was for an independently owned economic enterprise, and even a small place of forest-cleared land: a subsistence farm was within this category. The tentative planting of a handful of grains, where a spring supplied water, was a start towards this end. Finally, there was some motivating force in the simple desire to 'work with the land', in the sense of a desire of individuals of peasant origin.