Tracing Kodava Women’s Histories: Intersections of Oral Tradition and Textual Archive

Abstract

Feminist historiography foregrounds questions about the historical representation of women and the use of various tools of inquiry. The methodological challenges posed by these questions become particularly pronounced when attempting to recover the lived historical experiences of women from small agricultural and forest communities who remain marginal to mainstream history. This study is undertaken as a methodological experiment to investigate the historical experiences of Kodava women from an indigenous community residing in Kodagu—a densely forested, mountainous region in Karnataka. Kodagu, once an independent principality until its incorporation into the Mysore state in 1956, has a minimal presence in dominant historical narratives. To overcome the limitations of conventional historiography in accessing Kodava women’s experiences, this study turns to the oral traditions of the Kodavas, based on the assumption that these sources may contain traces of women’s lived experiences in history. The study underscores the difficulty of recovering women's historical experiences from sources—both textual and oral—that are controlled by men. It reveals more about how men represented women’s lives in historical narratives than about how women themselves perceived and navigated their lives amid broader socio-economic and political transitions.