Kodava

The Kodava, or Coorgs, are an endogamous Dravidian hill people of Kodagu, the forested Coorg highlands of the Western Ghats in southern Karnataka, where they have lived as land-owning rice farmers and cattle herders for well over a thousand years. Their society is patrilineal and martial, honouring ancestors, nature and weapons, and a Kannada lexicon of 1398 already described them as warriors fond of hunting.

Early medieval Coorg passed between several dynasties and then the Vijayanagara Empire. Around 1600 the Haleri Rajas made the district their own, ruling from Haleri; in the later eighteenth century Raja Dodda Vira Rajendra fought the invading armies of Tipu Sultan.

In 1834 the East India Company defeated the last Haleri raja and annexed Coorg, and a revolt against the new order broke out at Sulya in 1837.