The Gatekeepers of the Massif: Reconstructing the Baḍuga (Toḷkuḍi) as Path-Controlling Custodians of the Nilgiri Pass Corridors

Traditional colonial and post-colonial anthropological frameworks have long suffered from a structural binary when evaluating the indigenous speech communities of the Nilgiri Massif. While small pastoral and artisanal groups were classicized as "insular, isolated tribes," the numerical majority—the Baḍuga community—was frequently misclassified as late-arriving agricultural refugees who migrated from the Mysore plains following the collapse of the Vijayanagar Empire in 1565 CE. This paper challenges both perspectives by establishing that the Baḍuga (தொல்குடி / Toḷkuḍi — The Primordial Assembly) were neither insular nor late-stage imports. Instead, they functioned as highly visible, path-controlling custodians and sovereign gatekeepers of the high-altitude pass corridors linking the plateau to the lowland plains. By deploying a multidisciplinary framework of reconstructive ethnolinguistic archaeology, we deconstruct a highly specialized matrix of haptic (path), jurisdictional (border), pleurographic (flank), and chōromorphic (locus) substrate tokens natively embedded across more than 5,000 localized toponyms. Bridging this data to the 3rd-century CE classical Tamil Sangam corpus inside the Malaipaḍukaḍām (vv. 161–163), we demonstrate that the community held an absolute monopoly over the vertical ingress tracks (kaṭṭu / ghaṭṭa) of the Western Ghats for millennia. This paper outlines the mechanisms of this transit governance, proving that their socio-ecological advancement was a direct consequence of controlling inter-regional connectivity, rather than a lack of tribal identity under Article 342 of the Constitution of India.