Thursday, March 7, 2013

The Kuruba Villages

There are hundreds if not thousands of villages named after Kuruba Gowdas all over South India, about which I have mentioned in my previous blog. I do not think or come across any other community with so many villages named after them, the other community which has lent its name to many villages is the Golla(Yadava) community. Both these communities are dependent on the livestock management and are a proof that these two communities are the most ancient of all, once the people of these communities started to settle down in places after abandoning their pastoral life style those villages naturally came to be named after them.

Every time I go visiting a different town or city in Karnataka, I come across at least 2 or 3 villages named after Kurubas. I was obviously very fascinated about this and thought will do a bit more exploration about this trend. My impression was if a village was named after Kuruba Gowdas for example Kurubur or Kurubara Halli then those villages should be full of Kurubas. But I was pleasantly surprised when I found out that some of the villages named after Kurubas did not have any Kuruba Gowda families living in the village or very few families lived there and the majority belonged to different community like the Kunchitigas, Vokkaligas, Lingayats, Brahmins and other communities.

Now that is an interesting finding, villages named after Kurubas not having any Kuruba families ?, if you ask the villagers how the village got the name- no one knows exactly, those villages and their names are thousands of years old and people have forgot how the village got to be named after Kurubas.

After doing a bit of literature search, I have come to the conclusion that these villages which are inhabitated by Vokkaligas and Lingayats but having the name of Kurubara Halli, Kurubur etc were originally inhabitated by the Kurubas thousands of years ago, when they abandoned their pastoral life style and started settling down in a particular place and started to till the land and grow grains. These original Kurubas as time passed abandoned their community profession of sheep farming and took up agriculture full time and over time becam Vokkaligas, Kunchitigas etc, and when the reform happened in the 12th century by Basavanna, lot of Kuruba Gowdas became his followers and took up Lingayathism as their religion and hence became Lingayaths.

This trend only proves the fact that Kuruba Gowdas are the ancestors of all other living communities of today and they are the original inhabitants of the ancient land of India.

This simply goes to show and prove that all other communities

Wednesday, March 6, 2013

The Story of Adhi Gonda

The Halumatha Kuruba Gowda community is the oldest community among all the communities of India, the fact is proven by various sayings and proverbs used in the villages and cities even today. Most of the other communities which branched out of the Kuruba Gowda community maintain some sort of a like with their mother community either in terms of following our Gothra system, the Bedagu system or various other costumes and traditions which are linked to the Kuruba Gowdas.

One such interesting story which I came across recently is that of Adhi Gonda. This story is not so much used or prevalent among the Kuruba Gowda community, but is widely accepted and acknowledged as the origin of the Vokkaligas community of south India. The story goes that Adhi Gonda was a human ancestor who had two wives, the children born to the first wife took up agriculture as a profession and they came to be called as Vokkaligas, whereas the children of the second wife took up animal husbandry as a profession and were called as Kuruba Gowdas.

This story goes on to mention how the ox(Nandi) was sent by lord Shiva to help out the Vokkaligas in farming, this story was mentioned in a book about Vokkaligas, I do not thing any Kuruba Gowda community people accept this story as theirs as they believe they are the original inhabitants and ancestors of all other communities in India. Never the less this story is accepted by most Vokkaligas and shows how they establish their link to the Kuruba community.