The Kodava people

An okka is a patrilineal joint family holding ancestral land and name in common. Membership passes through the father's line; marriage within the okka is prohibited. The okka's ritual centre is the ainmane, the ancestral house, where births, marriages, death rites and festivals are observed and where the ancestors are addressed.

Above the okka sat the nad, a grouping of villages with its own headman — the unit through which the Haleri kingdom and later the British administration actually governed. Land tenure in Kodagu was recognised in distinctive forms, and land, clan and identity are difficult to separate in the historical record.

Kodagu's population also includes Kodava-speaking and Kannada-speaking communities of many kinds — Amma Kodava, Airi, Kembatti, Kudiya, Yerava, Kuruba and Gowda groups, Moplah and Muslim traders, Tulu and Malayali settlers, and the labour communities that came with coffee. Writing only about the Kodava would misdescribe the district.