The book contains essays on the Toda of South India. it begins with an essay "Toda Society: Between Tradition and Modernity" to provide the background for all that will follow. The second essay: "A Thousand Out of Eight Hundred Million: Who Cares?" is an attempt to explain just why the Toda, despite being one of India's smallest communities, are yet among the best known in the ethnographic record, not only of India, but of the whole world.
The next two chapters deal with aspects of Toda ethnography, but presented in radically different ways. Chapter 3 is a polemical paper, attacking some and supporting other modern secondary analyses of the Toda kinship and marriage systems. Chapter 4 is a straightforward account of a famous Toda ritual: the giving by a man of a symbolic bow-and-arrow to a woman. Chapter 5 takes up the subject of the earliest Christian missions to the Toda community. Chapter 6 deals with the Toda people and how they have thoroughly charmed generation upon generation of Westerners. Chapter 7 discusses whether the designation of certain types of human societies as "tribes" or "tribal" has any explanatory value at all. Chapter 8 is the author's response to Professor Stephen Tyler's criticisms of his book 'The Toda of South India: A New Look." The final chapter "Reporting the Toda: 1602-1993", is a bibliographical essay to indicate the extraordinary wealth of documentation available to the researcher of Toda socio-cultural institutions. The book is dedicated to Murray Barnson Emeneau, truly the modern 'guru' of Toda Studies.