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The forest is gone but the embroidery lives on
I walk barefoot on the rolling grassland. A little ahead, rising from the velvety grass, is an oval shaped bamboo hut. Thatched by dried grass, the hut has no window and just a tiny door for people to crawl in. By the fence that surrounds the hut, an old frail woman wrapped in a remarkable woolen shawl gives me a toothless grin. I am in a hamlet unmarked on Google Maps in the Nilgiri district of Tamil Nadu. Here live the Todas, a tribe indigenous to the Nilgiri mountains. The Toda women are custodians of the unique embroidery called Pukhoor, G.I tagged since 2013. Before the British arrived in the…