Hakki pikki tribal colony at the edge of Bannerghatta national park houses over 100 families of Hakki Pikki and Iruliga tribals who come from a tradition of hunting and forest produce gatherers but are now grappling to find their place in the modern city of Bangalore.

The women make household handicraft items and sell them in the City and are main earners in the family. They are skilled at making useful nick knacks with scrap. A traditional practice of the community has been child marriage, women having the right to give up a marriage and take another husband in a simple ceremony of returning the bride price received from the husband.

While the practice originated in the community as a means of protecting girls in their nomadic life style, in the modern day the practice continues even as they find themselves settled in the colony and nomad lifestyle in the colony is an exception rather than a rule. Their traditional marriage practices that protected women’s freedom and rights in marriage have in today’s age of the market, become means of controlling women. Desertion of wives with dependant children has become a common affliction.

Here, hakki pikki families are seen negotiating bride price and following child marriage ceremony.

Hakki Pikki and Iruliga tribal women


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