Kuruba Gowdas and Gotras

Kuruba Gowda's are one of the ancient communities of Karnataka and India. The fact proven by their ancient customs and traditions. Kuruba Gowda's trace their origin to the first humans who took up animal husbandry as a way of sustaining their families and formed settled communities. Humans were nomads many thousands of years ago, they sustained their families by hunting and gathering food, gradually they started to tame animals, animals which in character were docile, non aggressive, easy to tame and control. Sheep's, cows and goats fitted all these characters and were among the first to be tamed by humans. Cattle being larger were tamed after the sheep's and goats.

So the first humans in fact were all Kuruba Gowdas(shepherds), they tamed the sheep and travelled along with their herds to wherever the grazing fields were, so in truth these Kuruba's created only temporary settlements, but there livestock was their lifeline, gradually they started to develop methods of growing grain. Rice and wheat were tamed from the wild and these Kurubas started to grow them in large scale and this allowed them to settle down in one place and grow the grain year after year. This allowed them to settle down in permanent settlements, once this happened vast majority of Kurubas abandoned their traditional profession and branched into other communities like farmers and agriculturists, but still there remained a good number of Kuruba Gowdas who stuck to their traditional profession, providing milk and meat to these settled communities.

Once settled communities were formed and plenty full of grain provided food security all round the year, they started looking at making their life better, communities developed from these early settlers, Goldsmiths, Iron smiths, Pottery makers, washer men etc, etc developed into distinct communities. But Kuruba Gowda's remained the pioneers and innovators, they built Temples and started praying to their own distinct gods, the priests of these Temples remained Kuruba Gowdas. They developed the Gotra system to prevent inter marriages among the Kuruba Gowda's, which was an innovative method and remains testimony of the knowledge of the Kuruba Gowdas.

They built several kingdoms but did not take up education in big way, while the branched out communities over took Kuruba Gowdas in other spheres of life, a priest class was formed, numerous gods and customs were invented, progress was made in education, new methods to make life better was implemented, universities were built. All these started due to the first taming of animals by the Kuruba Gowda's.

Today Kuruba Gowdas are lagging a bit in modern education, thanks to their ancient profession. Majority of Kuruba Gowdas still stick to their ancient profession of sheep rearing and agriculture, efforts should be made to help them get modern education.