Brahmagiri hadi has been Chikbomi’s home for almost her entire life It is a small settlement of 177 families and around 1000 members of the Beta Kuruba community whose communal deity is Nandre Maramma. Their ancestral ways of life, which are animistic, inform their unique traditions and belief systems. Of late they have started to notice with some concern that these traditions, which guided their ancestors and them up until now, are slowly beginning to erode.

Some of it is being brought about by the increasing momentum of development and the wage market, and some through the youth in the community who are starting to pursue options offered them by education and social mobility. But within the hadi itself every significant milestone of life – birth, marriage, rites of passage and death - is still graced by the traditions of the Beta Kurubas and the reverence for nature that forms its basis.

The Beta Kurubas are an indigenous tribal group who are classified as a Scheduled Tribe. They originally inhabited the hilly and forested regions of the Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve in southern India. Today they are distributed across the districts of Chamarajanagar, Mysuru and Kodagu in Karnataka as well as the adjacent districts of Tamil Nadu (Nilgiris) and Kerala (Wayanad).

They were originally hunters and foragers who also traded in forest produce like honey and medicinal plants. The women wove fine baskets from bamboo and other forest materials. With the transition from the forest to the rural mainstream of India the Beta Kurubas had to adopt to other ways of life.

Today many of them work in the informal sectors of agriculture, trade and manufacturing. They also tend to their plots of land that was given them by the Government on relocation. Their children go to schools and some are moving to the cities for employment. The Beta Kuruba community, like most other tribal groups in this category, are in a state of transition, with a past that is slowly loosening its hold and a future that is still hazy and hard to define.