Pukhoor means flower. It is the embroidery Toda women work on the putkuli, a coarse half-bleached cotton shawl woven for them by Kota weavers with red and black bands already running through it at six-inch intervals. Between those bands the women count threads and lay wool along warp and weft, so every stroke is a right angle and every line is stepped.

The stitch is reversible: both faces are finished, and the shawl is worn either way. The motif vocabulary is named and closed — buffalo horn, sun and moon, zigzag, arrowhead, the W, the black triangles for the first priest. This system inherits that discipline: fixed rails, counted units, plain cloth left plain.