The Billava, Billoru,Biruveru or Ilava people are an ethnic group of India. They are found traditionally in Karnataka and some parts of Kerala, including Kasaragod district. The community was reformed under Narayana Guru's teachings.^{[citation needed]}

L. K. Ananthakrishna Iyer recounted the community's belief that billava means bowmen and that it "applied to the castemen who were largely employed as soldiers by the native rulers of the district" but he could find no evidence in support of their claim.Edgar Thurston had reached a similar conclusion in 1909.

The Billavas are first recorded in inscriptions dating from the fifteenth century AD but Amitav Ghosh notes that "... this is merely an indication of their lack of social power; there is every reason to suppose that all the major Tuluva castes share an equally long history of settlement in the region". The earliest epigraphy for the Tuluva Bunt community dates to around 400 years earlier.

There is a complex linguistic environment in Tulu Nadu, which is the area of India to which the Billavas trace their origin. A compact geographic area, Tulu Nadu lies on the coastal belt of Karnataka and Kerala and has natural boundaries in the form of the Arabian Sea, the hills of the Western Ghats and the rivers Suvarna and Chandragiri. It includes the South Canara district of Karnataka and the Kasaragod area of Kerala, which were formerly united for administrative purposes within the Madras Presidency. Although many languages and dialects are traditionally to be found there—for example, Tulu, Kannada, Malayalam, Konkani and Marathi—it is the first two of these that are common throughout, and of those two it is Tulu that is the older and gave rise to the region's name.

Ava Lavinia Gardner (December 24, 1922 – January 25, 1990) was an American actress.

She was signed to a contract by MGM Studios in 1941 and appeared mainly in small roles until she drew attention with her performance in The Killers (1946). She became one of Hollywood's leading actresses, considered one of the most beautiful women of her day. She was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress for her work in Mogambo (1953).

She appeared in several high-profile films from the 1950s to 1970s, including The Hucksters (1947), Show Boat (1951), The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1952), The Barefoot Contessa (1954), Bhowani Junction (1956), On the Beach (1959), Seven Days in May (1964), The Night of the Iguana (1964), The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (1972), Earthquake (1974), and The Cassandra Crossing (1976). Gardner continued to act regularly until 1986, four years before her death from pneumonia, at age 67, in 1990.

She is listed 25th among the American Film Institute's Greatest female stars.