Merchant Ships and Forest Groves: Indigenous Knowledge Systems in Eco-Sensitive Zones of the Malabar Coast

01/06/2025 to 31/07/2026

Indigenous languages and literatures are repositories of knowledge about human-environment relations. We intend to innovate methods of generating socio-ecological datasets out of manuscripts and their interpretation anchored in local and Indigenous insights. Our project is centred around politically, culturally, and environmentally vulnerable communities of the Malabar Coast (south-western India), their lived heritage, and their literary inheritance as embodied in a 15th-century Malayalam ballad. A Malayalam-English bi-lingual workshop, joint reading sessions, and remote fieldwork will test an educational model that gives Indigenous knowledge systems a structural position in sustainable development research frameworks.