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How can we examine our land and its spaces, encompassing the visible and the invisible, the enduring and the fleeting, the physical and the mythical, the visual and the sensory, through a lens that transcends contrasts?
Amid the current era characterised by selective historical narratives and biased political agendas of nation-states, this research aims to redefine the perspective through which we explore the stories of the coastal districts of Karnataka and Kasaragod. This will be achieved by delving into archival human documents, travelogue texts, cartographies, and visual materials, thereby uncovering blind spots in dominant narratives. The goal is to critically reinterpret the narratives from a local perspective and voice.
This study positions itself within the broader Indian Ocean World, relying on the human-environment interaction as a method to explore the land across time. The proposal introduces a repository platform with a non-linear framework designed to present and narrate historical global and regional connections, the current multiplicity of narratives and the living heritages to both inquisitive locals and curious travellers.
The 300km stretch of land lies along the land margin of the Indian subcontinent and the rim of the much larger Indian Ocean World.
Analysis of human texts across centuries to reveal the patterns of an external gaze and to reveal blind spots in the narratives.
Political and administrative histories sideline local people, everyday practices and embedded knowledges as antiquities or folklore.
A ‘history from below’ approach to explore relationships between people, culture and production (in this case, paddy) to the geography and nature within the Indian Ocean World.
The platform segregates and lays out archives and their sources within a designed lens and framework for the knowledge to be consumed, to be engaged with, to grow and spread.