Modifying Sensibilities | Reimagining the Humanities and Indigenous Knowledge
Talking to Dr. Aarti is an experience. It modifies your sensibility.
Friday, 21 August 2026 | 1 pm
A Report
It was such a joy hosting Dr. Aarti from Leiden University, Netherlands, over a luncheon session at the Office of International Programmes, MCC, today.
Well, the Leiden University, Netherlands is a public research university in Leiden, Netherlands. Established in 1575 by William, Prince of Orange, it holds the distinction of being the oldest surviving university in the Netherlands.
Dr. Aarti arrived 15 minutes ahead of time, and we started the luncheon meeting sharp at 1 pm.
Excerpts from her interactions with us -
I feel that, there is a move away from the Humanities today, due to rising unemployment and underemployment. People are increasingly losing touch with the Humanities. The way the world is going ahead – especially in Africa and Asia – we are prone to become more and more tech-oriented, so much that, the ability to think for oneself is becoming a challenge.
Emotional engagement with the world has also become a greater challenge.
How to bring back this engagement with the world, is the question.
Even the Humanities as we see it today, is more of Westocentric in its appeal – that, it is not grounded in our own realities.
Quite interestingly, unlike Scientific Knowledge which is highly abstract, Humanistic Knowledge is more descriptive.
How can we innovate in pedagogy that is more civically engaged?
How can we engage and collaborate with different nations? For example, although Myanmar or a Nepal are close to us, we don’t teach about them in our curricula. So we need to look at regional collaborations that are trans-national.
If you’re an Asianist, you don’t want to look at Africa. How can you not look at Africa?
Why can’t we look at an interconnected world, where knowledge is produced together?
The world that we inhabit today – its boundaries are highly porous! Inter-disciplinarity is quite important to engage with cultures, languages and nations across the world.
And for this we need a toolkit,
said Dr. Aarthi, and went on to give us a lovely book titled, Words from Jawadhu Hills: Eastern Ghats, South India.
The book is unique for so many reasons.
Firstly, there is no author to this book – an authorless book.
Secondly, there are no paginations anywhere in the book.
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Thirdly, it doesn’t have any ‘formal’ preface by any great ‘patron’, nor does it have the prototypical paratextual properties that are a staple of any regular book that’s published in academia.
Flipping through each of the pages of the book is a real visual treat and and an engaging journey into community knowledge or indigenous knowledge of the people of the Jawadhu Hills.
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The book is a joint initiative by Aarti and Delphine Thivet. It is an ethnographic “wordbook”, in the sense that, rather than acting as a rigid dictionary or a conventional academic treatise, it captures the socio-cultural, ecological, and working world of the Malaiyali millet farming community in the Jawadhu Hills of Tamil Nadu through 30 spoken Tamil words and phrases.
What makes the book so unique and a cut above the rest is that, the book abandons traditional academic distance in favour of dialogic interaction. It uses the daily spoken vocabulary - nouns, verbs, and regional idioms - as entry points into the complex realities of rainfed subsistence farming.
Each of these entries feature the Tamil script, its popular transliteration, their English and French translations, etc., along with a descriptive narrative context, field photography, and line illustrations, as follows –
Spoken Dialect Word - Contextual Meaning - Socio-Ecological Narrative
Yet another interesting feature of the book is its focus on the Agrarian Cycle and Local Ecology of the Jawadhu Hills.
The narrative follows the rhythm of millet cultivation - primarily saamai (little millet), along with ragi (finger millet), cholam (sorghum), and kambu (pearl millet).
Beginning with “Land Preparation” (Mottankal & Kattayerippu), that describes elevated, dry rainfed plots (mottankal) and traditional land-clearing techniques, the chapter details beautifully on the transition from historical slash-and-burn methods and collective community labour (uur vellai) to individualised wage work (coolie vellai).
Then comes the “Sowing & Care” (Visuri Veraikkirathu) part, that captures the art of hand-broadcasting indigenous seeds across ploughed grooves (saal) drawn by native kuttanmaadu cattle.
Finally there is the “Harvest & Processing” (Patham Pakkurathu & Kaikkuththal) during which, farmers judge grain dryness not with moisture meters, but by sound - listening for a crisp kada-mada crackle (resembling frying murukku) or a sharp sala-sala sound. It highlights the intense physical strain of hand-pounding grain using a mortar stone (kallu urali) and wooden pestle (kuththi).
The book also offers a candid look at the pressures facing tribal farmers, like socio-economic realities and modern transitions. For example, “Cash Crops (Vellari & Parutthi), that are done through corporate contract farming of export gherkins (vellari) and BT cotton (parutthi) brings short-term cash but depletes soil fertility and decimates bee populations. Farmers are hence compelled to continue due to accumulated debts.
Moreover, seasonal labour migration (Keela Porathu) is also a detrimental factor. During the dry summer season (kaasa kaalam), families are forced to move “downhill” to plains or cities (pattinam) like Chennai, Bengaluru, or Tiruppur to work in construction, plantations, or textile factories.
While government welfare provides free white rice through ration shops (PDS) and boarding hostels are in fact nourishing their children, it has inadvertently led younger generations to lose their taste for nutrient-dense traditional millets (ragi koozh, oratti).
It felt quite interesting to observe how farming is inextricably bound to their spiritual beliefs and folklore.
In this respect, the book highlights the concept of “Field Guardians” (Kollai Idurathu). Before harvest, farmers perform ritual offerings and animal sacrifices to Kollai Muni (the field guardian deity) and Kannimar (the seven goddesses of prosperity).
The book also features their rich folklore - local sayings, such as carrying lemons, charcoal, and dried chillies to protect sweet millet flatbreads (oratti) from attracting wandering ghosts or spirits (pey).
To me personally, this book makes highly engaging reading for the following reasons –
Firstly, the book’s take on structural nativisms, regional words from Jawadhu Hills, and their uniqueness.
Secondly, I like the way the book subverts linguistic hierarchies, by rejecting diminutives, (and top-down terms like shri anna) and instead documenting the words that the farmers on the soil use to name and value their own crops. instead
Thirdly, the book has given agency to local voices, by directly documenting their embodied experiences from the soil. In fact the book has been co-created over 1.5 years directly with indigenous farmers (such as Jaya and Raman of Vazhakkadu village).
Fourthly, the book is a lovely tribute to field ethnography, with a vibrant multimodal trilingual reach. Indeed, the book combines Tamil dialect along with English and French, along with a vast array of field photographs, and line drawings, thereby making field ethnography accessible worldwide.
Fifthly, the book doesn’t romanticise tribal life at any point of time. It balances deep respect for ecological wisdom with honest accounts of debt, migration, and technological shifts.
In a power-knowledge framework, where language becomes a mirror of power, the book strives to stand out as an exception. By documenting regional terms like veraikkirathu (local pronunciation for sowing) rather than giving the standardised Tamil textbook terms, it not only preserves the linguistic integrity of the Jawadhu region, but also subtly demonstrates how scientific and administrative labels often seek to marginalise local knowledge.
Yet another unique feature about the book is that, the book doesn’t sport a strict linear hierarchy. The reader can flip through entries individually or read it end-to-end, without any ‘dominant’ words or ‘practices’ subsuming other terms.
To sum it up, the book titled, Words from Jawadhu Hills treats language not merely as grammar, but as a living ecosystem. And by allowing the Malaiyali millet farmers to describe their land, labour, tools, and struggles in their own dialect, the book not only documents the voices of the farmers live from the fields, but also gives them agency in the process.
Where the subaltern can speak, and also be heard!
Therein lies the uniqueness of this “book”.
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