Expanding Contours of Knowledge: Indigenous Knowledge Systems, Self-Reliance and Sustainability 15 5

Abstract

The editorial of the last volume of Vantage began thus: “There are many stories about India. But the key question is how to know and see India?” The editorial answered it by stating, “The contemporary use of the term ‘our culture’ invisibilises this (pluralistic literary traditions) dimension of India” (Tripathy, 2024). Through her engagement with both national and vernacular literary traditions, Tripathy very lucidly made us relook our understanding of India, Indians and Indianness. Having worked on issues in the context of North-east India for more than a decade and half and now being stationed in the region not only made me approach this question differently but pushed me to raise a few of my own. How do we define (our) world and the people in that world? How did the text (‘word’ as Tripathy puts it in her editorial and quite rightly so) come to be the most prominent way to understand the world in its myriad forms? In doing so, are we not failing to account for the societies that have oral and visual traditions (often referred to as unlettered) defying the mainstream understanding of history, historicity and dynamism? My answer to this question is very simple: owing to the dominant civilisational paradigm, the textual and the written word had been prioritised over the oral and the visual, pushing many intellectual traditions and systems of knowledge to the periphery thereby placing them in a hierarchical relationship. Prima facie this may not seem to be a big issue, however, such a relationship underneath its surface has a civilisational bias, a distorted understanding of historicity, intellect and knowledge and subsequently development, growth and progress. However, these oral narratives which include an array of folklore materials have been an invaluable source of knowledge about indigenous worldview and lifeways, providing us an insight into sustainability, survival and self-reliance.