How aware are the people of Kerala of their own culture or their past? Not much, says a group of Malayalis leading an initiative to preserve the state’s cultural heritage.
Maintaining that the same goes for history, Asok says Malayalis would know of World War II but will be clueless about the battles of Samoothiri, a powerful chief from the kingdom of Kozhikode.
While Asok is currently pursuing a PhD in Public Policy from IIT Delhi, joining her in the effort are Nevin Thomas, an alumnus of Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), and Sruthin Lal, a journalist from Kozhikode.
ARPO discovers and shares lesser-known aspects of Kerala’s cultural heritage through research, digital archiving, multimedia storytelling, and community engagement.
“We work with schoolchildren to make them collect vanishing oral traditions from their locality using their mobile phones and we crowdsource them,” Lal said, referring to tales, songs, and lullabies.
Lal says Malabar hookahs have been made in northern Kozhikode “for at least 300 years” and was “a vestige of millennia-old trade relations between Kerala and the Middle East”.
ARPO has begun archiving tribal songs, language, culture, cuisine and way of life for presentation via social media and public programmes without any adulterations.