Arts Lab

The Lab's activities over the past two years, and the networks that have emerged, have helped us to secure a GCID small grant for a pilot project, bringing in collaborators from the University of Hyderabad, the University of Tübingen, and the University of Sydney.

We start from the position that indigenous languages and literatures are repositories of knowledge about human-environment relations. We intend to develop methods of generating socio-ecological datasets out of manuscripts and their interpretation anchored in local and Indigenous insights. The 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.  

Kappalile (In the Boat)

The Jewish Malayalam song Kappalile (In the Boat) has inspired artists and researchers to co-create a new form of expression of intangible heritage conservation. Researchers and artists across three countries, Kerala, Israel, and Scotland imagined a multimedia project combining animation, music, and videography, based on a Jewish Malayalam wedding song that was first published in the bilingual Malayalam-Hebrew book Karkuzhali-Yefefia-Gorgeous (2005). The artist Meydad Eliyahu (Kallingal) and Gamliel collaborated since 2016 on a knowledge exchange geared toward salvaging the erased heritage of Kerala Jews from oblivion and decay. The musician Resmi Sateesh began performing Jewish Malayalam wedding songs in research seminars and performances in Kerala in collaboration with scholars and the Aazhi Archives. Sreedevi P. Aravind, Assistant Professor at the School of Film Studies (Malayalam University, Kerala), and cinematographer Arun Bhaskar brought them together in their production of the documentary Mozhiyazhaku on the Malayalam language. Finally, when the production was nearing completion, the team approached the translator and scholar Fathima E. V. to produce a beautiful translation in collaboration with Gamliel. The production was carried out under the auspices of the University of Glasgow Heritage Lab coordinated by the co-directors John Reuben Davies and Ophira Gamliel. The animation is juxtaposed with images of the scenic landscape of Jew Town Road in Kochi: the landing ghat (kadavu), the ruins of the adjacent Kadavumbhagam Synagogue (established in 1344, renovated in 1550, collapsed in 2019), and the tomb of the poet-saint Namya Mutta (died 1616). Credits: Lyrics - Anonymous. Art & Animation - Meydad Eliyahu. Research & Co-ordination - Ophira Gamliel. Music & Composition - Resmi Sateesh. Director - Sreedevi P. Aravind. Cinematography - Arun Bhaskar. Executive Producer - John Reuben Davies. Video Editing - Sarath Usha Sasidharan. Voice - Resmi Sateesh. Clarinet & Saxophone - Thomas Joe. Bass & Keys - Paul J. Mathews. Music Programming & Arrangements - Paul J. Mathews. Mix & Mastering - Sabaridas T. K. Recording Studio - Audiogene, Kochi, Kerala. Production Partners - The Scottish Funding Council, University of Glasgow, Aazhi Archives. Poetry Translation & Subtitles - Fathima E. V. Acknowledgements: Riyas Komu, M.H. Ilias, C. S. Venkideshwaran, Arathi P. M., Anwar Ali, Basil C. J. With deep gratitude to the many mothers and daughters who sang this beautiful song during so many weddings in Kadavumbhagam Kochi Synagogue.

The activities of the Lab formed the background for a successful AHRC Research Grant application in 2023, with Ophira Gamliel as Prinicpal Investigator. The project, in turn, formed the background for our Lab symposium on South Asian Coastal Heritage in October 2023. 

The AHRC/DFG research project begins from the position that Indian Ocean history tends to focus on material exchange and to rely primarily on European records and foreign travel accounts. In contrast, this project seeks to place the circulation of ideas, concepts, and values in the foreground by relying on sources produced by and for local communities, with the coastal communities of southwestern India (Malabar Coast) as the case study. To do so, we explore origin legends of Hindu, Muslim, and Jewish communities along the Malabar Coast, analysing selected tellings of these legends for identifying patterns of inter- and intra-religious demarcation. We use literary, linguistic, and content analysis for a study of cross-communal relations and transregional contacts during a period of significant transformations in global trade and geopolitics. Juxtaposing our findings against the European interventions in the region, our analysis targets the emergence of new types of networks between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean and the role of religion therein.

The project will run until 2027.

The Reading Collective Initiative (RCI) is an approach to reading Indigenous sources in non-European languages developed by researchers from the University of Glasgow’s College of Arts and Humanities, the University of Hyderabad’s Department of History, Sree Shankaracharya University of Sanskrit’s Malayalam Department, and the University of Sydney’s Indigenous Research Hub. The RCI is a collective of scholars for communicating Indigenous knowledge across several fields of expertise. There are specialists in Malayalam language and literature of various periods, digital humanities experts, linguistics scholars, historians, anthropologists and palaeographers, some of whom had little or no knowledge of the source language. In practice, the RCI gathers researchers to read a manuscript and co-produce transcriptions, annotations, translations, references, and commentaries. But rather than fixing a single, authoritative reading in print, the objective is to produce a thick layer of textual, intertextual, historical, and ethnographic hermeneutics, making use of digital editing tools and digital humanities methods. The underlying vision is to utilise XML TEI encoding tools in editing archaic texts for creating open-source transferrable datasets. Methodically, the RCI can be applied not only to different texts but also to oral traditions in endangered languages of Indigenous communities.

The RCI is envisaged as a co-operative, with contributions from and interventions by the participants arising from a common interest in listening and giving voice to Indigenous sources. In this way, participants engage in deep listening, openness and trust, curiosity and patience to allow for the emergence of meanings as researchers discuss graphemes, phrases, and historical context. The text we chose for our first RCI is the Ballad of Payyannur (Payyannūrpāṭṭu), a fifteenth-century Malayalam composition, which is too cryptic to be read by a single expert. The Ballad of Payyannur is preserved in a single manuscript kept in the Tübingen Manuscript Library and digitised on the Gundert-Portal. Its rediscovery in the early 1990s by Scaria Zacharia was received with excitement so much so that the rediscovered composition was described by M. Leelavathy as the ‘missing link’ in the evolution of Malayalam literature (Zacharia and Antony 1994). A detailed study of the text, its linguistic register, poetic expression, and performative and historical context is nevertheless still due. Except for a few verses, most of the work has not been translated into modern Malayalam, nor into English or any other modern Indian or European language.

Kalady (18–22 December 2025)

Our first series of RCI sessions took place in settlement of Chengal, Kalady (18–22 December 2025), the birthplace of the famous eighth-century monist philosopher Shankaracharya. Kalady is a scenic town on the banks of the Periyar River that flows from the Western Ghats towards the Arabian Sea and drains into the backwaters of the port town of Kochi. We gathered in Sameeksha, a Jesuit retreat centre that was established in 1987 for promoting inter-religious harmony. Malayalam scholars from Sree Shankaracharya University of Sanskrit (SSUS) jointly led the readings, with interventions in English and Malayalam by colleagues from the Universities of Hyderabad, Glasgow, and Sydney, as well as participants joining from Changanassery, New Delhi, and Chicago. The manuscript was displayed on a screen, and each participant also had a copy of the printed edition of the text (Zacharia and Antony 1994). A soft copy of an unpublished reading of the manuscript, transcribed into Malayalam and based on its digitised format (Ma I 279), was also shared in digital form. For the sake of participants with little or no knowledge of Malayalam, each verse was romanised. Rudimentary English translation of the verses was provided for each verse, with notes and comments captured during online reading sessions undertaken between 2022–2023 with the late T. B. Venugopala Panicker (1945–2025), the eminent Malayalam linguist and scholar.

The third day of the RCI was dedicated to an induction into XML and TEI, to familiarise participants with digital editing tools and the possibilities they offer not only for researchers but also for widening access and impact beyond the academy, through the future open, web-based availability of texts to readers anywhere in the world.

The Payyannurpattu Digitally Reimagined

As the reading progressed, we could start imagining the scheme of a digitally edited Payyannūrpāṭṭu. Take, for example, the fourteenth verse, describing the pregnancy of the central female character in the story, Nīlakēśi. The verse is on folio 142v, lines 3–8:

In the digital edition, the image will be placed alongside the Malayalam transcript typeset in the old script (paḻayalipi) as follows:

The verse will be translated into modern Malayalam prose (anvaya) and also linked to an audio file with the recitation. Separate archaic lexemes in the transcript will be tagged with their modern Malayalam equivalents and grammatical explanation in Malayalam. The next layer will be the verse romanised in the Indic transliteration and similarly, annotated for philological explanations.

paḷḷiyaṟattaḷam pukkavaḷkku gerbham ninnu/ pariśupeṭa muttiṅṅaḷ kaḻiññābāṟe//

puḷḷimulakkaṇ potṛnnū kaṟittiriṇṭu/ polcoṟ uṇṇāḷ pāvutinnāḷ puṣpavṛtti//

taḷḷivarum piḷḷayuruvakum toṟum/ śarddiyum paniyum talanovum koṇṭ’ uḻannu//

tuḷḷi kuṭiyāḷ kaṇṇi tuyil uṟaṅṅāḷ/ dukhicciṭṭ’ ombātām māsam ākī//

The English translation will form the next layer, as translation is also interpretation, and it will be digitally annotated to explain other possibilities arising from different readings of the Malayalam text. A tentative translation is as follows:

After entering the bedroom, she became pregnant

After three months were successfully completed,

Her nipples became swollen and dark.

She wouldn’t eat fine rice, she wouldn’t touch sweets, like a delicate flower.

Whenever the child would push as it was forming,

She would vomit, suffer fever and headaches, she would just slow down.

She would not drink even a drop; she would not sleep even a tiny bit.

Suffering like this, nine months went by.

The digital edition will also include the scholarly discussion arising from the joint reading in the RCI, with historical and geographical references, and references to texts which intersect with the Payyannūrpāṭṭu, for example, with similar scenes of pregnancy narrated in other Malayalam texts or elsewhere in Indian literature.

The collective format encouraged interpretative hesitation rather than premature closure. The discussions of metre, idiom, and semantic nuance repeatedly opened out into questions of ritual practice, performance history, and embodied experience. Participants were able to move between philological detail and wider ethnographic and historical contexts. This then allowed participants to model a practice of reading that remains open to various interpretive possibilities.

The long-term outcome of this work will be a digital scholarly edition of the Payyannūrpāṭṭu which deliberately resists the stabilisation of a single textual form. The edition will allow readers to navigate between scripts, translation systems, interpretative commentary, and interdisciplinary discussion. The collaborative character of the work will be evident throughout.

This first attempt at experimenting with RCI has shown that collaborative, multilingual reading can productively complicate conventional assumptions about philological expertise and textual authority. The collective developed the participants’ appetite for shared attention, interpretative humility, and the willingness to inhabit uncertainty. This created a friendly and hospitable space in which different readings could coexist without being prematurely reconciled. This approach opens significant methodological possibilities for the study of Indigenous textual traditions, especially those transmitted in fragile or fragmentary archival forms.

The digital edition of the Ballad of Payyannur will exemplify this ethos, inviting users to investigate transliterations, translations, interpretations, linguistic commentary, and scholarly debate as interrelated forms of meaning-making. It is conceived as an open educational resource for researchers, students, and community members, and also has the potential to inform wider debates on language endangerment, literary historiography, and the ethics of working with Indigenous cultural heritage.

An important outcome of the sessions in Kalady was the emergence of a shared intellectual practice grounded in careful listening. Participants noted that meaning often arose not through isolated acts of expertise – the notion of a scholarly ‘hero in the room’ was explicitly rejected – but through conversation, hesitation, and revision. For colleagues not fully fluent in Malayalam, participation entailed inhabiting a space of partial understanding, sometimes grasping only fragments of what was said, yet remaining deeply engaged, contributing disciplinary insight from linguistics, anthropology, history, and literary and manuscript studies while learning through attentive presence. For Malayalam specialists, the collective environment provided opportunities to test assumptions, encounter alternative perspectives, and articulate forms of tacit knowledge that might otherwise remain unrecorded. For specialists unfamiliar with Malayalam, the RCI was a window into an intimate scholarly conversation among Malayalam experts, one that could be followed only in part but nonetheless conveyed its intellectual and affective texture through tone, gesture, and the rhythms of collective enquiry.

This process also made for moments of productive tension. Differences of opinion over vocabulary, transliteration or semantic nuance became occasions for methodological reflection. The experience showed how philology and ethnography intersect: textual form, performance, ritual practice, and lived memory continually shape one another. In this sense, the RCI not only read a manuscript but also reflected on what it means to read collaboratively across different experience and knowledge. In this way, the collective served as both scholarly encounter and pedagogical experiment, modelling ways of working that may benefit other research communities.

Acknowledgements

The organisers wish to record their gratitude to the staff of Sameeksha, Kalady, for looking after everyone so thoughtfully throughout the meetings; for the Sree Shankaracharya University of Sanskrit hospitality in their guest house; as well as to Shanthamma, Jisha and Saji Mattathan for hosting several of the participants with love, openness, and generosity.

Thanks are also due to colleagues from Sree Shankaracharya University of Sanskrit, the University of Hyderabad, the University of Glasgow, and the University of Sydney for their commitment to the project and for the spirit of openness that characterised the discussions. The Tübingen Manuscript Library and the Gundert-Portal are gratefully acknowledged for providing access to the digitised manuscript.

A special expression of thanks is recorded here for the contribution of the late T. B. Venugopala Panicker (1945–2025), whose scholarship, guidance, and generosity of spirit shaped the early development of this collective reading. His insights continue to inform the work, and this report is dedicated to his memory.

Finally, the organisers acknowledge the institutional and financial support that made the workshop possible – the Glasgow Centre for International Development’s Small Grants scheme, Dr Mary Ryan, Mrs Elaine Wilson, and the College of Arts and Humanities Research Office.

The organisers also extend their thanks to all participants whose intellectual, linguistic, and interpersonal contributions sustained the collaborative ethos of the Initiative. Participants in the Kalady 2025 RCI included colleagues from the University of Glasgow – John Reuben Davies (Associate Director, ArtsLab), Ophira Gamliel (Senior Lecturer in Theology and Religious Studies), and Luca Guariento (Senior Research Systems Developer, College of Arts and Humanities); from the University of Hyderabad – V. J. Varghese (Senior Lecturer in History) and Hafis Chalthodi (PhD researcher in History); and from Sree Shankaracharya University of Sanskrit, across the Kalady campus and the regional centres in Thirunavayi and Kannur – Sajitha K. R. (Head of the Department of Malayalam), Dileepkumar K. V. (former Head of the Department of Malayalam), Abdul Lathief (Assistant Professor in Malayalam), Abhilash Malayil (Assistant Professor in History), and Shamshad Hussain K. T. (Professor of Malayalam).

The Initiative was further enriched by the participation of members of the TAPASAM Association for Comparative Studies – Ajaykumar, Biju C. P., Binto Alex, and Jaya Sukumaran – as well as by invited and affiliated scholars, including Jakelin Troy (Professor of Anthropology and Director of Indigenous Research at the University of Sydney), Prasannanshu (Professor of English at National Law University Delhi), and Ihsan Ul-Ihthisam and Rohini Nagath Menon (PhD researchers in the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago).