Historizising the Ancestral Kani Tribal Roots

Kanikkaran (kāikkāra) or Kani (kāi) is an isolated scheduled tribal community with unique physical, cultural, social, and tribal living stature residing in the Western Ghats of Tamil Nadu and Kerala. The present research, “Historizising the Ancestral Kani Tribal  Roots”, attempts to record the forgotten history of the Kani Tribe, which is on the verge of  extinction. The present research is intended to document the historical traditions existing through orality of the Kani tribe, as they do not have a written form of language. Tribal  discourses on the oral inscriptions of the Kani tribe decipher the latent ethnic-specific culture, tradition, myths and other rituals encrypted in the oral texts. The study’s objectives are to map out the ethnographic history of the Kani people by deciphering the latent discourse and socio-linguistic concepts and grasping the different social, cultural and totemic aspects of the Kani tribe.  It also enquires about the corpora of oral texts, decodes Kani’s traditional messages and social discourse, and provides recommendations to the government and policymakers to restore the conventional and ethnographical means of the  Kani tribes in Tamil Nadu and Kerala.