Epics to Ethnographies: Indian Regional Cinema as an archival tool of Indigenous Knowledge System

Indian cinema, with its extraordinary reach and deep culturalresonance, serves as a vital custodian and interpreter of IndianKnowledge Systems, or IKS. Within IKS reside not only philosophicaltexts and treatises but also oral folklore, reverberating myth, andregion-specific ways of knowing blueprints of India’s intellectual souland living memory. Cinematic storytelling, for its part, is neither staticrelic nor academic vault; it is a fluid amalgam of image, sound, andperformance that collapses distances of century and creed. By passingon the towering wisdom of diverse traditions through a contemporary,plural audience, the medium renders the once-esoteric now relational.Visual-adaptive epics, layered soundscape chants, and personifiedmetaphors become vivid scenes; abstraction is made concrete, andlocal wisdom is cradled in a national hug. Thus, cinema snatches thefrail whisper of a fading oral verse, amplifies it through light andaction, and, in doing so, safeguards IKS and grants it resonance in aworld being re-written nightly by circuitry and screens