This talk draws on Lucy May Constantini’s doctoral research on kaḷarippayaṟṟ˘, a martial art and associated medical system from the Malabar region of Kerala, South India. Lucy’s study focuses on the voices and experiences of long-term practitioners, placing the practice of kaḷarippayaṟṟ˘ within its unique lineage, religious, and social context. Her main argument is that embodied and indigenous practices should be studied on their own terms, and that doing so helps decolonise academic culture by highlighting voices and knowledge systems that have often been marginalised. In this talk, Lucy will explain how the methods used in her research align with the goals of the MANTRAMS project. She will discuss how focusing on embodied knowledge and combining it with detailed ethnography helped deepen the understanding of the kaḷari body in ritual and practice. Lucy will also explore how the embodied practice of kaḷarippayaṟṟ˘ informs textual descriptions of the body’s subtle qualities, revealing them as observable and repeatable, rather than merely metaphorical. Additionally, she will outline the role of mantram in the transmission of kaḷarippayaṟṟ˘.
Lucy May Constantini recently joined the ERC-funded Synergy Project, MANTRAMS, at the University of Vienna as postdoctoral researcher. Her PhD at the Open University in the UK explored the relationship between practice and textual traditions in kaḷarippayaṟṟ˘, funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council’s Open-Oxford-Cambridge Doctoral Training Partnership. This interdisciplinary research encompassed ethnography, drawing on a relationship since 2002 with CVN Kalari Sangham in Thiruvananthapuram, where she spent roughly 24 months over several intervals, and the study of manuscripts in Malayalam and Sanskrit. Her methodology is informed by her background in dance and somatic practices, where her work investigates the confluence of her praxes of postmodern dance, martial arts and yoga.
