Indigenous Knowledge for Environmental Sustainability: A Case Study on the Santhal Community

By nature, Indigenous Education is known as the traditional cum situational knowledge. It is considered traditional because it is passed down from generation to generation through various means, such as verbal instruction, trial and error, and hands-on experience, achieved by being deeply involved in the natural atmosphere or situation. Indigenous knowledge is grown and nurtured in a setting that is based on informal learning that flows spontaneously from community life in which people are not outsiders or impartial observers but a learning which is deeply embedded and embodied in the sense where emotion, intuition, and sense of place and nature play the most vital role in imparting unique strategies which assist in maintaining and sustaining the lives of the community. This traditional approach of knowing creates a unique pedagogical content, i.e., ‘indigenous pedagogy’, which is supported by the community and quite different from the conventional hierarchical model. So, these indigenous knowledge practices help to make our educational process more joyful and meaningful while enriching our curriculum content. If we want to transform educational theory into more creative, prolific practice and experience, we must bank on such a unique place-based alternative line of pedagogy as prevalent in tribal communities. Here we would like to locate how such a vibrant learning process operates in the Santhal community, which manages all dimensions of their lives in an integrated manner. This creates the conception of ‘living classroom’ embedded with traditional food collection, constructing building, and so on, that taken together compose an inclusive, natural, and innovative way of doing things or ‘talim’. So the story of indigenous pedagogy of the Santhal community is not artificial engineering or manipulative in a modern sense, but it reveals non- competitive, yet resilient ways of life and survival because it is essentially a collaborative exercise in which experiments derive from the core experience of living amidst nature. Hence, indigenous pedagogy is at the centre of their lives, and vocations like agriculture, animal husbandry, indigenous health care, traditional healing, indigenous fishing, nature study, land resource management, collection of natural resources from the forest, and so on. Thus Santhal community learns through trial and error, observing the natural facts through introspection, and even observes the natural phenomena for a long time to understand and interpret the ground reality through deep personal involvement.