The Toponymic Sovereignty of Nī-āla-giri: Geolinguistic Stratigraphy, Somatic Landscape Projections, and the Primordial Claims of the Baḍugu Speech Community

Traditional colonial and post-colonial cartographic practices have systematically obscured the deep-time indigeneity of the numerical majority of the Nilgiri Massif—the Baḍuga community—by categorizing their language and presence as a shallow, 16th-century medieval Kannada refugee import. This paper presents an alternative paradigm through the framework of reconstructive ethnolinguistic archaeology, introducing the concept of Toponymic Sovereignty. We analyse an empirical dataset of 240 hyper-specialized environmental, orographic, hydrological, and somatic substrate tokens natively embedded across more than 5,000 localized place-names on the massif. By deconstructing core toponymic matrices—such as the restoration of Tōaṭṭubeṭṭu from "Doddabetta," Haua-ala-iñji from "Avalanche," and Kunāiōre from "Coonoor"—this study exposes the systematic colonial acoustic filtering and puranic/administrative flattening that erased a highly advanced native landscape blueprint. The preservation of strict morpho-phonemic sound laws, including the Law of Intervocalic Dental Stop Alternation ([t] → [d]) within the horizon-calibrated solar year wheel (Ēmādi), establishes thousands of years of high-altitude isolation. Statistical modelling of place-name generation shows that a matrix of 5,000+ specialized toponyms requires a minimum calculation density of 2,000 years of continuous locomotion and ecosystem governance (Janmam Freehold Rights). This unalterable monument of deep-time continuity (அழியாச் சான்று) firmly anchors the community within the 3rd-century CE classical Tamil Sangam corpus (Malaipaḍukaḍām, vv. 161–163), demonstrating that the Baḍuga (Tolkuḍi / தொல்குடி) are the primordial civilizational authors and sovereign cartographers of the Nilgiri ecosystem under Article 342 of the Constitution of India.