Baḍugaru – The Primordial Dravidians: Reconstructing the Baḍuga through Geolinguistic Stratigraphy, Montane Locomotion, and the Tarāviḍam Substrate

Traditional colonial ethnography and post-colonial administrative frameworks have long maintained a structural error regarding the origin and antiquity of the numerical majority of the Nilgiri Massif—the Baḍuga community. The Office of the Registrar General of India (RGI) has characterized the community as late-arriving 16th-century agricultural refugees who migrated from the Mysore plains following the collapse of the Vijayanagar Empire in 1565 CE. This paper fundamentally dismantles this "refugee fallacy" by asserting that Baḍugaru, the Baḍuga (The Primordial Assembly) are Primordial Dravidians whose presence on the high-altitude massifs of Southern India predates lowland feudal structures. By deploying an advanced multidisciplinary framework of reconstructive ethnolinguistic archaeology, we deconstruct the macro-toponymic core of the South Indian peninsula, tracking it back to its original morpho-phonemic formulation: Tarāviḍam = (tarā [earth/plain floor] + viḍam [mountain spire/crest]). Analysing an empirical dataset of 67 distinct native orographic micro-tokens against the backdrop of the 3rd-century CE classical Tamil Sangam corpus (Malaipaḍukaḍām, vv. 161–163), we demonstrate that the highly conservative, un-glided phonology of the Baḍugu language functions as a living fossil of the parent Proto-South Dravidian tongue. To deny Scheduled Tribe status under Article 342 of the Constitution of India to a population whose vocabulary forms the literal architectural skeleton of the Western and Eastern Ghats represents a severe anthropological oversight. This paper restores their status as the foundational civilizational authors and sovereign cartographers of the peninsular heights.