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.