The Department of History, School of Social Sciences, University of Hyderabad (UoH), the University of Glasgow, and the Department of Malayalam at Sree Sankara University of Sanskirt, Kalady, Association for Comparative Studies (Tapasam) and Institute for Social Sciences, Humanities and Oceanic Research (ISHORE) jointly organised a five-day reading collective of a pre-modern Malayalam ballad, Payyannurpattu, held from 18 to 22 December 2025 at Sameeksha, Kalady, Kerala. The programme was conducted as a closed-group collective reading and brought together faculty members and researchers from the University of Glasgow, the University of Hyderabad, Sree Sankara University, the University of Sydney, the University of Chicago, SB College Changanasseri and the National Law University, Delhi.
The reading collective was aimed at engaging closely with Payyannurpattu, which had long been considered lost for nearly one and a half centuries before being recovered from the Tübingen University Library by Professor Scaria Zacharia. The manuscript was subsequently published in 1994 as Payyannur Pattu: Padavum Padanangalum, edited by P. Antony and Scaria Zacharia. The workshop involved a comparative reading of the original palm-leaf manuscript alongside the published edition, with the objective of developing a broader understanding of the literary, historical, and socio-cultural traditions of the region as reflected in the text.
In addition, the programme included a technical session on the use of the Oxygen XML Editor for the preparation of digital editions of Payyannurpattu and other pre-modern textual sources.
Dr. V.J. Varghese (Associate Professor in History) and Hafis C (Research Scholar) participated in the Reading Collective, which was organised under the aegis of ‘Merchant Ships and Forest Groves: Indigenous Knowledge Systems in Eco-Sensitive Zones of the Malabar Coast’, a collaborative project of the University of Glasgow and the University of Hyderabad, funded by the Glasgow Centre for International Development (GCID).