Bidaara / Dwelling

Bidaara, a colloquial Kannada word, not just in the Havyaka dialect but a commonly used term across the hills, slopes and coastal parts of the Southwestern Ghats, translates into camp, lodge, shelter, hut, and temporal occupation/appropriation of space.

Instead of seeing dwelling as permanent or temporary, the research uncovers making home through the rhythms of everyday practices, leading to an entirely new structuring of the Southwestern Ghats, driven by walking, a metapractice for research, within a monsoon terrain–here, bidaara is a threshold, a temporal inhabitation continually in the making by the multitude situated practices. “These multiple practices extend beyond habitat boundaries, beyond the shelter, and depend on particular conditions relating to the ground, moisture, and humidity.” This has led to a rethinking of vocabulary, in regional tongues, of ground that may be anchored in conditions of wetness, revealing “a relational quality that reimagines the Ghats as a threshold. Dwelling is an act of situating an anchor and generating trajectories of emergent practices that depend on wetness” (Sateesh 2020).