Listening to the Spirit of Indigenous Aesthetics in Kantara: The Legend- Chapter 1

Abstract

Focusing on Kantara: The Legend—Chapter 1 (2025) written, directed, and starred by Rishab Shetty, this article explores how land shape's identity in the memory of an indigenous community in South India. Primarily, the study inquires how the film visualizes sound, ritual, and indigenous aesthetics to portray land not as something people just own, but as living and sacred thing shaped by memories, ancestors and rituals showcasing its essential role in indigenous identity and sovereignty. The study aims to examine how the film frames Bhoota Kola and the farming life of Tulu culture in Karnataka through audiovisual elements. It illustrates how sounds, rituals, stories and visual symbols come together to create a way of storytelling rooted in local beliefs. By focusing on rituals, music, the landscape and comparative analysis of mainstream cinematic practices, close reading of Kantara’s folk cultures and traditional land, God, spirit and ritual knowledge, the article argues that the film offers a different kind of story where the land has a voice, spirits are listened, celebrated and cinema becomes a platform to remember culture and respect nature. The article employs Shawn Wilson’s notion of relational accountability and Margaret Kovach’s tribal epistemologies to ensure respect, responsibility and ethical engagement with indigenous knowledge and communities. It also applies visual methodology to examine how images, sound, performances and spatial stetting communicate power and identity. In addition, the study draws on sound studies treating listening as a method of understanding place, cultural experience and relationships to land. The article asserts that film’s indigenous aesthetics are not just for decoration but are essential to how the story is narrated. Through drumming, chanting, ritual dance and forest soundscapes the film invites viewers to listen to the land and understand identity through relationship with place, ancestors and more than human life.