The Lithic-Somatic Citadel: Agrarian-Pastoral Engineering, Oronymic Sandhi, and the Absolute Indigeneity of the Highland Baḍuga on the Nilgiri Massif

For more than a century, plains-centric and Eurocentric colonial historiographies have mischaracterized the Baḍuga of the Nilgiri Massif (Nī-Āla-Giri) as late historical migrants from the plains of Mysore or Karnataka. This paper presents many structurally integrated linguistic equations from the active highland register to expose these migratory narratives as flawed. By analysing the raw, unpadded phonotactic architecture of Baḍugu, we reveal an independent, highly archaic classical language that splits from Proto-South-Dravidian before the historical palatalization and labial-softening shifts occurred on the lowlands. More profoundly, this study establishes that Baḍugu grammar is inherently bound to a unified, eco-somatic engineering blueprint where human anatomy and montane topography share the exact same structural manual. Waking life is mapped as an active water-spring portal, internal illness is diagnosed through pipeline failure and hydraulic overloads, and customary law is enforced through the physics of digital vector-channelling. The structural preservation of ancestral plosives (b-, g-), complete consonant dissolutions, and localized laryngeal mutations (p → h) confirm that the Baḍuga have been organically fused to the rock-shelves and terraced watersheds of the Nilgiri Massif since deep antiquity.