The Dohnavur Fellowship is committed to ensuring our historical and cultural legacy endures for current and future generations. Our main campus in Dohnavur was established in 1911 by our founder Amy Carmichael. 

 

Amma, as she was fondly known, was instrumental in shaping our ways of life; living close to nature, causing minimal disturbance to the existing ecology. Founding members of the Fellowship ensured that the bricks used to construct the historical structures on-campus were cast in-situ, using earth excavated for the foundations. They designed the roofing system with palm tree logs, again a locally available material. As a result of Amma’s travels, the architecture is a blend of regional Indian, British and Japanese styles. Apart from the main campus, we also protect a forest within the Kalakkad range of the Western Ghats. Naraikadu or Grey Forest was so named by Amma. It houses our spiritual retreat and can only be accessed by foot, trekking through the forest.

 

Saythu…Linking People and Heritage, a community-centric and research-based conservation collective, advises us on diverse aspects related to sustainable and inclusive heritage management-conservation, including our objects, structures, and the campus as a whole.

 

We have been collaborating with them for over four years now on their Beyond Four Walls field school in the Tamirabarani basin. Our philosophies are closely aligned in the context of nature-based education and minimalistic living, in harmony with the environment. The Saythu team ensures that each iteration of Beyond Four Walls gives back by scientifically documenting our historical, cultural and ecological legacies.

​

As our heritage advisors, the team at Saythu sought and obtained a grant from The Archives at NCBS(National Centre for Biological Sciences, Bangalore), through a regrant programme of the Arcadia Foundation, to sort, catalogue and digitise some of our paper-based archival material related to STEM-based knowledge production. 

 

The materials include field diaries, journals, weather observations, sketches and pedagogical material on nature-based education, created by Amma/Amy Carmichael and other founding members of the Fellowship. 

 

See the Saythu-Dohnavur Collection of Collections 2025-26 organised as the Dohnavur Collections and the Naraikadu Collections.

​