Binesh Balan is a doctoral researcher at Jagiellonian University in Kraków and a PhD researcher at the University of Groningen.

e-mail: binesh.balan@doctoral.uj.edu.pl

His research focuses on ritual performance, oral traditions, mortuary practices, and song cultures among Indigenous communities in northern Kerala, southern India. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, his doctoral project examines Teyyam and related ritual traditions among the Mavilan and neighbouring communities, with particular attention to possession, the ritual return of the deceased, social memory, caste, and intergenerational transmission. His broader research interests include the anthropology of religion, performance studies, ritual economy, vernacular textual traditions, and the cultural history of South India.