With the fall of Tipu Sultan in 1799, the East India Company consolidated their control over erstwhile Mysore. As part of the process, they appointed Francis Buchanan, a Scottish physician and geographer, to survey parts of southern India, for which he traversed through lengths and breadths of southern India collating information, statistics, oral-histories on a range of physical, political, cultural, social and economic subjects. With this repository of information in hand, we decided to retrace Buchanan’s Journey more than 200 years later. We have travelled extensively in the footsteps of Buchanan, talking to people about their lives and livelihoods, taking photographs of dilapidated monuments and landscapes, recording vanishing occupations, writing research articles and even making few documentary films based on his work. The project is far from complete and as we continue our travels along Buchanan’s route, we will share our experiences from our own explorations.