This paper establishes the structural and classical sovereignty of Baḍugu, the indigenous language of the high Nilgiri plateau (Nī-āla-giri), by conducting an exhaustive morphological and semantic audit of its Optative Mood infrastructure. In comparative historical linguistics, a primary diagnostic marker of extreme textual and structural antiquity is the non-existence of a mechanical, synthetic future tense. Primitive languages conceptualize futurity not as a deterministic calendar certainty, but as a manifestation of human volition, intention, and desire—modalities native to the optative register. Through a letter-by-letter structural decomposition of the existential verb iru (= to live, exist), we demonstrate that Baḍugu bypasses modern tense inflation, executing all forward-looking, counterfactual, conditional, and aspectual time-streams by systematically stacking monosyllabic volitional tokens (nē, be, na, iva, āl) and recursive root-duplication engines directly onto the naked verb stalk. Furthermore, the daily preservation of the ultra-archaic politeness marker -ī—surviving on the plains as a near-extinct literary fossil in only a single example (“senḍṛī peruma” in classical Tamil grammar)—confirms that Baḍugu did not erode downward from lowland vernaculars. It split from the Proto-Tamil-Kannada parent stem circa 1000 BCE, preserving the uncorrupted, pristine volitional skeleton of the Proto-South-Dravidian (PSD) ancestor.