Kerala History
The origin legend of Kerala assigns to Parasurama's axe the credit of reclaiming 160 katam (an old time measure) of land that lay between Gokarnam and Kanyakumari. Another puranic legend, the story of Lord Visnu's Vamana incarnation predating Parasurama, relates the deporting of a Kerala king called Mahabali to the under world and contradicts the origin legend by implying the existence of Kerala prior to Parasurama. The legends apart, the land-mass in question lying between the western ghats and the sandy littoral lashed by the sea waves, is a strip of large and small wet land plains surrounded by undulated red soil hillocks. The marine geological studies, soil composition researches and sediment analyses have proved it a land-mass that emerged on the recession of the sea. Emerged from the sea, the land got forested but submerged again by the sea, a phenomenon that repeated several times over the travail of millennia as the floral fossils and marine sediments suggest. The land-mass that emerged and reforested eventually got covered by flood silt leading to the gradual making of an agro-climatic landscape of backwaters, water-logged tracts and grassy marshes covering roughly one third of the total land.
Kerala’s high ranges and the upper reaches of rivers were the habitat of Stone Age people whose chronology and extent are little known. Archaeological evidences at a few places in the western ghats show the presence of Paleolithic people using quartzite choppers. The rock shelters and paintings at certain sites like Marayur in the Kutakkad reserve of the Ranni Division have yielded relics of late Stone Age. The presence of Neolithic people is attested by stray finds of Celts and hand axes at several places. There are natural rock shelters and engravings at Edakal and Tovari near Sultan Battery, identified as belonging to late Neolithic and early Iron Age.
The red-soil tracts had become human inhabited by the turn of the first millennium AD as attested by the sparsely distributed burial relics and monuments of early iron age. The relics by and large point to the material culture of diverse forms of subsistence such as hunting/gathering and shifting cultivation as suited to the ecosystems. A few plough shares have been discovered from some dolmens in the western ghats where wet-rice landscape eco-system existed in small pockets as interspersed along the hill valleys. The Greco-Roman traders frequented the west-coast during this period as evidenced by their writings as well as the hoards of their coins. Muciri, Tondi, and Mantai have been referred to in their writings as the famous ports of the times. This was the period of the Chera chiefdom. The people in those days lived across the red-soil tracts and high ranges mainly as hunting/gathering tribes and clans of self-sustaining agrarian villages. There were long distance exchange contacts between the Gangetic valley and the deep south of peninsular India. Brahmi script travelled to the Tamil region including Kerala probably through the merchants and monks. Many Jain, Buddhist and Ajivika monks had migrated to the Tamil region, if not Kerala. A vatteluttu inscription from Nilampur refers to a sluice mouth directing water to a place called Mavakkode, obviously for agriculture The antiquity of rice cultivation in ecotypes of the grassy fields of high ranges and elevated alluvial plains goes back to the closing centuries before Christ. There was no technological know how in Kerala till the second half of the first millennium AD for the productive use of wetlands in the plains. The aforesaid period witnessed the conversion of wetland ecosystem of water-logged depressions and marshy plains enclosed by small hills, into paddy fields. Making of the paddy fields, a major social action on natural landscape, involving drastic changes in the ecosystem and its bio-diversity marked the end of ancient society and its transformation into that of the medieval. The paper seeks to provide a brief introductory outline of this long history.
The reclamation of wetland tracts into paddy fields required heavy labour, various organizational and institutional devices of labour mobilization, knowledge systems, structures of social control. Migrations and circuits of people from different parts of the sub-continent facilitated the convergence of various cultural practices, beliefs, world-views and knowledge systems in the region. Among them included the Jains, Buddhists and Brahmins. The immigrants seem to have provided the external dynamic for the opening up of the paddy fields, expansion of wet-rice agriculture and the corresponding changes in the economy and social relations. By the closing centuries of the first millennium AD the entire fertile plains got studded by numerous agrarian settlements with the Namputiri brahmins as their proprietors and temples as their headquarters. The Vedic, sastraic, puranic wisdom, elaborate rituals, structures of social control such as caste division and hierarchy besides the historically and culturally contingent hegemony account for the brahmin land control that attained the level of a virtual monopoly. Tradition speaks about thirty-two of them as the original settlements. Each settlement was a hierarchically ordered system of land relations and hereditary occupations with people who eventually got divided into endogamous caste groups. This was a long process, the consolidation and crystallization that probably took at least four to five centuries. The reign of the Perumals, probably emerged out of the preexisting tribal ruling lineage called the Cheras, that lasted roughly for two centuries and a quarter between circa 900 - 1124 AD represented the overarching political structure of the brahmin landlordism in Kerala. It was the period of the shaping of Kerala's cultural identity. It was a period of intellectual and creative developments too. Vedic ritualistic and philosophical scholarship of Kerala has always been remarkable. Sankara, the famous advaida philosopher is said to have lived during the early decades of 8th century AD. Astronomy, astrology, mathematics and health care learning received great attention during the period. Numerous palm leaf texts relating to the various forms of knowledge and their manuals of practice vouch for this. Sankaranarayana who reinterpreted Bhaskara I is a well known name among the 9th century astronomers of Kerala. All the major systems of knowledge in classical India were retold, commented and adapted by the scholars of Kerala. Kautilya's Arthasastra, one of the most ancient treatises on state-craft, was told in old Malayalam around the 12th century. The temple was a seat of learning and a place of performing arts too. Kutiyattam and Kuttu the earliest genres of Kerala's dance drama got standardized during this period. Sanskrit dramas like Tapatisamvaranam, Subhadradhanajayam, Vichchinnabhishekam etc., were composed during this period. Kulasekhara Varman ranks foremost among the playwrights of the times. It was a period of cultural symbiosis in the sense that several religious sects like the Jains, Buddhists, Vedic brahmins, Saivites, Vaisnavites, Arabs, Christians and Jews peacefully co-existed and interacted, providing the land benefits of a composite culture. The several brahmanical temples as well as Christian and Jewish monuments of 9th - 10th centuries have survived to our times. As the population grew up, agriculture expanded, trade relations enlarged and social system further structured, the Perumal monarchy gave way to the emergence of several independent regions of which the Kolathunad in the north, the Zamorins of Calicut and the Venad in the South were the most prominent. The crystallization of the caste system probably began during this period. As a predominantly agrarian economy of unequal entitlements, relatively far weaker compared to those of the kingdoms in the neighbourhood, the living conditions of lower rungs were extremely miserable. In spite of the obvious regulation of the population strength by the possible high death rate, the economy seems to have yielded very limited surplus which the small and simple monuments of the times vouch for. In mid May 1498 with the historic landing of Vasco da Gama at Kappad near Calicut, and subsequently with the arrival of the Dutch and French, the history of the land marked the beginnings of colonization. The early years of western contact did not affect the traditional culture much. Western contact initially gave a boost to Kerala's crafts production and trade. It was the period of the proliferation of markets along the river mouths and consolidation of trade routes mainly through rivers and backwaters. The earlier temple towns persisted on as major centres of economic activity and cultural developments. In addition to Kuttu and Kutiyattam of olden days, Tullal and Kathakali also emerged as important art forms during this period. Traditional forms of knowledge continued to flourish and old worldviews dominated. Certain areas of traditional knowledge registered remarkable exponential rise. In architecture, mathematics, astronomy and medicine the period made lasting contributions during the 15th - 18th centuries. Nilakanta's Tantrasamgraha, Jyestadeva's Yuktibhasa, Putumanasomayaji's Karanapadhati and Sankara Varma's Sadratnamala exemplify the amazing heights the Kerala astronomy and mathematics reached during the period, taking the cue from Aryabhata and Bhaskara I. The westerners who happened to know these works did express their surprise at the exponential heights, but preferred to hush up truth rather than daring a cognitive encounter. Now it is well known that at least three centuries before Newton and Liebniz, mathematicians like Madhava and Nilakanta had taken decisive step onwards from the finite procedures of ancient mathematics to treat their limit passage to infinity, which is understood today as central to classical mathematical analysis. The achievements of Kerala mathematicians and astronomers were great. They had already discovered the principles that we call today as the Gregory Series for the inverse tangent, the Liebniz Series, and the Newton Series for sine and cosine as well as certain remarkable rational approximations for circular and trigonometric functions, including the well known Taylor Series approximations for the sine and cosine functions. Kerala mathematicians had obtained these results without the use of infinitesimal calculus. Modern English consummated by the close of 18th century. In literature, linguistics and grammar too theoretical production continued till the establishment of the British imperialism.
The rest of the history of Kerala was a mixture of good and evil. The massive economic and cultural loss under colonial exploitation remains not remedied as yet. However, the land owes its modernisation to Colonialism. The service of the Christian missionaries in the field of social reform and mass education was great. It set the background for the anti-caste movement of Sreenarayana Guru and the subsequent series of community reform Movements that culminated in the Communist movement of Kerala. The people of Kerala who were subjects mainly of three ruling lineages virtually got reconstituted as citizens of the British Government, though the princely states of Cochin and Travancore nominally sustained their political identity. Finally when the freedom struggle was set in across the sub-continent, national consciousness got worked up here as well. Kerala became a State in the Republic of India in November, 1956.
Kerala’s high ranges and the upper reaches of rivers were the habitat of Stone Age people whose chronology and extent are little known. Archaeological evidences at a few places in the western ghats show the presence of Paleolithic people using quartzite choppers. The rock shelters and paintings at certain sites like Marayur in the Kutakkad reserve of the Ranni Division have yielded relics of late Stone Age. The presence of Neolithic people is attested by stray finds of Celts and hand axes at several places. There are natural rock shelters and engravings at Edakal and Tovari near Sultan Battery, identified as belonging to late Neolithic and early Iron Age.
The red-soil tracts had become human inhabited by the turn of the first millennium AD as attested by the sparsely distributed burial relics and monuments of early iron age. The relics by and large point to the material culture of diverse forms of subsistence such as hunting/gathering and shifting cultivation as suited to the ecosystems. A few plough shares have been discovered from some dolmens in the western ghats where wet-rice landscape eco-system existed in small pockets as interspersed along the hill valleys. The Greco-Roman traders frequented the west-coast during this period as evidenced by their writings as well as the hoards of their coins. Muciri, Tondi, and Mantai have been referred to in their writings as the famous ports of the times. This was the period of the Chera chiefdom. The people in those days lived across the red-soil tracts and high ranges mainly as hunting/gathering tribes and clans of self-sustaining agrarian villages. There were long distance exchange contacts between the Gangetic valley and the deep south of peninsular India. Brahmi script travelled to the Tamil region including Kerala probably through the merchants and monks. Many Jain, Buddhist and Ajivika monks had migrated to the Tamil region, if not Kerala. A vatteluttu inscription from Nilampur refers to a sluice mouth directing water to a place called Mavakkode, obviously for agriculture The antiquity of rice cultivation in ecotypes of the grassy fields of high ranges and elevated alluvial plains goes back to the closing centuries before Christ. There was no technological know how in Kerala till the second half of the first millennium AD for the productive use of wetlands in the plains. The aforesaid period witnessed the conversion of wetland ecosystem of water-logged depressions and marshy plains enclosed by small hills, into paddy fields. Making of the paddy fields, a major social action on natural landscape, involving drastic changes in the ecosystem and its bio-diversity marked the end of ancient society and its transformation into that of the medieval. The paper seeks to provide a brief introductory outline of this long history.
The reclamation of wetland tracts into paddy fields required heavy labour, various organizational and institutional devices of labour mobilization, knowledge systems, structures of social control. Migrations and circuits of people from different parts of the sub-continent facilitated the convergence of various cultural practices, beliefs, world-views and knowledge systems in the region. Among them included the Jains, Buddhists and Brahmins. The immigrants seem to have provided the external dynamic for the opening up of the paddy fields, expansion of wet-rice agriculture and the corresponding changes in the economy and social relations. By the closing centuries of the first millennium AD the entire fertile plains got studded by numerous agrarian settlements with the Namputiri brahmins as their proprietors and temples as their headquarters. The Vedic, sastraic, puranic wisdom, elaborate rituals, structures of social control such as caste division and hierarchy besides the historically and culturally contingent hegemony account for the brahmin land control that attained the level of a virtual monopoly. Tradition speaks about thirty-two of them as the original settlements. Each settlement was a hierarchically ordered system of land relations and hereditary occupations with people who eventually got divided into endogamous caste groups. This was a long process, the consolidation and crystallization that probably took at least four to five centuries. The reign of the Perumals, probably emerged out of the preexisting tribal ruling lineage called the Cheras, that lasted roughly for two centuries and a quarter between circa 900 - 1124 AD represented the overarching political structure of the brahmin landlordism in Kerala. It was the period of the shaping of Kerala's cultural identity. It was a period of intellectual and creative developments too. Vedic ritualistic and philosophical scholarship of Kerala has always been remarkable. Sankara, the famous advaida philosopher is said to have lived during the early decades of 8th century AD. Astronomy, astrology, mathematics and health care learning received great attention during the period. Numerous palm leaf texts relating to the various forms of knowledge and their manuals of practice vouch for this. Sankaranarayana who reinterpreted Bhaskara I is a well known name among the 9th century astronomers of Kerala. All the major systems of knowledge in classical India were retold, commented and adapted by the scholars of Kerala. Kautilya's Arthasastra, one of the most ancient treatises on state-craft, was told in old Malayalam around the 12th century. The temple was a seat of learning and a place of performing arts too. Kutiyattam and Kuttu the earliest genres of Kerala's dance drama got standardized during this period. Sanskrit dramas like Tapatisamvaranam, Subhadradhanajayam, Vichchinnabhishekam etc., were composed during this period. Kulasekhara Varman ranks foremost among the playwrights of the times. It was a period of cultural symbiosis in the sense that several religious sects like the Jains, Buddhists, Vedic brahmins, Saivites, Vaisnavites, Arabs, Christians and Jews peacefully co-existed and interacted, providing the land benefits of a composite culture. The several brahmanical temples as well as Christian and Jewish monuments of 9th - 10th centuries have survived to our times. As the population grew up, agriculture expanded, trade relations enlarged and social system further structured, the Perumal monarchy gave way to the emergence of several independent regions of which the Kolathunad in the north, the Zamorins of Calicut and the Venad in the South were the most prominent. The crystallization of the caste system probably began during this period. As a predominantly agrarian economy of unequal entitlements, relatively far weaker compared to those of the kingdoms in the neighbourhood, the living conditions of lower rungs were extremely miserable. In spite of the obvious regulation of the population strength by the possible high death rate, the economy seems to have yielded very limited surplus which the small and simple monuments of the times vouch for. In mid May 1498 with the historic landing of Vasco da Gama at Kappad near Calicut, and subsequently with the arrival of the Dutch and French, the history of the land marked the beginnings of colonization. The early years of western contact did not affect the traditional culture much. Western contact initially gave a boost to Kerala's crafts production and trade. It was the period of the proliferation of markets along the river mouths and consolidation of trade routes mainly through rivers and backwaters. The earlier temple towns persisted on as major centres of economic activity and cultural developments. In addition to Kuttu and Kutiyattam of olden days, Tullal and Kathakali also emerged as important art forms during this period. Traditional forms of knowledge continued to flourish and old worldviews dominated. Certain areas of traditional knowledge registered remarkable exponential rise. In architecture, mathematics, astronomy and medicine the period made lasting contributions during the 15th - 18th centuries. Nilakanta's Tantrasamgraha, Jyestadeva's Yuktibhasa, Putumanasomayaji's Karanapadhati and Sankara Varma's Sadratnamala exemplify the amazing heights the Kerala astronomy and mathematics reached during the period, taking the cue from Aryabhata and Bhaskara I. The westerners who happened to know these works did express their surprise at the exponential heights, but preferred to hush up truth rather than daring a cognitive encounter. Now it is well known that at least three centuries before Newton and Liebniz, mathematicians like Madhava and Nilakanta had taken decisive step onwards from the finite procedures of ancient mathematics to treat their limit passage to infinity, which is understood today as central to classical mathematical analysis. The achievements of Kerala mathematicians and astronomers were great. They had already discovered the principles that we call today as the Gregory Series for the inverse tangent, the Liebniz Series, and the Newton Series for sine and cosine as well as certain remarkable rational approximations for circular and trigonometric functions, including the well known Taylor Series approximations for the sine and cosine functions. Kerala mathematicians had obtained these results without the use of infinitesimal calculus. Modern English consummated by the close of 18th century. In literature, linguistics and grammar too theoretical production continued till the establishment of the British imperialism.
The rest of the history of Kerala was a mixture of good and evil. The massive economic and cultural loss under colonial exploitation remains not remedied as yet. However, the land owes its modernisation to Colonialism. The service of the Christian missionaries in the field of social reform and mass education was great. It set the background for the anti-caste movement of Sreenarayana Guru and the subsequent series of community reform Movements that culminated in the Communist movement of Kerala. The people of Kerala who were subjects mainly of three ruling lineages virtually got reconstituted as citizens of the British Government, though the princely states of Cochin and Travancore nominally sustained their political identity. Finally when the freedom struggle was set in across the sub-continent, national consciousness got worked up here as well. Kerala became a State in the Republic of India in November, 1956.
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