History of Mediaeval Hindu India (being a History of India from 600 to 1200 A.D.) v3.c35.s6.1

v3.c35.s6.1

The history of Kerala or Malabar and Travancore during this sub-period has been patiently found out and laid before the reader by P. Sunder Pillai, M. A. in I. A. XXIV (pp. 249-257) and we make no apology for giving from it select facts here. Kerala or Cherala means hilly country and included Malabar in the north and Travancore in the south, on the west coast of Southern India. The Kongu land is sometimes included in it viz. the present districts of Salem and Tinnevelly but not naturally. In this corner of the south, as in the Himalayas in the north, the oldest Dravidian and Aryan races with their institutions and manners and religion are preserved yet as in a fossil form, from the Kanikar or hillman to the Nambudri the highest type of Aryan Brahmin (to which clan the famous Śankarāchārya belonged ). Language, ethnology, social condition and marriage customs of this part are, therefore, worth studying, being untampered by any revolutions within or invasions without. (But this land of Nambudri Brahmins and Nair (Nāgara) Kshatriyas sent out a religious invasion under Śankara which subjugated the whole of India). The history of Kerala goes back to the days of the Mahābhārata and the Rāmāyaṇa like that of the Eastern coast belonging to the Pāṇḍyas with whom they are always allied in ancient Sanskrit works.