Kerala History

The ancient history of Kerala is shrouded in the mists of tradition. The most popular legend would have it that the land crust that forms the State was raised from the depths of the ocean. Parasurama, the Brahmin avatar (incarnation) of Lord Vishnu, had waged an epic series of vengeful wars on the Kshatriyas. Came a moment when Parasurama was struck by remorse at the wanton annihilation he had wrought. He offered severe penance atop the mountain heights. In a mood of profound atonement, the sage heaved his mighty axes into the midst of the distant ocean. The waves foamed and frothed as a prawn-shaped land extending from Gokarnam to Kanyakumari surfaced from the depths of the sea to form the state and hence the sobriquet - "Gods own Country".

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.  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.  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.