Kochi & Central Kerala · Western Coastal Strip
This is the stretch of the coast with the deepest written record and the shortest political continuity. Its ancient period is the one everyone else's sources describe - Muziris at the Periyar mouth is named in Greek and Roman writing, and the region's oldest resident communities hold copper plates rather than legends. Its medieval period runs from the Chera Perumal capital at Mahodayapuram, the modern Kodungallur, to the flood traditionally dated to 1341 which silted that harbour and opened the gap at Kochi; the port moved twenty-five kilometres south and the political centre of the coast moved with it. The modern period begins in 1500, with the Portuguese, a quarter of a millennium before the national date, because from that year the ruling house of Kochi governed inside somebody else's naval system - Portuguese to 1663, Dutch to 1795, British thereafter. Cochin was a princely state throughout, so the twentieth-century argument here was not with a collector but with a durbar.
Periodisation is regional, not national — the medieval period does not begin in the same century here as it does elsewhere in India.
The Periyar mouth held the busiest port on the western coast. Roman and Greek writers name it, Roman coin hoards turn up in its hinterland, and excavation at Pattanam near Kodungallur has produced amphora sherds, glass and beads consistent with a mart trading westward across the Arabian Sea. What arrived with the trade stayed: Jewish and Christian communities on this coast are old enough that their earliest documents are royal grants engraved on copper rather than accounts of arrival, and the traditions of arrival that circulate alongside those grants are traditions.
| When | What happened |
|---|---|
| 1st century CE | The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea and Pliny describe Muziris, at or near the Periyar mouth, as the principal pepper mart of the coast, reached on the southwest monsoon. |
| 1st-5th century CE | Roman coin hoards and, at Pattanam near Kodungallur, amphora and glass finds attest sustained westward trade. The tradition that the apostle Thomas landed at Maliankara in 52 CE is a tradition of the Syrian Christian community, not a documented event. |
| c. 800 CE onward | The Chera Perumals govern the coast from Mahodayapuram, the modern Kodungallur, at the Periyar mouth. |
| c. 849 CE | The Tarisapalli copper plates, issued in the Perumal period, record a grant to a church with witnesses signing in Kufic, Pahlavi and Hebrew - direct evidence of the resident trading communities of the coast. |
The Perumal kingdom ended in the early twelfth century and its successor here was the Perumpadappu Swaroopam, the house later known as the Rajas of Cochin, which moved its seat repeatedly as the coastline itself moved. The decisive event was hydrological rather than military: floods on the Periyar, traditionally dated to 1341, choked the Kodungallur channel and opened a new mouth at Kochi deep enough for large ships. The house followed the water south, and a fishing settlement on a sandbar became the port that every European power on the coast would afterwards fight over.
| When | What happened |
|---|---|
| c. 1000 CE | The copper plates of Bhaskara Ravi Varman grant hereditary privileges to Joseph Rabban at Muyirikkode, the charter document of the Jewish community of this coast. |
| c. 1018-1120 | Chola campaigns and the long Chera-Chola conflict exhaust the Perumal state. |
| c. 1124 | The Perumal kingdom ends; the Perumpadappu Swaroopam emerges as the ruling house of the central coast. |
| 1341 | Floods on the Periyar, traditionally dated to this year, silt the Kodungallur harbour and open the Kochi gap; shipping and the pepper trade move south. |
| early 15th century | The Perumpadappu seat is established at Kochi; the house is thereafter pressed between the Zamorin to the north and, shortly, the Portuguese at sea. |
Cochin's rulers survived four centuries by hosting whoever held the sea. The Portuguese built their first Indian fort here in 1503 in exchange for backing the raja against the Zamorin; the Dutch took the town in 1663 and the alliance simply transferred; the British inherited it by treaty in 1814. The cost was sovereignty, and the compensation was that Cochin was never fought over as territory and never annexed. Inside that shelter the state did two things unusually early - it spent on schooling and public works from the nineteenth century, and it rebuilt its own harbour in the 1920s and 1930s, dredging a channel and raising an island out of the spoil. Its politics, when they came, were about representation in a state assembly rather than about expelling a government.
| When | What happened |
|---|---|
| December 1500 | Pedro Alvares Cabral reaches Kochi and a Portuguese factory is agreed with the ruling house, then at war with the Zamorin. |
| 27 September 1503 | The foundations of a timber fort are laid at Kochi - the first European fort in India - and the Portuguese garrison becomes the guarantee of the raja's independence from Kozhikode. |
| 1524 | Vasco da Gama dies at Kochi and is buried at St Francis Church; his remains are removed to Lisbon in 1539 and the empty tomb remains. |
| 7 January 1663 | The Dutch East India Company takes Kochi from the Portuguese. The town is reduced in size, the Bolgatty and Mattancherry establishments follow, and the Cochin raja's alliance transfers intact. |
| 1789-1790 | Tipu Sultan's forces breach the Nedumkotta lines on the northern frontier of the Cochin and Travancore country; the campaign ends with the Third Anglo-Mysore War. |
| 1790-1805 | Rama Varma IX, known as Sakthan Thampuran, reigns: he moves the working seat to Thrissur, clears the ground around the Vadakkunnathan temple, settles Syrian Christian and Konkani traders in the town, and is credited with the Thrissur Pooram in the form it still takes. |
| 1814 | Under the Anglo-Dutch treaty the Dutch possessions on this coast pass to Britain; Cochin continues as a state under British protection with a Resident and a Dewan. |
| 1925 | A legislative council is constituted in Cochin, the state's first representative body. |
| 1920-1936 | Robert Bristow dredges the approach channel and the harbour, raising Willingdon Island out of the spoil; the port opens to ocean-going ships in 1936, restoring to this coast a deep-water harbour it had lacked since 1341. |
Rulers and commanders
A matrilineal house in which the title went to the senior eligible member. Its policy for four centuries was to hold the northern frontier against Kozhikode by allying with whoever controlled the sea, which cost it independence and preserved its existence.
Dynasty: Perumpadappu Swaroopam. Seat: Kodungallur, then Kochi, then Thrissur and Thripunithura
Received Cabral in 1500 and granted the Portuguese the ground on which the 1503 fort was built, converting a local dynastic quarrel with the Zamorin into a permanent European foothold on the coast.
Dynasty: Perumpadappu Swaroopam. Seat: Kochi
The office of chief minister was hereditary in a single family, which for two centuries conducted Cochin's dealings with the Portuguese and the Dutch. Paliath Komi Achan joined Velu Thampi's rising against the Company in 1808-09, after which the office lost its powers.
Dynasty: Paliam family of Chendamangalam. Seat: Chendamangalam
Governed the Dutch establishment and commissioned the Hortus Malabaricus, published at Amsterdam between 1678 and 1693 - twelve volumes on the plants of this coast, compiled with the Ezhava physician Itty Achudan and with Konkani and Malayali scholars, and printed with their names and their Malayalam script in it.
Seat: Kochi
Rebuilt Thrissur as the state's working capital, cleared and laid out the ground around the Vadakkunnathan temple, brought Syrian Christian and Konkani traders into the town, and reorganised the Pooram into the combined festival of the surrounding temples that it remains.
Dynasty: Perumpadappu Swaroopam. Seat: Thrissur
Presided over the expansion of state schooling and public works, and abdicated in 1914 - a voluntary abdication being rare enough among the states of the coast to be worth recording.
Dynasty: Perumpadappu Swaroopam. Seat: Thripunithura
Dredged a channel through the sandbar and used the spoil to build Willingdon Island, giving the coast its first deep-water port since the medieval harbour silted. The port opened in 1936.
Seat: Willingdon Island, Kochi
Led the movement for responsible government inside Cochin state from 1941 and was imprisoned for it; the constitutional reforms he pressed for were the state's principal political question in the 1940s.
Seat: Thrissur
The history of Kochi & Central Kerala from ancient through medieval to modern times, and the rulers, commanders and administrators who shaped it. (8)