BharatSangraha

Malabar · Western Coastal Strip

The small things

  • The river that divides the regionThe Korapuzha is a short, unremarkable river north of Kozhikode, and it is the most consequential line in Malabar. North of it the deity walks as Theyyam at a kavu, descent ran through the mother in most communities, and the Kolathiri ruled; south of it the same ritual family is called Thirayattam, the Zamorin's country begins, and the social history is different. Nobody living there needs the river pointed out.
  • What the mirror doesThe Theyyam performer is painted for hours and dressed while the thottam pattu narrates the deity's life. At a fixed point a mirror is held up to him. From the moment he looks into it he is no longer addressed by his name, and he stays the deity — hearing petitions, arbitrating family and land disputes, and delivering an utterance treated as binding — until the costume comes off. The men who do this belong to communities that the households commissioning the festival rank below them, which is the whole social fact of the institution.
  • Kaima, not basmatiThalassery biryani uses jeerakasala or kaima, a short, round, intensely aromatic rice, and cooks the meat and the rice separately before layering and sealing them with coals on the lid. A long-grain biryani made in the northern method is a different dish; the local view is that basmati is a substitution, not an upgrade.
  • A newspaper before a dictionaryHermann Gundert, working for the Basel Mission at Illikkunnu near Thalassery, published Rajyasamacharam — the first newspaper in Malayalam — in 1847, and his Malayalam–English dictionary in 1872. The same mission, in the same decades, gave Kannada its first substantial dictionary from Mangaluru. Two languages received modern lexicography from one organisation on one coast.
  • A city of literatureKozhikode was designated a UNESCO City of Literature in 2023, the first in India. The designation followed a network of libraries and reading rooms across Malabar that had been running for generations, in a region where a village of a few thousand people commonly has a lending library with a paid membership.
  • Teak with an addressThe Nilambur teak plantation was begun in 1844 because wild teak on this coast was being felled for shipbuilding faster than it regenerated. It is the oldest teak plantation in the world; a branch railway from Shoranur was later laid specifically to move the timber; and Nilambur teak became, in 2017–18, the first forest produce in India to be given a geographical indication.
  • A ship built without a drawingAn uru at Beypore is built shell-first — the planking is laid and shaped before any internal frame — by a maistry working from proportions held in memory rather than from plans, and it is launched not by a crane but by khalasis using wooden levers, coir rope and a large number of men pulling together. Gulf buyers have commissioned these hulls for centuries and still do.
  • Wayanad drains the wrong wayWayanad sits behind the crest of the Ghats, so its rain does not run into the Arabian Sea forty kilometres away. The Kabani carries it east into the Cauvery and out into the Bay of Bengal. That single fact explains the plateau's ecology, its forest continuity with Karnataka and Tamil Nadu, and why its agriculture looks like the Deccan's more than like the coast's.
  • Rice with a geographical indication, and a field flooded with seawaterWayanad's Jeerakasala and Gandhakasala scented rices were both given geographical indications in 2010–11. So, in 2013–14, was Kaipad rice — grown in the tidal fields of the north, where brackish water is let in and out with the tide, rice is grown in the monsoon when the salinity drops, and prawn are farmed in the same field for the rest of the year. No fertiliser is added, because the tide brings it.
  • Malayalam in Arabic lettersArabi-Malayalam writes Malayalam in the Arabic script with extra letters invented for sounds Arabic does not have. It carried a full literature — devotional, narrative, romantic and polemical — for centuries, and reading it was common in households where reading the Malayalam script was not, particularly among women. The Muhyiddin Mala of 1607 is the earliest surviving work in it.
  • Nine square kilometres of another territoryMahe is part of Puducherry, entirely surrounded by Kannur district, and was under French administration from 1725 until 1954. It keeps Puducherry's excise regime and its own administration, and the roadside as you enter changes accordingly. A separate colonial history left a separate legal one.
  • Why Bekal is not in this fileBekal fort and the Kasaragod coast sit in Kerala, but they were part of the South Canara district until the 1956 reorganisation, the fort was built by the Keladi Nayakas of the Kannada country, and the district's speech, its shrines and its kitchen read as Tulu and Kannada. This taxonomy therefore places Kasaragod in Tulu Nadu — an example of an administrative boundary and a cultural one pointing in opposite directions.

Small local details of Malabar — customs, quirks and things that are not in any guidebook. (12)