In the midst of all this greenery, there is one plant that can barely be seen. Yet it has threaded its way through Keralas' history, linking the old world with the colonial age and earning foreign exchange to this day: the pepper vine. The small, green berry, invaluable in the preservation of meats in the days before refrigeration, has attracted successive waves of visitors. To the ancient world, it made Kerala known as the Spice Coast. When the Queen of Sheba made her celebrated entry into Jerusalem, she carried in her train 'spices, gold, precious stones and the wood of the almug tree (sandalwood) from Ophir'. Scholars believe that Ophir is the town of Puhar that existed close to where Thiruvananthapuram is today. The 'ivory, apes and peacocks' of Masefield’s poem were also exported to furnish the palace of Solomon (970-951BC). In the seventh and sixth centuries BC the Babylonian empire was at its zenith; remnants from the temples and palaces of Nebuchadnezzar include hardwoods that must have come from the tropical forests of Kerala.

Later, the Arabs acquired control of the trade routes and maintained the pepper monopoly almost up to the 16th century. After Alexander's triumphant sweep across Asia Minor and arrival on the northern threshold of the Indian subcontinent, the Greeks provided a certain amount of competition. The trade was conducted between the famous port of Alexandria and Musiris in Kerala, with the city of Vanchi nearby. It is hard to believe that the sleepy little town of Kodungallur, or Cranganore as it is known today, was once the fabled Musiris, attracting cargoes of the ancient world, and people of different faiths. The Jews, the early Christians, and the Moslems, built their first synagogues, churches or mosques in India at this spot. In the first century AD there was even a temple to Augustus built here by the Romans. The Romans were sybarites who shared 'the passion of the Greeks' (for pepper) and we find Pliny the Elder complaining in the first century that the Roman nobility of his time had depleted the Treasury with their greed for pepper.

Pepper also formed part of the export trade with China. Gradually the ports of Kerala became a link between the Middle East and the Mediterranean and China. Pearls, gems and fine Indian cottons were traded for corals from the Mediterranean. From China came silks, jade, sugar and fireworks. At Cochin, Alwaye and Quilon, major ports in their time, the most picturesque remnants of the Chinese influence are in the giant fishing nets that hover on the horizon like dragonflies. At Calicut the Chinese even built a fort that is remembered as Chinnakotah. The round wok-like vessel that is used for cooking the Kerala specialty, appam, is called a Chinna-chutty. The use of the flat copper tiles on the roofs of some temples, the solid jars that were used for ballast in sea-going vessels and even the shallow sampan-like boat, are other signs of Chinese influence.

In 1498, Vasco da Gama made his historic landing on the Malabar coast, thereby slicing open the sea routes to the fabulous Orient. Throughout the next century the leading maritime nations of the period—the Portuguese, the Dutch, the Danes, the French and the English—planted one flag after the other to establish their rights. It was a Dutch hike in the price of pepper by a mere five shillings that led to the founding of the East India Company in December 1599, by a group of English merchants. The Age of Empire was thus inaugurated on a grain of pepper!
 

Vasco da Gama was received by the Zamorin of Calicut with courtesy but little enthusiasm. At that time the Zamorin was heavily dependent on his naval arm, controlled by the sailors of Arab descent known as the Kunjali Maraicars. Their main interest was to protect the pepper trade, and they would not allow the Zamorin to concede de Gama’s demands to set up a factory or trading post at Calicut.

The following year, the Portugues sent a far stronger fleet under the command of Pedro Alverez De Cabral, who attacked an Arab ship while it was in harbour, loading pepper. The Kunjali Maraicars retaliated by burning down the Portuguese factory, and 50 Portuguese were killed in the skirmish. The next few years were spent in endless reprisals and savagery on both sides. Cabral found willing allies both north, where the Kolathiri of Cannanore (as the Raja was called) had scores to settle with the Zamorin and south, where the weak Raja of Cochin, was flattered into giving him land at Fort Cochin, and the pepper monopoly. The Portuguese also managed to find a secure stronghold in Goa. As long as the Zamorin relied on the support of the brave Maraicars he was secure, but by the time the forth Kunjali Maraicar commandant appeared on the scene, the Portuguese had driven a wedge between him and his former ruler, who sided with them in hunting him down. In an unforgivable gesture, still remembered in the lilting songs that the boatmen sing, the Zamorin allowed the captured commandant to be taken by the Portuguese to Goa, where his head was struck off and dried before being sent to Cannanore for all his followers to see.

The Portuguese passage through Kerala was a stormy one. They did everything to annoy the native Keralites, from stirring the local community of Christians to revolt to creating a famine by concentrating on cash crops and stopping rice shipments to Calicut, as part of an early attempt at an economic blockade.

By contrast, the Dutch who replaced them in the middle of the 17th Century were actually invited to Kerala by a representative of the Cochin prince, after they had succeeded in ousting the Portuguese from Ceylon. The Dutch remained in the area for more than 130 years, but they made it clear that their interest was only in trade and that they had no desire to involve themselves in intrigues with the native princes. Little remains of their presence; the so-called Dutch Palace at Fort Cochin (now known as the Mattancheri Palace) was actually built by the Portuguese for the Cochin Raja. The Dutch left a wonderful compilation of all the rare plants and trees of the Kerala coast, the Hortus Malabaricum. It was a collaborative effort, made possible by the co-operation of the local Keralite scholars, the Dutch and the Portuguese and rendered exceptional by the engraving in copper-plate - 800 of them - by Father Matthaeus, a Carmelite priest, who captured the strangeness and beauty of the plant life of Malabar.

The British East India Company had maintained a low profile on the Kerala coast with a small base in Fort Anjengo, near Trivandrum. In 1723 they signed a treaty that was to have far-reaching consequences with Marthanda Varma, the dominant force in Kerala through the first half of the 18th century, aiming to oust the Dutch. A footnote of history is the presence of a Dutch soldier of war, Eustache de Lannoy, in the army of Marthanda Varma. He is remembered with affection as Valia Kappithan, Great Commander. He trained the Travancore army and built a line of fortifications known as Travancore Lines. British influence was for some decades eclipsed by Hyder Ali, who with his son Tipu Sultan, known as the Tiger of Mysore swept down several times into Kerala. Tipu Sultan saw Kerala both as a potential source of wealth (one of the first things he did was to make pepper a state monopoly) and as an area of darkness in need of reform by conversation to the tenets of Islam. Large numbers of the population of North Malabar who embraced the new faith are to this day known as Moplahs (Moslems of Kerala origin). But Tipu Sultan’s luck eventually ran out and in a series of humiliating defeats, the areas conquered by him in Kerala passed into British hands, even before his final rout and death at Srirangapatnam in 1799. Tipu Sultan had broken the back of the feudal system in Kerala, so it was not difficult for the British to pension off the local rulers, keeping most of North Kerala, Fort Anjengo and Fort Cochin in their control.

If geography placed Kerala on the trade map of the world, religion shaped her mind and heart. The myths speak of the Nagas, or snake people, who came from the north. The Mahabharata tells of Krishna and Arjuna burning down the Khandava forest causing the snakes, who could not stand the terrible heat, to fleet to Kerala. A portion of every large estate maintains a sarpa-kavu or ‘snake house’. Women are generally guardians of such places and where there is a temple, the priestess is regarded as the bride of the snake king or Nagaraja of the shrine. A traditional piece of jewellery worn by the women of Kerala is made up of small snake hoods of emeralds and rubies set in gold.

History tells us that the earliest inhabitants were animists. Some aboriginal tribes who could be the descendants of these early people, still live deep in the jungles and mountain retreats, living off the produce of the forest- collecting honey, snaring birds, making baskets - and doing some subsistence farming.

The Dravidian people who came next, brought with them a vigorous culture that stamped itself upon the entire southern part of the country. It is believed that they are the descedants of the same dark-skinned people of Mediterranean origin who occupied the Indo-Gangetic plain some time around 2,500 BC. 1,000 years later, the Indo-Aryans, with their military superiority and the confident light of their knowledges as embodied in a set of hymns known as the Vedas, drove the Dravidians out eastwards and southwards. The encounter between these two systems, the Dravidian and the Aryan, has historically given Indian culture its peculiar vitality, setting up a dynamic tension as each force continued the process of assimilating and repelling the other.
    The South became the arena for three powerful kingdoms, those of the Cheras, the Cholas and  the Pandyas. Of these the Cheras occupied the territory known as Kerala (its name in fact derives from Cheralam - land of the Cheras) for almost ten centuries, starting from around the second century BC. In the third century BC., the representatives of both the Jain and Buddhist religions were vigorous in Kerala, even though their presence survives only in the faintest of echoes. The Cheras suffered a setback in the seventh and eighth centuries but managed to establish a second empire from AD 825 to 1019, which was also known as the Kulashekhara empire. It is regarded as an age of prosperity and stability. The famous Advaita philosopher, Adi Shankara (788-820) was the first of the very many religious teachers that Kerala has produced.

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