MALEALAM or Malayalam, also called Kerala, a region,• in the extreme S.W. portion of the Peninsula of India, extending from the Chandra, girl _ Aver, in lat. 12° 29' N., to Cape Comorin, in lat. 8° 4' 20" N. It is fabled in Hindu legend to have .boen reclaimed from the ocean by the now deified warrior Parasu Rama, and within historic times it has had many dynastic changes. The Zamorin of Calicut, the Bibi of Cannanore, the raja of Travancore, the Portuguese, -Dutch, French, and the Muhammadan Sultan Tipu, have held sway there, but the present paramount power is the British, and it is now partitioned into the British districts of South Canara and Malabar, the States of Cochin, Travancore, and the Bibi of Cannanore. The region is a series of hills and valleys, which explains the name Malealmn, meaning literally hill and dale,—Malai, a mountain, Alam, a dale. Kerala, its other name, is of doubtful origin, one derivation being from Keram, a cocoanut, another being from a wise ruler of that name.
The prominent race are the Maleala Sudra or Nair. Of them, the 1881 census returned 664,260, and the people speaking the Maleala language at 4,847,681.
Malealam, Malearma, Malayarma, or. Malay alam is the vernacular, but Tamil is spoken by 16.8 per cent. of the population, these two tongues being used by 99.2 per cent. of the inhabitants, Tamil chiefly south of Trevandrum, and- Malealam to the north ; but all along the Southern portion of the west coast, a large part of the population is of foreign blood. There are settled here numerous smaller tribes or castes of Indian races, of Aryan and non-Aryan and Semitic descent, speaking Canarese, Gujerati, Hindustani, Konkani, Mahrati, Nagari, Tamil, Telugu, and Tulu, with foreign races speaking Arabic, Hebrew, English, French, Portuguese. Malayarma is spoken along .the Malabar coast on the western side of the ghats or Malealam range of mountains from the vicinity of Mangalore, where it supersedes the and the Tulu, to Trevandrum,. where it begins to be superseded by the Tamil. Malealam
was separated from the Tamil before the latter Was cultivated and refined, and, from Brahmanical influence, has since had an infusion of Sanskrit words more than in any other Dravidian language, the fewest of such being in the Tamil. In all the southern languages, save the Malealam,.the pro noun is postfixed in a contracted form to the verb. Some of the postfixes are also made honorific by slight euphonic changes.
In this tract the Nair race occupy large hold ings ; the maharaja of Travancore is a Nair, and there are many of the Moplah or MappilaMdiam madans. The Mappila in N. Malabar, known also as the Chulia, write Malealam with Arabic character, but with additional vowel, marks for e, o, and i, and some of the consonants have addi tional dots. In S. Malabar they use the old Tamil h.firacter called vattezhuttu.
Moplah, also possibly derived.from- the Tamil words Ma, mother, Pilla, 4. son, are all Muhammadans, and are descendants 0, Arabs who visited or, settled in Malabar ; and Wilson supposes that the Malabar women, who bore children to them, from such casual or per manent intercourse, ignorant as to who of the race of foreigners were the fathers, styled the children sons of mothers ; but the probability is that law of descensus ab utero, marumakka tayam, followed by the mothers, was prevailing from pri,or ages. The Moplah are active, enter prising, and possess much landed property. Their origin is explained by the fact that till lately Tyatti, or women of the Tiyar race, did not lose paste by forming connections with rich and respect able foreigners, though, since two or three have risen in the Government service to position (one was a deputy collector) they have put a stop' to this practice. The Mappila race have several times risen in insurrection, seemingly from agrarian grievances. Hindu landlords kept the land in their own hands or leased it out to the Mappila at high rents, and then took advantage of legal rights to turn them out.