Introducation of Kerala

Kerala is a state on the southwestern tropical Malabar Coast of India. Kerala borders Tamil Nadu and Karnataka to the east and northeast; to the west and south lie the Indian Ocean islands of Lakshadweep and the Maldives, respectively. Kerala also envelops Mahe, a coastal exclave of the Union Territory of Pondicherry. With a population of around 3.18 crore (31.8 million) and 819 persons per km², Kerala is among India’s most densely populated regions. With a 73-year life expectancy and a 91% literacy rate, Kerala is also one of India’s healthiest and best-educated states.

Prehistoric Kerala’s rainforests and wetlands, then thick with malaria-bearing mosquitoes and man-eating tigers, were largely avoided by Neolithic humans; indeed, no evidence of habitation prior to around 1,000 BCE exists. Only then did tribes of megalith-building proto-Tamil speakers from northwestern India settle in Kerala.

Subsequent contact with the Mauryan Empire spurred development of new Keralite polities, including the Cheran kingdom and feudal Namboothiri Brahminical city-states. More than a millennium of overseas contact and trade culminated in four centuries of struggle between and among multiple colonial powers and native Keralite states, a period whose end saw on January 11, 1956 the final formation of the modern-day state of Kerala.

Accounts of the etymology underlying “Kerala” differ; according to the prevailing theory, it as an imperfect portmanteau that fuses kera (”coconut palm tree”) and alam (”land” or “location”). Natives of Kerala - “Keralites” - thus refer to their land as Keralam. Another theory has the name originating from the phrase chera alam (”land of the Chera”).

THE LAND of coconut and kathakali, is a strip of green canopied land on the southern part of peninsular India bordered by the Arabian Sea on the western side and mountainous peaks on the eastern side.

National geographic society publication has listed Kerala as one of the ‘50 greatest places of a life time’. The only other destination from India is TAJMAHAL.

Exceptionally different from the rest of India it has developed attributes, which are exceptionally unique and are compared to the most advanced nations in the west in the field of literacy (which is about 90 per cent).