Talk:Cheraman Perumal/Quotes

• I am having a look through Questia and, as I go, will post what I find.

Only at one period does it appear that Malabar was politically united. This was during the time of the Perumal dynasty. The Perumals were foreigners, brought in by the Brahmins, so the accounts maintain, to reign for a period of twelve years before returning to their homes. The Perumals ruled from A.D. 216 until A.D. 825, when Cheraman Perumal was converted to Islam and set sail for Mecca. This date marks the beginning of the Malayalam Era. Some authorities think that the Perumals reigned until a much later date, around A.D. 1350, and it is suggested in the Malabar Gazetteer that Cheraman Perumal's departure marked the end of only one territorial branch of the dynasty, which continued to rule elsewhere. The important fact about the Perumals' reign is that it was the Brahmins who are said to have had control over the choice and deposition of the Perumals, and thus had ultimate control over the political side of the society, though they took no active part in it. At the end of the Perumals' reign, whatever the date, Malabar was divided into many small kingdoms. Gradually the Zamorin of Calicut established his ascendancy amongst these small rajas. His power spread with the backing of the powerful and rich Arab traders, who had been responsible for Cheraman's departure, and who had founded a community of Muslims called Moplas, 11 partly Arab and partly Malayali converts and the progeny of the resulting intermarriages. The Moplas supported the Zamorin for commercial reasons, since Calicut was a large emporium, where trade was carried on under the best terms and with the greatest honesty. Foreign contacts thus existed before the rise of European power in India.

— Book Title: Land and Society in Malabar. Contributors: Adrian C. Mayer - author. Publisher: Geoffrey Cumberlege. Place of Publication: Bombay. Publication Year: 1952. Page Number: 17–18.

These four key elements are also found in the origin legend of Kerala's Muslim community, as recorded in the sixteenth-century Arabic historical work Tohfut-ul-Mujahideen, by the Kerala Muslim, Shaikh al-Malbari Zain al-Din. 7 Al-Din's narrative locates the origin of Kerala Islam in eighth-century Mecca, Arabia, when a trio of pious pilgrims set out for Adam's Peak in Sri Lanka, stopping in Cranganore en route. Contemporary local Muslims go one better: The Cheraman Juma Masjid, named for Cranganore's dynastic rulers, bears a sign proudly proclaiming it the oldest mosque in India, having been established in 621. This would date the mosque from the lifetime of the Prophet himself, thus connecting Kerala's community directly with Muslim sacred time, in accord with local legend.
Similarly, the Cochin Jews narrate an origin legend connecting them not only with sacred space—Jerusalem—but also with sacred time—the era of the Second Temple. 8 Their claim is that they came to Cranganore in the year 70, fleeing the Roman occupation of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple. 9 Their claim is graphically asserted: In the Cochin Synagogue hang paintings depicting the Temple in flames and Jews setting sail for India. 10
All three legends go a step further in narrating a most hospitable welcome from the Cheraman dynastic maharajah of Cranganore. 11 Several popular Malayalam-language wedding songs have the Indo—Bactrian king Gundaphorus sending for Thomas, a carpenter, to build him a temple as grand as Solomon's. Local traditions claim Gundaphorus to have been a Cheraman maharajah. Like the Muslims and the Jews, the Christians' narrative continues with a royal welcome from "Cheraman Perumal" and the bestowal of a copper-plate—inscribed land grant, bestowing upon them sovereignty at Mahadevapattanam, "the city of the great god," in Cranganore, and rights to the seventy-two traditional privileges of royalty. 12
The welcome claimed by the Muslims is even more grand. According to their traditions, the king secretly accompanied the three pilgrims back to Mecca, where he converted to Islam. 13 Interestingly, this apostasy is corroborated in local Hindu legends: the quasi-historical Malayalam text the Keralolpatti, 14 records the conversion to Islam of the last Cheraman Perumal king, who left for Mecca and thereafter became known as "makkattupoya perumal," the emperor who went to Mecca. 15 As ritual recompense for this familial apostasy, the maharajahs of Travancore used to recite, on receiving their sword of office at their coronation: "I will keep this sword until the uncle who has gone to Mecca returns." 16 In this tradition of royal welcome and patronage, there is a stone inscription at the Muccanti Masjid of Calicut according to which a thirteenth-century Zamorin granted an income for the maintenance of the mosque. 17

Footnotes:
7. Lt. M.J. Rowlandson, trans., Tohfut-ul-mujahideen, an Historical Work in the Arabic Language, by Zain al-Din ( London: Oriental Translation Fund, 1833).
8. We are using the terms "sacred space" and "sacred time" as first suggested by Mircea Eliade in The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion ( New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1959).
9. At different times, the Cochin Jews narrated alternative origin legends. For example, a couple of centuries back when Europe was in search of lost tribes, they claimed to be a lost tribe. Some of their Malayalam-language folk songs indicate a Persian origin, and at times Yemen was proclaimed their ancestral home. Today's version claims a dual ancestry from Jerusalem and Cranganore; the reasons for these narrative shifts are explored in Nathan Katz and Ellen S. Goldberg, The Last Jews of Cochin: Jewish Identity in Hindu India ( Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1993).
10. This analysis of the Cochin Jews' origin legends follows upon the work of Barbara C. Johnson, " The Emperor's Welcome: Reconsiderations of an Origin Theme in Cochin Jewish Folklore," in The Jews of India, ed. Thomas A. Timberg ( New Delhi: Vikas, 1986), pp. 161-76.
11. The meaning of Cranganore for the Cochin Jews is explored in Barbara C. Johnson, " Shingli or Cranganore in the Traditions of the Cochin Jews of India, with an Appendix on the Cochin Jewish Chronicles" (M.A. thesis, Smith College, 1975).
12. See Johnson, " Cochin Jews and Kaifeng Jews," p. 3. See also chapter I.C.2 in this volume.
13. Similarly, Knani Christians narrate how the " Cheraman Perumal" king who welcomed the Christian missionary who founded their community, Thomas of Cana in A.D. 345 , converted to Christianity and made pilgrimage to the tomb of St. Thomas the Apostle in Mylapore, Madras. There he died and was buried alongside the apostle. "It seems that Chereman Perumal is a good empty name to fill with whatever events satisfy the audience of the faithful. He legitimates one or another foreign religion in India by welcoming its proselytes and himself becoming a convert in the end." Richard Michael Swiderski, Blood Weddings: The Knanaya Christians of Kerala ( Madras: New Era Publishers, 1988), p. 64.
14. William Logan, Malabar ( Trivandrum: Charithram Publications, 1981), vol. 1, p. 265.
15. M.G.S. Narayanan, Cultural Symbiosis in Kerala ( Trivandrum: Kerala Historical Society, 1972), p. ix.
16. Logan, Malabar, p. 269.
17. Narayanan, Cultural Symbiosis in Kerala, pp. 38-42.

— Book Title: The Jews of China. Volume: 1. Contributors: Jonathan Goldstein - editor. Publisher: M. E. Sharpe. Place of Publication: Armonk, NY. Publication Year: 1999. Page Number: 123–124.

However, an early consequence of the socio-political dominance of the Brahmins was that they provided a foundation for the second Chera dynasty to rule Kerala. The old capital of Vanchi had been sacked by the Pandyas and the apparatus of the kingdom had found refuge in the port of Muziri. Here a new capital was built, called Makotai or Mahodayapura, and its lord was the Chera high king, the Cheraman Perumal, or overlord of Kerala (Keraladhinatha), who presided over a realm divided into great districts (nadu), each ruled by a governor, who usually gained office by inheritance. The highest nobles, therefore, were the princely governors of the main hereditary fiefs, Kolathunad (in the far north-brought under Chera rule by conquest towards the end of the ninth century), Purakizhanad, Kurumpanad, Eranad, Valluvanad, Kizhamalanad, Vempalanad and, in the very south and created from forcibly seized territories of the ancient Vels and the Ay kings, Venad (it long remained a border territory, without the original Nambudiri settlements and looking as much to the Tamil lands of the Pandyas as to the north, although it soon gained immensely in wealth). The second ruling Chera dynasty was known as the Kulasekhara, and the first known lord of Makotai, Varman, was crowned in about 800. He is also known as Kulasekhara Alwar, a famous Vaishnavite saint. His successor, Rajasekhara Varman (820-44), was a Saivite saint, under whose reign the Malayalam or Kollam era (Kollavarsham) was introduced in 825. The council convened to determine this era was summoned to the site of a city founded that same year under the authority of the lord of Venad, Udaya Marthanda Varma. Kollam was soon to attract great wealth to Venad, notably under its Christian merchants. The successors to the overlordship and to Venad are both famous-the next Perumal was Sthanu Ravi Kulasekhara (844-85), and the next lord of Venad was Ayyan Adigal Thuruvatikal (the later deified Ayyan, the Muslim evangelist, Bavan, and another contemporary, the Christian priest and hero, Kadamattathu Kathanar, are still commemorated at a multi-faith shrine at Sabarimala). Chera power persisted through the devastating Chola wars that began towards the end of the 10th century. The legendary end of the Chera hegemony, and the basis for any legitimacy claimed in the future by the principalities of Kerala, is attributed to the last high king, Cheraman Perumal Nayana, who is reported to have divided his kingdom, converted to Islam and left India for Arabia. The author of what is known as the partition of Kerala is sometimes conflated with the great, early Kulasekhara monarchs, Rajasekhara Varman or Sthanu Ravi, but the historical 'last emperor' is Rama Varma Kulasekhara, who ascended the throne in 1089. The exigencies of the Chola wars had by now brought about the rise of the warrior Nairs (and their chaver suicide squads) and the matrilineal system of inheritance, symptoms of social and economic stress in the country. Rama Varma faced the enmity of the Chola king, Kulothunga I, who sacked Makotai and captured Kollam in 1096. With the help of the chavers, the Chera forces drove back the Chola and regained Kollam in 1102-the city thereafter became the last Kulasekhara capital (Ten Vanchi, the Vanchi of the South), giving Venad a claim to be the most important of the Chera successor principalities, although the later rajahs of Kochi also claimed pre-eminence. Claims of Kulasekhara descent and grants of land came to be a necessity with the disappearance of Rama Varma in 1124. In the succeeding centuries three of some 30 local principalities were to rise to prominence: Venad (Travancore), Kochi and Kozhikode.

— Book Title: The Territories and States of India. Contributors: David Taylor - author. Publisher: Europa. Place of Publication: London. Publication Year: 2002. Page Number: 145.

Local tradition and archaeological and anthropological evidence sometimes seem to conflict, but both are useful in looking at the early history of Lakshadweep. Certainly the islands receive their first written historical mention in records from the first century AD, after storms enabled a Greek sailor to find a direct route from the Arabian coast to southern India-he mentions the islands as a source for tortoiseshell. By the time of Chola claims to have subjected numerous islands (presumed to be the Maldives and at least part of Lakshadweep) early in the 11th century, the islands had probably become Muslim and were already under the influence of the nearby kingdoms of Kerala. Buddhist remains in Minicoy confirm links with the Maldives (Buddhist until the 12th century), while the people of the Laccadives bear many similarities to the Moplahs (Keralan Muslims). Early Muslim remains on the islands would seem to indicate some substance to the local legend purporting an early conversion to Islam, although some claim that this only happened around the 13th or 14th centuries. Other legends attribute settlement to the time of the last Chera high king, Cheraman Perumal Nayana (early 12th century), who abdicated his throne and set out for the Muslim holy city of Mecca (now in Saudi Arabia). Searchers for him were wrecked on Bangaram, thence making their way to Agatti, and they saw other islands on their way back to the mainland. Soldiers and sailors from the mainland were sent to settle the islands-initially, Androth, Kalpeni and Kavaratti, while another group settled on Amini. These people, in turn, later settled Agatti, Chetlat, Kadmat and Kiltan. They were Hindus and the modern society of Lakshadweep still consists of three castes, but it seems likely that their arrival in the islands predates the time of the great Keralan king. Certainly, in the tale of the Muslim saint and evangelizer, Hazrat Ubaidullah, there was an existing population, and that was in the seventh century (41 AH). Ubaidullah was also shipwrecked, on Amini, but then proceeded to preach the revelation of his Prophet, marrying a local girl and, despite at first being driven from Amini, going on to convert Androth and then the rest of the islands.

— Book Title: The Territories and States of India. Contributors: David Taylor - author. Publisher: Europa. Place of Publication: London. Publication Year: 2002. Page Number: 293–294.

Jayen466 22:32, 3 September 2008 (UTC)

According to native tradition the last Hindu sovereign 1 of Chera, on his conversion to Islam in the ninth century A.D., had divided out his dominions and piously sailed for Medina. The main part of his territories went to form the Hindu kingdom of Vijayanagar in the interior of the peninsula. Out of the residue, Musalman adventurers from the north carved for themselves inland States, which had coalesced under the Bahmani dynasty in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries A.D. The coast-strip of Malabar, excluded from these larger kingdoms by the mountain-wall of the Gháts, was left to be scuffled for by seaportrajas, of whom the Zamorin of Calicut became the chief.
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1 Cheramán Perumál, literally the Great Man of the Chera Folk, said to have been buried at Safhár on the Arabian coast 831-832 A.D. Logan Malabar, i. 195-196 ( 3 vols. Madras 1887-1891). Rowlandson's Tahafat-ul-Mujahidin p. 55.

— Book Title: A History of British India. Volume: 1. Contributors: William Wilson Hunter - author. Publisher: Longmans Green. Place of Publication: London. Publication Year: 1899. Page Number: 94.

Jayen466 22:47, 3 September 2008 (UTC)

About a century after Sambandar came Sundaramūrtti of Nāvalūr. A child of poor Brahmin parents, he caught, by his physical charm, the attention of the local chieftain Narasinga Munaiyadaraiyan who, with the consent of the parents, interested himself in the child's education and bringing up. When Sundaramūrtti was about to marry a girl of his own caste, the marriage was stopped by the mysterious intervention of Śiva who claimed him as his slave. A little later, Sundaramūrtti fell in love with two young women, one a Śūdra girl of Tiruvor + ̈r + ̈iyūr (near Madras) and the other a dancing girl of Tiruvālūr (Tanjore District). Their jealousies, it is said, could only be resolved by Śiva himself acting as a messenger to one of them. Like the other Nāyanārs, Sundaramūrtti is also credited with many miracles and the contemporary Cēra ruler, Cēramān Perumāḷ, was his friend. They exchanged mutual visits regularly and made their last journey to the abode of Śiva in Mount Kailāsa together, Sundara on a white elephant and Cēramān Parumāḷ on a horse. [...] A doubtful legend relates the conversion to Islam of the last of the Perumāḷ rulers of Kerala, Cēramān Perumāḷ. He is said to have made the pilgrimage (Haj) to Mecca ( A.D. 825) and to have directed from there the rulers of his homeland to receive Muslims hospitably and to build mosques for them. But another and perhaps more likely tradition makes him, as we have seen, the friend of Nāyanār Sundaramūrti with whom he journeyed to Kailāsa, the Himalayan abode of Śiva. In fact Cēramān Perumāḷ seems to have been one of those truly spiritual men whom every religion proudly claims as its own -- Jainism, Christianity, Śaivism and Islam in this instance.

— Book Title: Development of Religion in South India. Contributors: K. A. Nilakanta Sastri - author. Publisher: Orient Longmans. Place of Publication: Bombay. Publication Year: 1963. Page Number: 43, 70

Jayen466 23:03, 3 September 2008 (UTC)

Cuntarar, the third of the itinerant hymn singers was not a contemporary of Appar and Campantar, but lived a century later and saw his vocation somewhat differently. Like Campantar, he was a brāhmaṇa, but he delighted in making a mockery of his human problems, which included two out-of-caste marriages to a low-caste temple dancer and to a Vēḷāḷa woman. He makes much of the fact that he was continually struggling with poverty, but he was at the same time a friend and supporter of kings and emperors. The chief sovereign of the day was the Pallava emperor, and he says in his hymn at Citamparam that those who fail to pay tribute to that sovereign will be punished by Śivaṉ. The story of his life that is best known, however, is his friendship with the prince of the Cēras known as Cēramān Perumāḷ with whom he is supposed to have carried on a close relationship.

— Book Title: The Home of Dancing Sivan: The Traditions of the Hindu Temple in Citamparam. Contributors: Paul Younger - author. Publisher: Oxford University Press. Place of Publication: New York. Publication Year: 1995. Page Number: 211.