Kingdom of Cochin

The Portuguese alliance

Cochin emerged from the Chera collapse as a principality overshadowed by its northern neighbour Calicut. When the Portuguese arrived and quarrelled with the Zamorin, Cochin took the opportunity: it granted them permission to build Fort Manuel in 1503, the first European fort in India, and in exchange gained protection and a share of the pepper trade.

The alliance was not a partnership of equals for long. Portuguese, then Dutch — who took Cochin in 1663 — and then British influence over the state's affairs increased steadily, and the raja's independence became formal rather than real.

Communities

Cochin's harbour town became one of the most plural places in India. The Paradesi synagogue in Mattancherry, built in 1568, served a Jewish community whose presence on the coast is documented from the Chera copper plates and whose traditions claim far greater antiquity. The Syrian Christian communities, tracing themselves to the apostle Thomas and organised under the Church of the East before the Portuguese attempted to Latinise them, were long established inland.

The Portuguese also brought the Latin rite and the Inquisition to Goa, and the pressures of the sixteenth century split the Syrian Christians into the traditions that still divide them.

Cochin was among the better administered princely states in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with early investment in schools and public works, and acceded to India in 1949, merging with Travancore to form Travancore-Cochin.