North Malabar
The Kolathiri rajas, descendants of the Mūṣika line of Ezhimala, held the coast north of Kozhikode. Like the other Kerala houses they were repeatedly at odds with their neighbours, and the Zamorin of Calicut was the principal rival.
Their territory contained Kannur, one of the best harbours on the coast, and the Portuguese, Dutch and English all established factories there in turn.
The Ali Rajas
The Arakkal house of Kannur — whose head bore the title Ali Raja — was the only Muslim ruling dynasty in Kerala, a matrilineal family that governed Kannur town and the Laccadive islands under Kolathiri suzerainty and later independently. Its matrilineal succession, in which a woman could hold the headship as Arakkal Beevi, is unusual among Indian Muslim dynasties and reflects Kerala's own social order rather than any imported form.
Kolathunāḍu was overrun by Hyder Ali and Tipu Sultan in the eighteenth century, and passed with the rest of Malabar to the British after 1792. The house continued as a landholding family until Indian independence.
Further reading
- Wink, Andre. Al-Hind: The Making of the Indo-Islamic World. Brill, 1990
- Kulke, Hermann. A History of India. Routledge, 2004
- Asher, Catherine B. India Before Europe. Cambridge University Press, 2006
- Hawley, John Stratton. A Storm of Songs: India and the Idea of the Bhakti Movement. Harvard University Press, 2015
- Jackson, Peter. The Delhi Sultanate: A Political and Military History. Cambridge University Press, 1999
See also
This entry was last revised on 1 August 2026.