Later Cheras

Mahodayapuram

The Kulaśekhara dynasty unified the Malabar coast from a capital at Mahodayapuram, modern Kodungallur, near the site of the ancient port of Muciri. They claimed the Chera name of the Sangam age, though continuity across the intervening five centuries is a matter of assertion rather than record.

The kingdom's wealth came from the pepper trade, and its ports served merchants from the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea and China. Kerala's social order in this period — its temple-centred landholding, its distinctive caste arrangements and matrilineal succession among some communities — took the shape it would keep into the modern era.

The charters

Two documents from this dynasty are of exceptional importance. The Jewish copper plates, granted to Joseph Rabban, confer on him and his community a set of hereditary privileges and honours in the port of Muyirikkode; they are the founding document of the Cochin Jewish community and are still preserved. The Tarisappalli plates, granted to a Christian church at Kollam in 849 CE, likewise confer rights on the Syrian Christian community and carry signatures in Kufic Arabic, Pahlavi and Hebrew.

These are among the earliest evidence anywhere for organised Jewish and Christian communities in India, and they show a Hindu kingdom granting them corporate standing as a matter of ordinary commercial policy.

End

The Cholas invaded Kerala repeatedly from the tenth century, and the long war exhausted the kingdom. The last Kulaśekhara, Rāma Varma Kulaśekhara, moved south to Kollam, and the unified Kerala kingdom dissolved around 1124 into the chiefdoms — Venad, Kolathunāṭu, Kozhikode, Cochin — that the Portuguese would find four centuries later.

Kerala tradition explains the dissolution through the legend of Cheraman Perumal, the last king who is said to have divided his realm among his chiefs and departed — in some versions to Mecca as a convert to Islam, in others to a Vaiṣṇava pilgrimage. The story is late and has more than one confessional version.