Valluvanāḍ and Palakkad chieftaincies

The Māmāṅkam

The Māmāṅkam was a great assembly held every twelfth year on the sands of the Bhāratappuzha at Tirunavaya, at which the presiding chief exercised a form of ceremonial overlordship over Kerala. The right belonged to the ruler of Valluvanāḍ until the Zamorin of Calicut seized it by force in the medieval period.

Valluvanāḍ never accepted the loss. At each successive Māmāṅkam it sent cāvers — warriors sworn to die — who attempted to cut their way through the Zamorin's guards to reach him, and were killed. This continued for centuries, and the pit into which the bodies were thrown was pointed out to travellers. It is among the more extraordinary institutions in Indian political history: a ritualised, hereditary, hopeless assertion of a lapsed claim, repeated on schedule for hundreds of years.

Palakkad

The Palakkad chiefs held the gap in the Western Ghats through which the only easy road from the Tamil country into Kerala runs — a position of permanent strategic value. Pressed by the Zamorin, the Palakkad raja invited Hyder Ali of Mysore into Malabar in 1757, which opened the way for the Mysorean conquest of the whole coast.

Both territories passed to the British with Malabar in 1792, and the chieftaincies were reduced to landholdings.