ABSTRACT
The lines of renowned Malayalam poet Vallathol Narayana Menon reproduced here represent an attempt to imagine Keralam territorially. It is not difficult to identify more such texts that endeavoured to do the same at different stages of the history of the region. The Keralolpathy legend perhaps is the best known among them, according to which the land known as Keralam was recovered from the seas by Lord Parasurama by throwing his axe from Gokarnam (belonging to the state of Karnataka now) to Kanyakumari (in Tamil Nadu at present). The geographical boundaries of the present Kerala State were defined in 1956, when states in India were reorganised, and united Keralam formed. The political boundaries of the state do not correspond well with the imagined Keralams or with the distribution of Malayalam-speaking people. The main disjuncture is Kanyakumari district of Tamil Nadu, which was part of the erstwhile Travancore, with a sizeable number of Malayalam-speaking people. It is doubtful whether political borders ever matched the imagined territory of Keralam. Yet the idea of Keralam is quite old, at least as old as the Mahabali fable. Obviously, the idea of Keralam always had an element that went beyond political boundaries.
