On India's Malabar Coast, farmers grow rice below sea level
In Kuttanad, the lowest point in India, farmers plant rice on land that lies beneath the level of the sea, one of the few places on Earth where that happens. The area, nicknamed the Rice Bowl of Kerala, sits on the Malabar Coast, a narrow, rain-soaked strip squeezed between the Western Ghats and the Arabian Sea.
The coast runs about 845 kilometres from the southern tip of Goa to Kanyakumari, taking in coastal Karnataka and all of Kerala. It drops in three bands, from cool mountain highlands through rolling midlands to flat coastal plains laced with the brackish canals, lakes and rivers known as the Kerala Backwaters. Vembanad, India's longest lake, dominates them. When the southwest monsoon reaches the tip of India it splits in two, and its Arabian Sea branch slams into the Ghats first, so Kerala is the first state to get the rains.
Those mountains rank among the world's eight hottest biodiversity hotspots, and their forests are thought to be older than the Himalayas. Anamudi, at 2,695 metres, is the highest peak in India outside the Himalayas. Down at the coast, 95 per cent of the original lowland moist forest has disappeared. Marine fossils found near Changanassery suggest much of the lowland once lay under the sea.
The name probably fuses the Dravidian mala, mountain, with an Arabic or Persian word for country. A 6th-century Greek text by Cosmas Indicopleustes already mentions a pepper market called Male, and Al-Biruni is the first known writer to use the full word. Europeans stretched it loosely; one 18th-century Tamil-English dictionary was titled a dictionary of Malabar and English.
Sumerian records suggest spices were leaving this coast as early as 3000 BCE, which is why it is still called the Spice Garden of India. Ports such as Muziris and later Calicut and Cochin fed Indian Ocean trade for millennia, and the traffic brought some of India's earliest Jewish, Syrian Christian and Muslim communities. The region belonged to the Chera kingdom until the early 12th century, after which local rulers such as the Zamorins of Kozhikode declared independence.
Source: Malabar Coast
