Culture
Malayali cultural genesis can be traced to their membership (around the 3rd century CE) in a well defined historical region known as Tamilakam, encompassing the Chera, Chola, and Pandya kingdoms and southern coastal Karnataka. Later upon the arrival of other ethnic groups such as Namboothiris, the distinct culture took shape. This was later elaborated upon by centuries of contact with foreign cultures such as Syrian, Judeo, Arabian, Portuguese, English communities which have left their mark. These foreign communities often settled in Kerala and assimilated with the local population resulting in different ethnic groups such as the Cochin Jews, Mappilas, Syrian Malabar Nasranis, and Anglo Indian.
Read more about this topic: Malayali People
Famous quotes containing the word culture:
“Why is it so difficult to see the lesbian—even when she is there, quite plainly, in front of us? In part because she has been “ghosted”Mor made to seem invisible—by culture itself.... Once the lesbian has been defined as ghostly—the better to drain her of any sensual or moral authority—she can then be exorcised.”
—Terry Castle, U.S. lesbian author. The Apparitional Lesbian, ch. 1 (1993)
“The best hopes of any community rest upon that class of its gifted young men who are not encumbered with large possessions.... I now speak of extensive scholarship and ripe culture in science and art.... It is not large possessions, it is large expectations, or rather large hopes, that stimulate the ambition of the young.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)
“There has never been in history another such culture as the Western civilization M a culture which has practiced the belief that the physical and social environment of man is subject to rational manipulation and that history is subject to the will and action of man; whereas central to the traditional cultures of the rivals of Western civilization, those of Africa and Asia, is a belief that it is environment that dominates man.”
—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)