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:
“A culture may be conceived as a network of beliefs and purposes in which any string in the net pulls and is pulled by the others, thus perpetually changing the configuration of the whole. If the cultural element called morals takes on a new shape, we must ask what other strings have pulled it out of line. It cannot be one solitary string, nor even the strings nearby, for the network is three-dimensional at least.”
—Jacques Barzun (b. 1907)
“To be a Negro is to participate in a culture of poverty and fear that goes far deeper than any law for or against discrimination.... After the racist statutes are all struck down, after legal equality has been achieved in the schools and in the courts, there remains the profound institutionalized and abiding wrong that white America has worked on the Negro for so long.”
—Michael Harrington (1928–1989)
“Culture is the suggestion, from certain best thoughts, that a man has a range of affinities through which he can modulate the violence of any master-tones that have a droning preponderance in his scale, and succor him against himself. Culture redresses this imbalance, puts him among equals and superiors, revives the delicious sense of sympathy, and warns him of the dangers of solitude and repulsion.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)