History of Kerala, Volume 2: Written in the Form of Notes on Visscher's Letters from Malabar

The History of Kerala is a monumental work in four volumes. Chaplain of Cochin (1717-23), Jacobus Canter Visscher wrote descriptive letters to his friends and which were edited and published. K.P. Padmanabha Menon re-edited the English translation of the letters with an extensive and exhaustive commentary. His notes speak eloquently of his wide range of information and study and no less of his power to present the varied material into a highly readable historical narrative. The author has used Visscher's book as the thread on which to string the ancient History of Kerala.

It contains cameos on many of the important events and institutions, customs and manners and the salient features of the region, and of its social, political and economic conditions, based as far as possible, on contemporary records. The author has brought into lime light a part of India about which not much was known earlier and has brought out in an orderly fashion some of the events and institutions, manners and customs of the place to give one an idea of the eminent position which Kerala had held even in those early days of her social and political evolution.

Table of Contents

• Pages
• List of Illustrations.
• Foreword, by the Editor. XI—XIX
• Letter IX.
• Account of the Royal houses of Malabar, Travancore, Cochin, the Zamorin and Colastri. Disagreements existing between them. 1-10
• Letter X.
• Laws of the Malabars—strange manner of laying seizure on the property of another. Their trials by ordeal, sometimes thrusting the fingers into boiling oil, sometimes the hand into a basket containing a cobra capella, some-times swimming through a river inhabited by crocodiles. Strange occurrence. Their prisous. The right they possess over slaves. Sales and purchases. 11-16
• Letter XI 17-21
• Letter XII 22-27
• Letter XIII 28-33
• Letter XIV 33-35
• Letter XV 36-40
• Letter XVI. Description of the St. Thomas or Syrian Christians. Their Priests. Means of bringing them back to the right way. Their antiquity and history. 40-47
• Letter XVII. Of the Roman Catholic Priests in Malabar and their converts among the Heathen. 47-50
• Letter XVIII. Of the Jews, black and white. 50-53
• Letter XIX. Account of the Moors in Malabar 54-57