Malabar Coast

The Malabar Coast is the southwestern coast of the Indian subcontinent, generally referring to the coastline of Kerala. Geographically, it comprises the wettest regions of South India. The term sometimes is used to refer to the entire Indian coast from the western coast of Konkan to the tip of India at Kanyakumari.

Quotes

• According to Amir Khusru ‘the Malik represented that on the coast of Ma’bar were 500 elephants, larger than those which had been presented to the Sultan from Arangal, and that when he was engaged in the conquest of that place he had thought of possessing himself of them and that now, as the wise determination of the king, he combined the extirpation of the idolaters with this object, he was more than ever rejoiced to enter on this grand enterprise.” Amir Khusru makes it appear that having seen all the country from the hills of Ghazni to the mouths of the Ganges reduced to subjection and having effectively destroyed the prevalence of the ‘Satanism’ of the Hindus by the destruction of their temples and providing in their stead places for the criers to prayers in mosques, Alau-d-din was consumed with the idea of spreading the light of the Muhammadan religion in the Dekhan and South India. According to the same authority Ma’bar was so distant from the city of Delhi ‘that a man travelling with all expedition could only reach it after a journey of twelve months,’ and there ‘ the arrow of any holy warrior had not yet reached.’ Apart from this statement of Amir Khusru, the object of this expedition is made quite clear in what he puts in the mouth of Malik Kafur himself that what he actually coveted were the elephants of better breed, and, what went along with them of course, other items of wealth.
  • Krishnaswami Aiyangar Sakkottai. 1921. South India and Her Muhammadan Invaders by S. Krishnaswami Aiyangar. Oxford: University Press. 91

• In the capital city of a Hindu State in Malabar coast, “there are about four thousand Muslims, who inhabit a suburb of their own inside the jurisdiction of the city. There is fighting between them and the inhabitants of the city often” (p. 185)...
  • Travels in Asia and Africa (Rehalã of Ibn Battûta) quoted from The History and Culture of the Indian People, Delhi Sultanate, vol.6. page 627-8