every parva (part) of which Heaven is said to descend. "In the same way there is the Trikuta nilaya, in height many yojanas and full of charming caves and crests. In its top is the great city of Lanka with palatial buildings, ever contented and prosperous. Its area is 100 by 30 yojanas. It is the residence of great Raksasas who can assume different disguises and who were defiant enemies of the devas. It is inaccessible to ordinary human beings. In front of that dvipa and on the shore of the sea, there is a great Siva temple known as Gokarna." It is clear that in this description there is a large transference of names from ancient India. Colonists have always had the habii: of transferring names from their own home-lands to their new settlements and the ancient Indians were no exception. Nearly all their place-names in South-East Asia have counterparts in ancient India. The Malaya Mountain of Kalidasa was composed of the Anamalai and Elamalai mountains, still known as the Malaya Range. These mountains form the southern part of the Western Ghats from the Palghat Gap to Cape Comorin. Malayalam, 'land at the foot of the mountain', is the name for the narrow plain along the Malabar coast. It is the country of the Nair caste and is called Kerala by Kalidasa and the Vayu Purana. Kerala is another form of Chera, one of the three great Tamil kingdoms, the others being Chola and pandya. The language called Malayalam is a comparatively new one and during the period of this paper Tamil was spoken in Kerala.18 Our name Malabar comes from the Arabic Malaya-bar, which in turn derives from the Sanskrit Malaya-vara, 'mountain country', Tamil Malai-nadu. Malayadvipa means 'mountain island-continent’, and, if the name Malaya was transferred, as is suggested, from Malabar to Sumatra, nothing could be more natural. When one passes out of what used to be British India into Cochin and Travancore, it is as if one had entered Sumatra. The mountains, the flora and the general landscape, with the saddle-backed roofs to houses and bullock-carts make the illusion almost complete. The topographical resemblance of the Malabar coast to the west coast of Sumatra is equally remarkable. Right down the Malabar coast, and never very far from the sea, there runs the chain of the Western Ghats, broken only by the remarkable Palghat Gap, some sixteen miles in width, through which there is land passage to the Carnatic plain and the Coromandel coast. These Ghats in their entirety run for 1,000 miles from the Konkan coast to Cape Comorin. Right down the west coast of Sumatra there runs a chain of mountain ranges, never very far from the sea, and broken by a remarkable medial trough, not more than twenty miles ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 18 Until the tenth century A.D. See K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar, HCIP., vol. 2, p. 289. |