MalappuramMalappuram

Malappuram means 'land atop the hills'. Along its southern edge flows the Bharathapuzha, the Nila, and on its banks at Thirunavaya the Mamankam was held every twelve years: a great festival and trade fair presided over by the Zamorin of Calicut. Warriors of the rival Valluvanad kingdom would attack the Zamorin's guard knowing they would die, and the last Mamankam took place in the mid-eighteenth century.

Near Tirur, in the sixteenth century, Thunchath Ramanujan Ezhuthachan wrote the Adhyatma Ramayanam Kilippattu in a Malayalam close to everyday speech, earning him the title 'father of the Malayalam language'. On Vijayadasami, children still write their first letters in the sand at his birthplace, Thunchan Parambu.

Ponnani became a celebrated centre of Islamic learning — the 'Mecca of Kerala'. There Zainuddin Makhdoom II wrote the Tuhfat ul-Mujahidin, a sixteenth-century history of resistance against the Portuguese. In 1921 the region was the centre of the Malabar rebellion against British rule and landlord power; its suppression included the Wagon Tragedy, when dozens of prisoners suffocated in a closed railway wagon.

In 1902 Vaidyaratnam P. S. Varier founded the Arya Vaidya Sala at Kottakkal, which became one of the world's best-known Ayurveda institutions. At Nilambur, British collector H. V. Conolly began a teak plantation in the 1840s that is considered the oldest in the world. The district was formed in 1969 from parts of Kozhikode and Palakkad.