Mūṣika dynasty

Ezhimala

The hill of Ezhimala on the north Malabar coast is named in Sangam poetry as the seat of a chief, Nannan, and the dynasty that ruled from it appears in later sources as the Mūṣikas — a Sanskritisation of a Malayalam name for the same country. Their territory covered the coast north of the Chera domains, a stretch with good harbours and a long involvement in the Arabian Sea trade.

The Mūṣikavaṃśa

In the eleventh century the poet Atula composed the Mūṣikavaṃśa, a Sanskrit mahākāvya narrating the dynasty's history from a legendary origin — a queen escaping a massacre of kṣatriyas and giving birth on the Mūṣika hill — down to the reign of his patron. Poems of this kind are rare from Kerala, and although its early sections are frankly mythological, its later portions preserve a sequence of rulers and events not otherwise recorded.

The line continued as the Kolathiri rajas of Kolathunāṭu, based at Chirakkal, who were among the principal powers of north Malabar when the Portuguese arrived and who survived as a princely house into the colonial period.