Kingdom of Tanur

Not to be confused with Vettom Grama Panchayath.

Kingdom of Tanur
Vettathunad (Malayalam)
Tanur Swaroopam (Malayalam)
Prakashabhu (Sanskrit)
Kingdom of Light (English)
Before 12th century CE–1793
Capital
10°58′N 75°52′E / 10.97°N 75.87°E / 10.97; 75.87
Common languagesMalayalam
GovernmentKingdom
History 
• Established
Before 12th century CE
• Death of last Raja
24 May 1793
Today part ofMalappuram, Kerala, India

The Kingdom of Tanur (also Vettathunadu, Vettom, Tanur Swaroopam, and Prakashabhu, and sometimes called the Kingdom of Light) was one of the numerous feudal principalities on the Malabar Coast of the Indian subcontinent during the Middle Ages. It was ruled by a Hindu dynasty, claiming kshatriya status, known as the Tanur dynasty. The kingdom comprised parts of the coastal Taluks of Tirurangadi, Tirur, and Ponnani taluks in present-day Malappuram district and included places such as Tanur, Tirur (Trikkandiyur) and Chaliyam. The coastal villages of Kadalundi and Chaliyam in the southernmost area of Kozhikode district was also under Tanur Swaroopam.[2][3]

The king of Vettathunadu was a long-time feudatory of the Zamorin of Calicut.[4] With the arrival of the Portuguese in Malabar, the rulers of Vettathunadu began to play the Portuguese and Calicut against each other. They were one of the first vassals of Calicut to stand up against the Zamorin with Portuguese assistance.[2] Francis Xavier had visited Tanur in 1546 and visited the Keraladeshpuram Temple at Tanur.[5] Subsequently, a Vettom king fell in offers of the Portuguese and converted to Christianity in 1549. This king allowed the construction of the strategic fortress at Chaliyam.[2]

Afterward, part of the Chovvaram (Sukapuram) village in the old 64 villages of Nambudiris, the queen of Cochin adopted some Vettom princes in the 17th century, which led to tensions along the Malabar Coast.[2]

The Tanur royal family became extinct upon the death of the last king on 24 May 1793.[6] Subsequently, the kingdom passed to the English East India Company and the temple of the royal family was transferred to the Zamorin of Calicut in 1842.[7]

The Vettathunad rulers were famous patrons of arts and learning. A Vettathunad ruler is said to have introduced innovations in Kathakali which have come to be known as the Vettathu Sambradayam. The famous poets Thunchaththu Ramanujan Ezhuthachan, who is also known as The Father of Modern Malayalam, and Vallathol Narayana Menon, who is also the founder of Kerala Kalamandalam, were born in Vettathunad.[2] The Kerala school of astronomy and mathematics flourished between the 14th and 16th centuries. In attempting to solve astronomical problems, the Kerala school independently developed a number of important mathematical concepts, including series expansion for trigonometric functions.[8][9]

  1. ^ M. K. Devassy (1965), 1961 Census Handbook- Kozhikode District (PDF), Directorate of Census Operations, Kerala and The Union Territory of Laccadive, Minicoy, and Amindivi Islands, p. 77
  2. ^ a b c d e Kerala History, A. Shreedhara Menon, 2007 Edition, D C Books, Kottayam
  3. ^ Cite error: The named reference Makhdoom was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  4. ^ princelystatesofindia.com
  5. ^ Manorama Yearbook 1995, 1996
  6. ^ Logan, William: Malabār, the manual of Malabār, p. 659
  7. ^ Madras Legislative Assembly Debates. Official Report by Madras (India : State). Legislature. Legislative Assembly, p. 373
  8. ^ Roy, Ranjan (1990). "Discovery of the Series Formula for π by Leibniz, Gregory, and Nilakantha". Mathematics Magazine. 63 (5): 291–306. doi:10.2307/2690896. JSTOR 2690896.
  9. ^ Pingree, David (1992), "Hellenophilia versus the History of Science", Isis, 83 (4): 554–63, Bibcode:1992Isis...83..554P, doi:10.1086/356288, JSTOR 234257, S2CID 68570164, One example I can give you relates to the Indian Mādhava's demonstration, in about 1400 A.D., of the infinite power series of trigonometrical functions using geometrical and algebraic arguments. When this was first described in English by Charles Whish, in the 1830s, it was heralded as the Indians' discovery of calculus. This claim and Mādhava's achievements were ignored by Western historians, presumably at first because they could not admit that an Indian discovered the calculus, but later because no one read the Transactions of the Royal Asiatic Society, in which Whish's article was published. The matter resurfaced in the 1950s, and now we have the Sanskrit texts properly edited, and we understand the clever way that Mādhava derived the series without the calculus, but many historians still find it impossible to conceive of the problem and its solution in terms of anything other than the calculus and proclaim that the calculus is what Mādhava found. In this case, the elegance and brilliance of Mādhava's mathematics are being distorted as they are buried under the current mathematical solution to a problem to which he discovered an alternate and powerful solution.