Kasaragod: the Tulu-speaking north of Kerala

Kasaragod is known as Sapta Bhasha Sangama Bhumi, the land where seven languages meet ¹. It is the northernmost district of Kerala ¹. The part of it north of the Chandragiri river lies in Tulu Nadu, the Tulu-speaking region ¹. Tulu is spoken there mostly in Manjeshwar taluk and the north of Kasaragod taluk, around Uppala, Kumbla and Badiyadka ². Across the whole district, Malayalam is the mother tongue of most people ². Until 1956 Kasaragod was a taluk of South Canara district ^{3 2}.

The Chandragiri is also called the Payaswini ⁴. It has long been treated as the line between Tulu and Malayalam speech ⁴. Sixteenth-century Portuguese geographies made the river the boundary between the province of Canara, the Kannada-speaking coast under Vijayanagara, and the Malabar kingdoms ⁴. The town became the district’s first municipality in 1966 ¹.

Seven languages

The sources do not name the seven languages. The 2011 Census names five languages that more than one person in a hundred speaks, and groups the rest as others ².

In the 2011 Census, about 83 in every hundred people in the district gave Malayalam as their mother tongue ². About 9 in a hundred gave Tulu, and about 4 gave Kannada ². Marathi and Konkani were under 2 in a hundred each ². Those shares are for the whole district, north and south together ². Tulu and Kannada speakers live mostly in its north ². That is Manjeshwar taluk and the north of Kasaragod taluk, around Uppala, Kumbla and Badiyadka ².

The name

The name is usually taken from Kannada kāsara, the Kanjiram tree (Strychnos nux-vomica), and gōḍe, a rampart or fort ^{1 2}. The old Malayalam name, Kāññirakkōṭŭ, the land of Kanhira trees, says the same thing in the other language ¹.

1956, and after

The States Reorganisation Act came into force on 1 November 1956 ³. It moved Kasaragod taluk from South Canara district to the new Malayalam-speaking state of Kerala ^{3 2}. The Dakshina Kannada part of South Canara went into Mysore State, later Karnataka ⁵. The Amindivi islands went to a union territory ⁵. The poet Kayyara Kinhanna Rai, from this district, later campaigned for Kasaragod to join Karnataka ⁶.

In 2007 V.S. Achuthanandan, then Chief Minister of Kerala, opened the Kerala Tulu Academy at Hosangadi, in this district ⁷. It belongs to the Government of Kerala ⁷. It works for the Tulu language, script, literature and culture ⁷. It is a different body from the Karnataka Tulu Sahitya Academy in Kudla (Mangaluru) ⁸.

The forts

Chandragiri Fort stands where the Chandragiri river meets the sea. It is a square fort from the seventeenth century, built by the Keladi Nayakas ⁹. Bekal Fort, further south on the coast, is the largest fort in Kerala ^{10 2}. Hiriya Venkatappa Nayaka of Keladi began it, and Shivappa Nayaka finished it in 1650 ¹⁰. Hyder Ali of Mysore later took it, Tipu Sultan used it after him, and after Tipu Sultan’s death in 1799 it passed to the British ¹⁰.

Kumbla and Manjeshwar

Kumbla was the seat of the Kumbla rulers, a house of mixed Nair and Tuluva Brahmin descent. They held the land between the Netravati and the Chandragiri rivers ¹¹. In 1514 the Portuguese traveller Duarte Barbosa wrote that Kumbla sent rice to the Maldives and took coir in return ¹¹. The Gopalakrishna temple at Kumbla is called Kanipura, a name a legend takes from Kanvapura, the place of the sage Kanva ^{11 12}. Parthisubba, the eighteenth-century Yakshagana artist called the father of Yakshagana, came from Kumbla ¹¹.

Near Kumbla, the Ananthapura Lake Temple stands in the middle of a lake. People hold it to be the first seat of the Padmanabhaswamy temple at Thiruvananthapuram ¹³. A temple guide site calls it the only lake temple in Kerala ¹³. The Gopalakrishna temple at Kumbla begins its festival at Makara Sankramana ¹².

Manjeshwar taluk, at Kerala’s northern border at Thalappady ¹⁴, lay inside old Tulu Nadu ². The temple’s own tradition names it after Sri Manjarisha, its deity ¹⁴. English Wikipedia also gives the name Manjula Kshetra for the place ¹⁴. Manjeshwar was the home of the Kannada poet M. Govinda Pai. He was the first to be given the title Rashtrakavi, national poet, by the Madras Government ¹⁵.

Inland, at Madhur, a temple is kept for Shiva and Ganesha together ¹⁶. Local people say a sword-mark on the temple well was made by Tipu Sultan ¹⁶.

The mosque of Malik Dinar

An old account, the Qissat Shakarwati Farmad, counts the mosque at Kasaragod among those built in the time of Malik Dinar ¹⁷. People believe he died at Thalangara, in Kasaragod town ¹⁷.

What to see

Visitors go to the two forts, the Ananthapura lake temple near Kumbla ¹³ and the Madhur temple ¹⁶. Kasaragod town has the Malik Dinar mosque ¹. The district also has the Kavvayi backwaters ¹.

Terms used on this page

• beary: the Muslim trading community of this coast and its speech
• adka: a common ending of village names; its meaning is disputed (open ground, or an unclean or burying place)

Related

• Tulu Nadu: the land, its districts and its towns
• Kudla (Mangaluru): the junction of two rivers

Sources

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Last reviewed by tulunadu.org on 2 November 2026.