Marakkar

The Marakkars are a South Asian Muslim community found in parts of the Indian states of Kerala (The Malabar Coast), Tamil Nadu (the Palk Strait and Coromandel Coast), and Sri Lanka. The Marakkars speak Malayalam in Kerala and Tamil in Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka. The community trace their ancestry to marriages between early Arab Muslim traders of the high seas and indigenous Paravar coastal women on the Gulf of Mannar coast and with Mukkuvar coastal women on the Travancore coast. Arab traders have also married other South Asian women in India and Sri Lanka, but their descendants are not necessarily members of the Marakkar community. The Islamized Arabs who arrived on the Coromandel and Malabar Coast brought Islamic values and customs and inter-married with the indigenous women who followed the local Buddhist, Jain & Hindu customs. Naturally, their children will have imbibed Islamic and local values and transmitted them to their descendants. From the outset, the Arabs must, in all probability, have asserted the centrality of Islamic values in their relationship with the local women while making the necessary adjustments to local customs. This is the pattern that has survived to this day. Arab traders had a flourishing business in South India with the Pandian Kingdom (capital at Madurai), the rulers of Malabar (Kerala) and Ceylon (Sri Lanka). With the advent of Islam, these Arab traders introduced a new faith in the region. They married among the local population, and their descendants are: The present-day population of many settlements along the Tamil Nadu coast. Many settlements on the Malabar / Kerala coast. The southern sea coast of Ceylon is like Galle and Batticaloa. The main item of trade of the Arabs was natural pearls fished in the Gulf of Mannar, Palk Strait separating Ceylon (Sri Lanka) from South India and horses. These pearls were exchanged with horses brought from Arabia. According to SV Muhammed, the Marakkar traders originated from Cochin, and their roots in his book Charithrathile Marakkar Sannidhyam, the Marakkar family (Kunhali) derived from the Konkan, and they were rice merchants.