4 - South India

Summary

South India includes the area covered by Madras Presidency and Coorg, and the princely states of Hyderabad, Mysore Travancore, Cochin, i.e., the present states of Andhra Pradesh (and the Marathwada district of Maharashtra), Karnataka (but excluding north Kanara, Belgaum and Bijapur, formerly part of Bombay Presidency), Kerala and Tamil Nadu. This is a region of great physical diversity. In the narrow western coastal strip of south Kanara and Kerala, intersected with waterways but isolated from the rest of India, rice is the main crop, closely followed by the coconut palm, which supplies not only food but the material for many cottage industries. In the high lands, pepper and other spices, tea, coffee and rubber are grown. Kerala has long been one of the most densely populated and cultivated parts of India; even in the fourteenth century Ibn Battuta remarked of Malabar that ‘there is not a foot of ground but what is cultivated. Every man has his own orchard, with his house in the middle and a wooden palisade all round it.’ The central plateaus again vary enormously. Mysore was traditionally divided into the forested Malnad in the west, and the eastern plains, the Maidan. The forests were of great commercial importance, supplying teak, sissoo and sandalwood. Most of the Maidan is unsuited for irrigation, except by tanks; here sugarcane and rice, coconut and areca, cotton, ragi and jawar are grown. Pastoralism is important; Haidar Ali developed a special breed of bullock, and these are still exported to the plains. The Telengana districts of Hyderabad state, mainly growing dry crops, were among the poorest and most neglected areas of the south.