The calendar that starts with a harbour

Most ports have a founding date somewhere in a gazetteer. Kollam has a calendar.

Kollavarsham — the Kollam era, the Malayalam era — begins in AD 825, and it begins with the founding of the harbour at Kollam. It is not a ceremonial survival. It is used across Kerala today for temple calendars, for festival reckoning, for agricultural dates, for the birth stars people give when they are asked. When a Kerala temple publishes its festival dates, it is very often counting from this harbour.

That is an unusual thing for a port to have done, and it is the reason a two-berth minor facility handling sand, cashew and tiles earns a page of its own. Whatever happened here in the 820s was significant enough that a whole region reset its reckoning around it.

And now the awkward part

Nobody can tell you, from a document, who founded it.

One line of sources — including the English Wikipedia article on the port, which is where most retellings begin — says Kollam was founded in AD 825 by Mar Abo, with the sanction of a king given as Udayamarthandavarma. Another line, at least as widely repeated, says it was founded by two Church of the East bishops, Mar Sabor and Mar Proth, with the permission of Ayyanadikal Thiruvadikal, the ruler of Venad.

These are less contradictory than they first appear. Mar Abo is generally identified with Mar Sabor, and our own page on the Kadamattom church already records that he did not arrive alone — he and Mar Proth reached the Malabar coast with a party of Persian Christian settlers, landing at Kollam. So the founder-figure is roughly stable across the tellings.

The king is not. Udayamarthandavarma and Ayyanadikal Thiruvadikal are different names, and neither version rests on a charter, an inscription or any instrument that can be produced and read. What we have is a tradition, recorded late, in more than one form.

So we write AD 825 as the conventional date rather than the recorded one, and the founder as a tradition rather than a fact. That is not scepticism for its own sake. It is the difference between the founding, which is remembered, and what comes twenty-four years later, which is written down.

What is actually written down

The Tarisappalli copper plates of 849 CE, issued in the reign of Sthanu Ravi, grant land and privileges to a merchant recorded as Maruvan Sapir Iso, who founded a church at a place the plates call Kurakkeni Kollam.

The plates are witnessed. And the witnesses signed in Kufic Arabic, in cursive Pahlavi, and in Judeo-Persian Hebrew.

Stop on that for a moment, because it is easy to read past. Three scripts, three communities, one legal instrument, in the ninth century, on the Kerala coast. Persians, Arabs and Jews were not calling at this harbour seasonally. They were resident in it, and resident with enough standing to witness a royal grant in their own hands. Whatever the founding story is worth, the copper plates settle the character of the place within a generation of it.

The plates are discussed at more length on our page for Ashtamudi Lake, which is the lagoon behind the port and the reason a port could exist here at all. This page is about the water in front.

The other calendar problem

There is a second version of the era story worth flagging, because it circulates alongside the first and is not compatible with it. In this telling the era begins not with a founding but with a rebuilding — the town was destroyed by a great fire, and the reckoning starts from its restoration. You will also find the date given as 824 rather than 825.

We are not going to adjudicate that either. The era is real, it is in use, and its starting point is conventionally 825. Everything attached to why is tradition, and tradition that disagrees with itself is still worth telling — provided it is labelled.

Why the date is plausible anyway

Here is the part that makes the whole thing more interesting rather than less. The independent evidence does not contradict the ninth-century date; it slightly outruns it.

The Chinese geographer Jia Dan compiled itineraries between roughly 785 and 805 CE describing trade with Kulam on the Malabar coast. That is before the conventional founding. Tang-dynasty records give the settlement the name Mahlai and refer to its king by a word recognisable as Venad. And when archaeologists came to study the Chinese coins recovered from the seabed off Thangassery, the earliest in the published assemblage turned out to be Tang — the dynasty that ended in 907.

A Chinese itinerary, a Tang place-name and a Tang coin all point at the same century, from three unrelated directions. What that suggests is not that the traditional date is wrong, but that AD 825 marks a formalisation — a founding in the sense of a grant, a settlement, a charter — of an anchorage that ships were already using.

Which is, in the end, how most old ports actually begin. Somebody writes down what boats were doing anyway. In Kollam, the writing-down was consequential enough that Kerala is still counting from it twelve hundred years later.