General Indian Topics
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Sharath C V wrote: Onam is a harvest festival and is celebrated under different names in different
states with different Gods. It cannot be considered to have evolved out of any
religious ritual or Vedas.
And yet the legend includes Vishnu (the Hindu god).
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smaaaart wrote: What was there before Hinduism? I'm curious because this is the first time I've
heard of Hinduism "spreading" to some place in India.
Mostly disconnected clans that had primitive religious concepts. Snake worship was common and we still have lots of Sarpakavus (think of it as snake temples) in Kerala. Christianity and Hinduism arrived at around the same time. Islam was a later addition. There are also those who believe that Buddhism was common in Kerala until the Hindu-influence.
A lot of people are uncomfortable acknowledging this because it then portrays them as being less Hindu/Indian than the rest of India. But to me, I think it just makes India more fascinating.
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Nish Sivakumar wrote: I think it just makes India more fascinating.
Certainly!
Thanks for the post. Very interesting! I never knew this fact. It's incredible how diverse India is, and how little we know about it.
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smaaaart wrote: It's incredible how diverse India is
I agree, and very few people outside India understand this. That's why I always find it amusing when we have "Indian" restaurants in the US (and Canada). There is no single Indian-cusine. Every state has their own awesome dishes.
Of course this is now a running joke, but I still get people ask me if I speak "Indian", or "Hindu" (not Hindi, they assume Hindu is a language).
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I never heard this. Do you have any link or book regarding this? Curious to read about it. As per my information, Christianity was a later addition. Let me know if you know of any good book on this.
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Sharath C V wrote:
I never heard this. Do you have any link or book
regarding this? Curious to read about it. As per my information, Christianity
was a later addition. Let me know if you know of any good book on this.
Unfortunately, I don't have any book references. And Wikipedia entries are seriously limited when it comes to Kerala history. My late maternal grandparents were my biggest source of information, as they both had an astonishing interest in Kerala history.
But there are secondary (and indirect) things that indicate how our religious origins are a little different from the rest of India. Our diet for example, which includes meat (and no, eating beef/pork is not a recent trend). Also, some Christians claim that St Thomas arrrived in Kerala and converted then then-Malayalaees into Christianity. Some of them insist that these original Malayalees were Namboodhiris (kerala brahmins) but this has never been historically established.
That said Hinduism itself is hard to define. All the snake-temples and the regional-goddess temples spread across Kerala are now considered to be a part of Hinduism. Some of these dieties have been re-defined to be incarnations of Kali. But this was not always so.
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Hard to believe that Buddhism was common in Kerala as there are no well known Buddist shrines in Kerala. Not sure if there are any either.
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Sharath C V wrote:
Hard to believe that Buddhism was common in
Kerala as there are no well known Buddist shrines in Kerala. Not sure if there
are any either.
Yeah, whoever wiped them off did a good job of it. 
More seriously, this is a rather controversial theory but if you google for "buddhism in kerala" you should get tons of hits, some of them more authentic and well-written of course (as is always the case).
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Interesting theory, will do some research on this and search for some books on this too.
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