The South

The Tamil south enters history in the Sangam poems of the early centuries AD, when the Chera, Chola and Pandya kingdoms traded pepper, pearls and cotton with Rome through ports such as Muziris in Kerala and Arikamedu near Pondicherry. The Satavahanas ruled much of the Deccan and patronised the Buddhist stupa at Amaravati; later the Pallavas carved the shore temples of Mamallapuram, and the Chalukyas built at Badami and Pattadakal. The imperial Cholas, under Rajaraja I and his son Rajendra, built the great temple at Thanjavur and sent fleets as far as South-East Asia in the 11th century.

The Vijayanagara empire, founded in 1336, united much of the south from its capital at Hampi until an alliance of Deccan sultanates defeated it at Talikota in 1565 and the city was sacked. The Nayaks of Madurai rebuilt the Meenakshi temple, the Qutb Shahi sultans founded Hyderabad in 1591, and from 1724 the Nizams ruled the Deccan from Hyderabad. Vasco da Gama landed near Calicut in 1498; the British built Fort St George at Madras in the 1640s, the French made Pondicherry their Indian capital, and Hyder Ali and Tipu Sultan of Mysore fought the British until Tipu died at Srirangapatna in 1799.

After independence Hyderabad was annexed by the Indian army in 1948, and Pondicherry passed from France in 1954. The 1956 reorganisation drew the states along language lines; Kerala elected a communist government in 1957, and Telangana was separated from Andhra Pradesh in 2014. The 2004 tsunami devastated the Tamil Nadu coast.

The South is Dravidian India. Its four great languages — Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam — belong to a family unrelated to Hindi, and Tamil, with a literature of some two thousand years, is fiercely defended; resistance to imposing Hindi has shaped Tamil politics since the 1960s. The Dravidian parties of Tamil Nadu and the film stars who became chief ministers, such as M. G. Ramachandran and Jayalalithaa in Tamil Nadu and N. T. Rama Rao in Andhra Pradesh, reflect how closely cinema and politics are bound together.

Temple culture is intense: festivals draw huge crowds to Madurai, Tirumala and Srirangam, and Carnatic music and Bharatanatyam dance are cultivated with devotion, above all in Chennai's December music season. Kerala has its own arts — Kathakali dance-drama, Mohiniyattam and the trance-like Theyyam of the north — and a distinct religious mix, with large Muslim and Christian communities, the latter tracing their origins to St Thomas the Apostle, and a historic Jewish quarter in Kochi. Hyderabad keeps the Urdu-speaking courtly culture of the Nizams.

The great festivals are Pongal, the Tamil harvest in January; Onam, Kerala's harvest feast, with flower carpets and snake-boat races; Ugadi, the Telugu and Kannada new year; Telangana's Bathukamma flower festival; and Mysore's Dasara. Silk saris from Kanchipuram and Mysore, sandalwood and bronze casting are prized crafts.

Bengaluru, Chennai and Hyderabad are each metropolitan areas of many millions of people. Bengaluru is India's software capital, crowded with tech campuses and notorious for traffic and summer water shortages; Hyderabad rivals it in IT and pharmaceuticals; Chennai builds cars and has long been the region's port and administrative centre. Kochi, Coimbatore, Madurai, Visakhapatnam, Vijayawada and Mysore are the next tier, and Andhra Pradesh is building a new capital at Amaravati.

Kerala stands out for its near-universal literacy, long life expectancy and dependence on remittances from millions of workers in the Gulf. Karnataka's hills of Kodagu and Chikmagalur grow most of India's coffee, Kerala and the Nilgiris grow tea, rubber, pepper and cardamom, and the deltas of the Kaveri, Krishna and Godavari are rice bowls. Tirupur is a knitwear centre, and fishing matters all along the coasts. Lakshadweep, with fewer than 70,000 people, lives on fishing, coconuts and a small tourist trade.

Mornings start with filter coffee or tea and a breakfast of idli or dosa; lunch is the main rice meal; temples are busy at dawn and dusk. Water-sharing disputes over the Kaveri, city flooding and migration to the Gulf are recurring issues.

Rice is the base of southern cooking, with coconut, tamarind, curry leaves and mustard seed. Breakfast is idli, steamed rice-and-lentil cakes; dosa, a thin fermented crêpe, often folded around spiced potato as masala dosa; vada, savoury lentil doughnuts; and pongal, rice and lentils cooked with ghee and pepper, all with sambar, a tamarind lentil stew, and coconut chutney. Tamil Nadu's Chettinad cuisine is peppery and meat-rich, and Madurai's jigarthanda is a cold drink of milk, almond gum and ice cream. Filter coffee, or kaapi, frothed by pouring between two cups, is the southern drink.

Kerala's sadya, the vegetarian feast for Onam, is served on a banana leaf with rice, sambar, avial and payasam, a sweet milk pudding. Appam, lacy rice pancakes, come with a mild coconut stew; puttu, steamed rice cylinders, with black chickpea curry; and karimeen pollichathu is fried pearl-spot fish. Malabar biryani belongs to the north of the state, and toddy, fermented palm sap, is sold in toddy shops.

Karnataka gives bisi bele bath, a spiced rice-and-lentil dish, and Mysore pak, a rich sweet of gram flour, ghee and sugar. Andhra cooking is the fieriest, with gongura, a sour pickle of sorrel leaves, and pesarattu, a green-gram dosa, while Hyderabad is famed for dum biryani, slow-cooked in a sealed pot, and haleem, a meat-and-wheat porridge eaten in Ramadan. Puducherry adds French bakeries and Franco-Tamil dishes.

Kerala's backwaters, centred on Alappuzha, Kumarakom and Vembanad Lake, are explored by houseboat through canals lined with paddy fields and coconut palms. Fort Kochi has its Chinese fishing nets, Portuguese and Dutch churches and the Paradesi Synagogue in Mattancherry. Inland, Munnar's tea estates and the Periyar Tiger Reserve at Thekkady lie in the Western Ghats, and Varkala's cliff beach lies in the south.

In Karnataka, Bengaluru has the Lalbagh gardens and Tipu Sultan's summer palace; Mysore has its illuminated palace, Chamundi Hill and nearby Srirangapatna; and Hampi's temples and bazaars — the Virupaksha temple and the stone chariot of the Vittala temple — lie among granite boulders on the Tungabhadra. Badami's cave temples, Pattadakal, the Hoysala temples of Belur and Halebidu, the coffee hills of Kodagu and the beaches of Gokarna complete the state.

Tamil Nadu is temple country: the Meenakshi Amman Temple in Madurai, the Brihadisvara Temple in Thanjavur, the island temple of Srirangam, Kanchipuram's silk-weaving temple town, the Pallava shore temple at Mamallapuram, and Rameswaram and Kanyakumari at the southern tip. The Nilgiri Mountain Railway climbs to Ooty. Pondicherry keeps its French Quarter of yellow villas, the Sri Aurobindo Ashram and a seafront promenade.

Hyderabad offers the Charminar, Golconda Fort, the Qutb Shahi tombs and Chowmahalla Palace, and Telangana the Ramappa temple in Mulugu district. Andhra Pradesh has the Tirumala hill temple and the Araku valley above Visakhapatnam. Out in the Arabian Sea, the Lakshadweep atolls — Agatti, Bangaram and Kavaratti among them — have lagoons and coral reefs.