Kerala

Kerala

or Keralam is an Indian state located on the Malabar coast of south-west India. It was created on 1 November 1956 by the States Reorganisation Act by combining various Malayalam speaking regions....

 is a state in south-western India

India

India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...

. Most of Kerala

Kerala

or Keralam is an Indian state located on the Malabar coast of south-west India. It was created on 1 November 1956 by the States Reorganisation Act by combining various Malayalam speaking regions....

's 31.8 million people are of Malayali

Malayali

Malayali is the term used to refer to the native speakers of Malayalam, originating from the Indian state of Kerala...

 ethnicity. Malayali Hindu

Hindu

Hindu refers to an identity associated with the philosophical, religious and cultural systems that are indigenous to the Indian subcontinent. As used in the Constitution of India, the word "Hindu" is also attributed to all persons professing any Indian religion...

s derive their ancestry from Dravidian and Aryan

Aryan

Aryan is an English language loanword derived from Sanskrit ārya and denoting variously*In scholarly usage:**Indo-Iranian languages *in dated usage:**the Indo-European languages more generally and their speakers...

 communities that settled in Kerala and intermixed. Additional ancestries derive from several centuries of contact with non-Indian lands, whereby thousands of people of Arab

Arab

Arab people, also known as Arabs , are a panethnicity primarily living in the Arab world, which is located in Western Asia and North Africa. They are identified as such on one or more of genealogical, linguistic, or cultural grounds, with tribal affiliations, and intra-tribal relationships playing...

, Jewish, and other ethnicities settled in Kerala. Many of these immigrants intermarried

Miscegenation

Miscegenation is the mixing of different racial groups through marriage, cohabitation, sexual relations, and procreation....

 with native Malayalees.