Chera dynasty in India ruled over Cochin, Travencore, Malabar and Pudukotta of modern Chennai (Madras) province. Later on, they also captured Konga province i.e. the district of Coimbatore. The most primitive reference with regard to the Cheras is evident in the rock inscription of Ashoka and the reference to them is also found in the geographies of Ptolemy and Periplus. However, there is no concrete evidence about the Chera kings of that period. It is known from the `Shilappadikaram`, a Sangam poem that a Chera king by the name Sangultauana once ruled. As per that book, this king ruled in the period of Chola king Karikala`s grandson and Pandya king Nedujodian. It is mentioned that this king was a mighty one and had overcame a number of the neighbouring kings. He is also believed to have taken a military expedition up to Himalayas. In the twelfth century A. D. the Cheras were a feudatory of the Cholas. However, in the thirteenth century A. D., the Pandyas became prominent and made the Cheras their feudatory. Again the Cheras rose into prominence when Malik Kafur in 1310 A. D. gave a smashing blow to the might of the Pandyas. The then Chera king Ravivardhan Kulasekhara defeated the Cholas and the Pandyas. However, the Chera king was defeated by the Kakatiya king Rudra I. The last powerful king of the Chera dynasty was Ravivardhan and the kingdom of the Cheras declined after him.

Along with the Pandyas of Madurai and the Cholas of Kanchipuram, the Cheras formed a triarchy of Dravidian ruling houses whose rival claims kept South India in a state of intermittent warfare for more than a thousand years. Nothing is known of the origins of the Chera dynasty which long ago defended the mountain barriers of a kingdom that covered very much the same ground as modern Kerala, but something of the nature of their culture may be gleaned from their references in the great Hindu epics, including the Ramayana, where the Cheras are classed, along with Greeks and Nakas, among those degraded races who illustrate the degeneracy of the age of Kaliyuga. Since these references mention peoples like the Sakas who reached India in the first century B.C., they were obviously interpolated relatively late into the constantly changing structures of the epics, not finally stabilized until about the eleventh century A.D. But at least they establish that round about two thousand years ago, when Greeks and Sakas invaders were still active in northern India, the Cheras were known and were clearly so different in character from the Indo-Aryans of the North that they were not yet regarded as having any true part in the fabric of Hindu religion and custom.

The conquest of the Chera Kings lead into the political history of ancient Kerala, a subject which belongs to the next doms, and the next stage in the ethnic history of the state of Kerala is the arrival of the Dravidians, generally regarded as the descendants of the dark Mediterranean people who once ruled all North India and who established the Indus Valley civilization, with its centres at Harappa and Mohenjodaro, round about two thousand and five hundred B.C. Kerala`s political history begins in the hints of poets and legend makers, from these, with a few facts communicated by Greek, Roman and Chinese writers, one must reconstruct the long period from the beginning of the Chera kingdom, at some undetermined time before the birth of Christ, to the ninth century when stone was first used in the construction of temple buildings and palm leaves began to be replaced by copper plates for making important records.

The kingly families of Cochin and Travancore, which claim to be Kshatriyas, are descendants of the Chera kings, and were originally Nayar, as were the Samantans or local chieftains. The Chera kings, the first known rulers of Kerala, were by origin of Nayar, not Kshatriya caste, as is clearly shown by their being classed in the Sanskrit epics as of degenerate race, outside the recognized caste system.

The development of authority by the Chera kings, theoretically all-powerful, is suggested in the references in Shilappadikaram to the `king`s council` and the `five assemblies`. The council of the King consisted of the inner group of respected elders and of powerful noblemen, rajas of districts like the `ruler of Alumbil`, who on one occasion makes a speech full of wise advice; the council was not merely the highest advisory body, but also the final judicial tribunal which assisted the king when he held his daily durbar to consider petitions and render judgments.

The functions of the `five assemblies` in the ancient kingdom of the Cheras was not clearly defined, but the five assemblies were territorially organized. There were four divisions of the Chera kingdom proper, the northernmost beginning in the neighbourhood of Cannanore and the southernmost near Trivandrum. Trivandrum itself was part of the realm of the mysterious Ay kings who ruled up to the tenth century A.D. in the region later known as South Travancore, between Trivandrum and Cape Comorin, with their capital at Vijinjam, once a flourishing port but today a dejected fishing village. During the Sangam Age the Ay kings, later independent, seem to have been tributary to the Cheras, so that there would in practice be five divisions to the empire, and five assemblies, who were presumably elected by the Nayar warriors, since they are mentioned in connection with the army. A part from these collective bodies which influenced royal policy and rendered legal judgments, the ancient Chera state had an elaborate executive structure. The chief minister appears to have functioned in the same comprehensive way as the powerful dewans who until twenty years ago administered the states of Travancore and Cochin on hehalf of the native princes.

After the Aryanization of Kerala, religious dedication was accepted as another kind of substitute for the physical sacrifice of the king on the termination of his customary period of office. At least two Chera kings renounced their temporal power and took up the life of the religious renunciate. One was the Vaishnavite devotional poet, Kulasekhara Alwar, who ruled Kerala in the eighth century and, on giving up his throne, wrote a stanza comparing his attitude with that of the worldly-wise who mocked his resolution. A later renunciate king became the most famous ruler of Kerala because of an abdication for which Muslims, Christians and Hindus have all claimed the credit. He is known to history as Cheraman Perumal, and is said to have given up his throne in 825 and to have gone on a pilgrimage from which he did not return; his destination, according to the traditions of the various religions, was Mecca, or the shrine of St. Thomas at Mylapore near Chennai, or the Brahminical temple of Chidambaram on the Coromandel Coast. But `Cheraman Perumal` appears to have been, not a personal name, but a title held by the kings of the whole Chera dynasty, lasting from before the Chrostoam era long into the twelfth century, and it is possible that all members of the line, after reigning a set number of years, performed such an act of renunciation. Until the sixteenth century, when the Portuguese stopped it, a similar custom survived among the Rajas of Cochin, who claimed descent from the Cheras. It was always the second male member of the royal family, counting by matrilineal succession, who reigned, his predecessor having withdrawn into seclusion with the title of Perumpatappu Muppil; when the Muppil died, the reigning raja would take his place in seclusion and the next prince would assume the responsibilities of state.

It is as a kingship already relieved of the burden of physical self immolation, but limited in other respects, that the Chera monarchy makes its first appearance, not in any historical chronicle, for none has survived, but in the early Tamil poems of the Sangam epoch. The Sangam epoch was named after the Academies of Sangams which are said to have flourished for the cultivation of the poetic arts in various ancient capital of the Pandyan kingdom. Tradition claims three Sangams, lasting altogether a period of ten thousand years; the first two existed in cities long submerged under the sea, the third in the still surviving city of Madurai. Except for a grammatical treatise on Tamil, all the surviving Sangham works are attributed to the Third Academy, and we can assume that this was the only institution of its kind which actually existed under Pandyan patronage. Since all their works appear to derive from a culture already partly Aryanized, the activities of the Sangham poets evidently represent a brief but rich flowering during the first three centuries of the Christian era. Of the three works of the epoch written by Keralan poets, the already quoted Shilappadikaram is the most important. The other two are the Paridupattu and the Kalavaliharpathu, a poem on the wars between the Cheras and the Cholas.