The Great Deluge of 99 — or 99le vellapokkam — is how Kerala remembers, through oral history, the horrors of the flood of 1924 (1099 in Malayalam Era), regarded as the worst in the recorded history of the region. Kerala was not a state then.

Unprecedented rain this week in some districts of Kerala have left the state in the worst flood situation of the century. The flow of water in some stretches of the Periyar was 1,800 cubic metres — or about one swimming pool of water — per second, almost equal to that recorded in 1924 as recorded by the ...