Ramacharitam, probably the oldest literary work written in Old Malayalam, which dates back to 12th century CE, is thought to have written somewhere near Kumbla as its manuscripts were discovered from Nileshwaram and the poem mentions about Ananthapura Lake Temple in Kumbla in detail.

The Kumbla dynasty, who swayed over the land of southern Tulu Nadu wedged between Chandragiri River and Netravati River (including present-day Taluks of Manjeshwar and Kasaragod) from Maipady Palace at Kumbla, had also been vassals to the Kolathunadu kingdom of North Malabar, before the Carnatic conquests of Vijayanagara Empire.

The Vijayanagara empire attacked and annexed Kasaragod from the Kolathiri Raja with Nileshwaram as one of the capital in the 16th century.

In the 16th century A.D. (1514), Duarte Barbosa, the Portuguese traveller, visited Kumble and he had recorded that he had found people exporting rice to the Maldives in exchange of coir[6] According to Barbosa, the people in the southwestern Malabar coast of India from Kumbla in the north to Kanyakumari in the south had spoken a unique language, which they called as "Maliama" (Malayalam).

When Tippu Sultan captured Mangaluru, the Kumble Raja fled to Thalassery; but he returned in 1799 and after an unsuccessful fight for independence, submitted to the British Empire and accepted a small pension of Rs.