Muslims, Hindus and the Malabar rebellion – why 1921 matters

This year marks the centenary of the 1921 Mappilla rebellion in Malabar, and the Indian Council for Historical Research (ICHR) that was reconstituted post 2014 by the Sangh Parivar chose this year to purge the names of 387 Mappilla rebels from the Dictionary of Martyrs of India’s Freedom Struggle: 1857-1947.

This Dictionary was the result of an ambitious project that began in 2007 when Prof. Sabyasachi Bhattacharya had been at the helm of the ICHR. While the original project was extremely well researched and authenticated and wished to give credit to those obscured by grand narratives, the present purge by a committee nominated by the same institution included Kerala based RSS ideologue CI Isaac who claimed that “almost all the Moplah outrages were communal. They were against the Hindu society and done out of sheer intolerance. Thus, the following names should be deleted from the yet-to-be published project.”

This of course comes on the heels of senior BJP leader Ram Madhav asserting that 1921 displayed a “Talibani mindset” and declaring that it was “born out of certain fundamentalist radical Islamist ideology, first manifested here in the form of the Moplah rebellion,” which, according to him, Kerala’s communists were attempting to “whitewash”.

Obliteration of histories

The present ICHR’s move of purging Mappilla names from the Dictionary must be seen in line with their project of renaming (streets, towns, railway stations bearing Muslim names) and rewriting school text books and changing syllabi to obliterate complex histories of the past, especially if these were linked in any way to Muslims or Islam.

While it requires no great insight to understand what the Sangh Parivar, and the ICHR following its command, are doing, it is worth remembering that the associations they are making are in keeping with their grand tradition of naming and attacking the Other (Mullah-Marxist; more recently, Jihadi-Naxal). This is also a part of their attempt to write what Ram Madhav terms as “correct history.”

While my attempt here is not to present a summary of the formidable literature on the subject of the Malabar/Mappilla rebellion (from Conrad Wood, RL Hardgrave, Stephen Dale, KN Panikkar, KKN Kurup and Ronald Miller to M. Gangadharan, Hussain Randathani, MT Ansari and many others), I do wish to reflect briefly on a few key issues.

Religious idiom

One, the question of religion and the Mappilla rebellion is a subject that has produced vast literature that explores the ways in which the Mappilla peasants used a religious idiom to mobilise forces from the mid-19th century onwards. While I do not expect any graduate of the WhatsApp University to read any history grounded in authentic sources, for any deviant in their midst, and others interested, may find it useful to read scholars like Hussain Randathani and others who have unpacked the many meanings of terms that were intrinsic to this religious idiom.

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One of these is jihad, whose meaning for believers embodied both spiritual and physical components, and was not monolithic in the ways in which it is often represented. The point to be noted here is not only the deep reading offered by such scholars, but also that they use Arabic and Arabi Malayalam sources to unpack such conceptual/spiritual categories.

As an organising principle for Malabar Mappillas through the 19th  and early 20th  centuries it provided an idiom to articulate their sense of self, which involved restoring dignity in the face of humiliating attacks on them by elite Hindus and the British.

The Khilafat controversy

The second term of relevance in this discussion is Khilafat. Students of Indian history know that many in the years immediately after the end of World War 1, including Muslim groups and the Congress, responded to the ongoing concerns in Turkey that the collapse of the Ottoman empire would heighten the danger not just for Islam, but also for the colonised. Like other parts of the country where Khilafat and the Congress’s non-cooperation came together, in Kerala too the committees and their members held some joint meetings with the hope of opposing British imperialism.

However, as Randathani shows in detail, the Mappilla ulema were split in their opinion, and while the Kondotty Thangals and the Tattangara Musliyar and followers (the Ponnani group) were pro-British, others like Pareekutty Musliyar issued a fatwa supporting the Congress and its fight against the British. This, known as the Tarjuma Muhimmat al Mu’minin called upon Muslim believers to fight against the British.  Indeed, it represented those Muslims who supported the British as heretics.

Needless to say, the British banned this fatwa in 1921. In other words, neither the Mappilla ulema nor the large body of Muslim cultivators had a monolithic view of Khilafat. And significantly, this heterogeneity revealed that while some amongst them nurtured pro-British loyalties, others were inspired by Khilfat’s anti-imperialist politics. Alongside, it’s worth remembering that some committees even had Hindus as members.

Casteist, religious undertones

All serious scholars of 1921, and its contexts — Hindu landlords’ abuse of their economic and social power; long history of lower caste conversions because of casteist abuse of the savarna Hindu landlords and their retainers (Nambudiris and Nayars); rampant abuse of economic power like evictions, overleases and increased taxation; and forms of religious humiliation by landlords which included destroying mosques and burial grounds, and desecrating the Quran — have argued how both economy and religion need to be engaged with while studying Malabar’s agrarian history or events like 1921.

I would press this further to suggest that it is also urgent to understand how landlord oppression almost always took religious (in this instance savarna Hindu) and casteist forms. If the Mappilla utilised a religious idiom to resist landlordism, then the landlords’ attacks against cultivators also often assumed a religious (Hindu) form. Unless the caste and religious nature of landlordism (almost 85% of landlords in the area were savarna Hindu) is not understood, it will always seem as though the Mappilla Muslim cultivators were the only ones spurred on by religious fervour.

In fact, much of the scholarship reveals the problems of lumping the Mappilla into an undifferentiated group of ‘believers’. However, there are no equivalent studies focusing on the ways in which the savarna Hindu were constituted by their beliefs and practices, even though so much of this history reveals precisely that.

Colonial discourse

Finally, while reading Ram Madhav’s views on 1921 as a precursor of the Taliban, and the ICHR’s haste in expunging the names of the Mappilla martyrs, I was struck by how the Sangh’s views were reminiscent of the British officials’, especially those of the police. From the 19th century onwards, colonial officials in Malabar use the term ‘fanatic’ to describe the Mappilla, so much so that by 1921 we find that it had been assimilated effortlessly into their vocabulary.

Alongside, colonial official discourse referred to Mappilla attacks on landlords and state officials as “outrages”, and a particular region in Ernad (one of the taluks where the protests were fierce) as the “fanatical zone.” The District Superintendent of Police, Hitchcock, in his ‘secret history’ of 1921, speaks of the Mappilla “yapping like dogs” inside a mosque. In others words, a close reading of official discourse reveals how histories of racism and Islamophobia were intrinsic to the ways in which the colonial officials, especially the police, perceived the Mappilla.

And now we find that the Sangh seems to following in the footsteps of the coloniser, both in their linguistic usages, and in the stereotypes they employ, while speaking about Muslims in India.

The British attempted to ‘divide and rule’ India, and their primary line of division was religious. The Sangh wishes to ‘divide and erase’, thereby rendering invisible Islam and its many histories on the subcontinent.  They hope that this will obliterate the ways in which Islam is essential to understanding India, its culture and its many ways of life.

The best way to respond to this is to increase and amplify serious, well-grounded research. And what could be better than building on existing historical studies on 1921 with research based on the many new sources now identified by a newer generation of scholars. This will greatly enrich our understanding of the intricate histories of religion, politics, agrarian violence and state surveillance that is at the heart of the Mappilla rebellion.

(The writer is Director, Kerala Council for Historical Research, Thiruvananthapuram).

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