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The Mappilla Outbreaks: Ideology and Social Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Kerala

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 March 2011

Stephen F. Dale
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During the nineteenth and the early twentieth century, a series of violent outbreaks erupted in the rural areas of Malabar District in northern Kerala. The outbreaks were conducted by small groups of Mappillas, the indigenous Muslims of Kerala. At the time they occurred, these “Moplah Outrages”—as the outbreaks were gothically labeled by British administrators—were the subject of extensive debate and wildly divergent interpretations. However, apart from unpublished official correspondence, little has been written about these incidents; and the few discussions that have appeared, rather than analyzing the outbreaks, have instead cited them as evidence to support a simplistic Marxist interpretation of South Indian history. This ideological approach is characteristic of the various works written by the former Prime Chief Minister of Kerala State, E. M. S. Nambudiripad. It is also clearly evident and conveniently epitomized in the most recent article dealing with the outbreaks, Kathleen Gough's “Peasant Resistance and Revolt in South India.” Professor Gough argues that the outbreaks were essentially an economic phenomenon, that they were directly and solely a response to radical changes induced in the agricultural economy of Malabar District by British administration. In fact, there is no doubt that British rule substantially altered the agricultural economy of Malabar District. Land became a marketable commodity, and landholders became land-owners with new rights which they could and did invoke in British courts to coerce their tenants. Yet while these changes helped to trigger some Mappilla outbreaks and influenced the course of others, these incidents were an extremely complicated phenomenon; and none of them was solely the result of economic pressures.

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The Journal of Asian Studies , Volume 35 , Issue 1 , November 1975 , pp. 85 - 97
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Copyright © The Association for Asian Studies, Inc. 1975

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References

1 See, for example, The National Question in Kerala (Bombay: People's Publishing House, 1952)Google Scholar and A Short History of the Peasant Movement in Kerala (Bombay: Peoples Publishing House, 1943)Google Scholar.

2 Pacific Affairs, Vol. XVI, No. 4 (Winter 1968–69), pp. 526–54.

3 These figures include only actual attacks. Nair, C. Gopalan, in his book The Moplah Rebellion, 1921 (Calicut: Norman Printing Bureau, 1923)Google Scholar, lists both suspected incidents as well as outright attacks.

4 The exception was an outbreak that occurred north of Calicut in Kottayam taluq. There were also substantial Mappilla populations resident in the semi-autonomous princely states of Cochin and Travancore, but there is no evidence of similar outbreaks in these two states.

5 It was the religious quality of the outbreaks that led British administrators to distinguish these incidents from other violent crimes in which Mappillas were involved.

8 The outbreaks are evaluated this way for two reasons. First, official reports often do not contain sufficient information to even begin to judge the motives of all the participants. Second, in some outbreaks—particularly those of several days' duration, many Mappillas joined after the initial attack, for reasons that were quite distinct from those that motivated the original participants.

7 Kartodirdjo, Sartono, Protest Movements in Rural Java (Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 5Google Scholar.

8 One of the most striking anomalies of the ryotwari land settlement, administered by British officials throughout much of South India, was its Malabar variant. There the system—which at least by implication was to grant the title to land to the actual cultivator—recognized as ryots the janmis, landholders who were often functionally indistinct from substantial Bengali zamindars. This was a triumph of definition, more than anything else. First, the ryot (ra'iyat, an Arabic term usually referring to a peasant or tenant farmer) was defined by the Madras Board of Revenue as “that class among them [the agriculturalists] who employ, superintend and sometimes assist the laborer, and who are everywhere farmers of the country and creatures and payers of the land revenue.” Then the Board went on to state that: “In the province of Malabar the ex-elusive usufruct of the soil is known by the term jenm or birthright.” Madras Record Office, Malabar District Records, 1818, Board of Revenue, pp. 1, 5.

9 The principal janmi was defined as one holding more than one hundred parcels of land in one amsam (parish). India Office Library, Malabar Special Commission, 1881–82, Malabar Land Tenures, Report, I, pp. lv-lvi.

10 The imprecise term agriculturalist is used here because of the way that agricultural occupations are listed in the Madras Census Reports. For example, in the 1921 report the listings are: “Cultivators; owners and tenants; Landowners and tenants; and agricultural laborers.” Boag, G. T., Census of India 1921, XIII (Madras: Government Press, 1922), I, p. 221Google Scholar.

11 Madras Record Office, Moplah Outrages Correspondence, I, Letter from H. V. Conolly, 30 April 1841. There are five volumes of Moplah Outrages Correspondence. Three, which include material between 1841 and 1849, have not been published. Two volumes, under the title Correspondence on Moplah Outrages in Malabar, containing material on incidents between 1849 and 1859, were published by the Madras Government for official purposes in 1863. Correspondence on outbreaks that occurred after 1860 are found in the Government Orders of various departments.

12 H. V. Conolly, who was Collector from 1840 until his assassination by a group of Mappillas in 1855, prepared a series of perceptive reports on the outbreaks during the 1840s; taken as a whole, they probably represent the most balanced assessment of these incidents during the nineteenth century. Conolly observed that the outbreaks often involved conflict over land, but he also recognized the crucial role of religious inspiration and ceremony in the attacks.

13 Logan, William, Malabar (Madras: Government Press, 2nd ed., 1951), I, p. 580Google Scholar. Logan summarized his detailed official report in this volume.

14 Malabar Special Commission, 1881–82, Malabar Land Tenures, Report I, p. xxvii. The disproportionate number of petitions from Mappillas can be explained only by the Muslims relative freedom from the social and religious sanctions Nambudri and Nair janmis were able to invoke to coerce their Hindu tenants. To the Mappillas, janmis of these castes possessed no special sanctity; on the contrary, to them these landlords were infidels.

15 Ibid., p. ix.

16 Ibid., p. xxxix.

17 The provisions of the 1887 Act are summarized in Innes, C. A. and Evans, F. B. (eds.), Gazetteer of Malabar and Anjengo (Madras: Government Press, 1908), p. 237Google Scholar.

18 Madras Record Office, Judicial G.O. No. 2374, 1 October 1894.

19 A survey of agrarian policy in Kerala, with special sections on Malabar District, is provided by Varghese, T. C., Agrarian Change and Economic Consequences, Land Tenures in Kerala 1850–1950 (Madras: Allied Publishers, 1970)Google Scholar.

20 The majority of the Mappillas were, however, concentrated in the southern taluqs. They were in the majority only in Ernad taluq. See Boag, G. T., Census of India, 1921, XIII (Madras: Government Press, 1922), Part 2, p. 350Google Scholar.

21 The principal Mappilla religious functionaries were known as tangals and mussaliars. The tangals, frequently Arabs, were the principal leaders of the community. They acted as qadis and imams of the more important mosques. The mussaliars were generally less well-educated men, who can be characterized in traditional Islamic terms as mullas, men qualified to interpret the Quran.

22 Madras Record Office, Moplah Outrages Correspondence, IV, p. 212.

23 Madras Record Office, Moplah Outrages Correspondence, IV, p. 276.

24 See Khan's, Muin ud-Din AhmadFara'idi Movement (Karachi: Pakistan Historical Society, 1965)Google Scholar.

25 Madras Record Office, Malabar District Records, 1817, Letters Received, Police, pp. 435–36.

26 As the Dutch Islamicis t C. Snouck Hurgronje showed, the hajj itself revivified Muslim consciousness and helped to disseminate ideas oflslamic orthodoxy. See Mekka, translated by J. H. Monahan (Leyden: E. J. Brill, 1931).

27 Madras Record Office, Malabar District Records, Magisterial, 1840, pp. 57–64.

28 Madras Record Office, Moplah Outrages Correspondence, p. 154.

29 The town of Tirurangadi is directly across the Kadalundi river from the Mambram shrine in Ernad taluq, and the names of the shrine and town are often used interchangeably in the sources when referring to the Mambram Tangals' activities.

30 Madras Record Office, Moplah Outrages Correspondence, IV, p. 355.

31 Madras Record Office, Judicial G.O.'s 1169–74, 2 May 1885.

32 Kondotti is located about ten miles northeast of Tirurangadi, in Ernad taluq. The Kondotti Tangal was descended from a Persian who had apparently arrived in Malabar during the latter half of the eighteenth century. However, there is no definite proof that the Kondotti Mappillas were Shi'ites, as the Ponnani faction often claimed. See Innes, Gazetteer of Malabar and Anjengo, pp. 415–16.

33 Madras Record Office, Judicial G.O.'s 1169–74, 2 May 1885, p. 10. There is no record that the Ponnani Mappillas actually carried out this threat.

34 The religious significance of Ramadan is summarized by von Grunebaum, G. E. in Muhammadan Festivals (New York: Henry Schuman, 1951), pp. 51–67Google Scholar.

35 A description of various kinds of moulids is contained in McPherson's, J. W.Moulids of Egypt (Egyptian Saint's Days) (Cairo: N. M. Press, 1941)Google Scholar. C. A. Innes describes the moulid in Malabar in Gazetteer of Malabar and Anjengo, p. 125.

36 The “Baank “may possibly be the Persian word bang, a cry or shout. The bang-i-namaz is one phrase for the call to prayer.

37 Madras Record Office, Judicial G.O.'s Nos. 1737–1740, II November 1898, p. 25. The use of Sayyid here is an obvious misprint for sahid.

38 For another frontier as a germinating ground for a similar ideal, see Wittck, Paul, The Rise of the Ottoman Empire (London: Royal Asiatic Society, 1938)Google Scholar, Chapter III: Emirate of March Warriors to Empire.” I am preparing an article explaining the growth of the “frontier” ideology among Malabar Muslims.

39 The South Indian Muslim Zain al-Din al-Ma'bari described the conflict with the Portuguese, in his late sixteenth-century Arabic history, the Tubfat al-Mujahidin, translated and edited by Muhammad Husayn Nainar, Bulletin of the Department of Arabic, Persian and Urdu No. 5. (Madras: University of Madras, 1942). He encourages his (presumably Muslim) readers to view this struggle as a jihad. The relationship between these commercial wars and the predominantly rural nineteenth-century outbreaks cannot be discussed in detail in this article, but it is analyzed in my unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, “Islam and Social Conflict: The Mappillas of Malabar, 1498–1922” (Berkeley, 1972).

40 Madras Record Office, Tellicherry Diaries XIII, 1741–42.

41 See F. Fawcett, “War Songs of the Mappillas of Malabar,” Indian Antiquary, November 1901, pp. 499–508.

42 Madras Record Office, Moplah Outrages Correspondence, IV, pp. 1–3. The desire for martyrdom also seems the best explanation for the fact that in some incidents, particularly the longer ones, many Mappillas who died in the final climactic, suicidal charge had not participated in an attack on either Hindus or Christians but rather joined at the last moment. Thus, in the 1849 outbreak—the second largest of the nineteenth century—the majority of those who died as sahids had not been involved with the original group at all. Apart from the religious explanation, there is another analytical tool to interpret this behavior: the studies of the social and cultural context of suicide. I am now preparing a second article examining the outbreaks from this perspective.

43 A similar type of religious suicide among Muslims in a somewhat analogous situation in Indonesia is described by Siegal, James in The Rope of God (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), pp. 82–83Google Scholar.

43 For data on earlier phases of this revolt, see: Madras Record Office, Malabar District Records, 1800, Political, p. 280 passim.

44 Madras Record Office, Moplah Outrages Correspondence, IV, p. 101.

45 I am preparing an article discussing, in detail, the eighteenth-century agrarian background of the outbreaks.