The Moplah Atrocities and National Memory: The Dictionary of Martyrs

The Moplah Rebellion

The Prime Minister Hon ble Narendra Modi released Volume V of the Dictionary of  Martyrs of India, a project of the Indian Council of Historical Research undertaken by the council when the Congress regime was in power. It speaks poorly of the plitical advice received by the Prime Minister that he was personally embarassed by being made party to the Dictionary which is full of names of the Khilafat rioters who indulged in wanton massacre of the indigenous population of the Malabar. Annie Besant and Dr B R Ambedkar both have drawn attention to cold blooded massacres of indigenous people belonging to the Nambudri, Nair, Tiyya and other social groups carried out by Moplah mobs which were agitating for the restoration of the Khalifate which  had been aboilished after the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire following the defeat in the War I (1914-1918). The Prime minister shuld have been warned about the contents of the Dictionary and he would have been saved the embarssment of having to answer for the excesses of an inept Historical Council which is clueless about such a sensitive issue.

Almost all contemporay accounts spek of the brutality of th Moplah hordes which killed wsith abandon after the Revolt began on August 20, 1921. What is really alarming is the fact that Moplah women were often seen near the site of the killings encouraging their men folk on. No wonder one of the prominent Moplah women leaders of the anti CAA riots in New Delhi publically acknowledged her debt to the Moplah Rebellion. Nearly 10,000 people were killed and that includes Mem Women and Childen. Annie Beasant and Dr Ambedkar were strident in their denunciation of the barbaric violence that accompanied the Rebellion. There are far too amny sourdes which record that pregnent women had ther stomachs ripped open and killed. Maybe in the interest of social harmony we may need to suppress the true horrors of the Moplah Rebellion but to make them "martyrs" for India is not just disingenous but rather fake narrative fabricated for political convenience.  "Are they human beings or Monsters?' asked Annie Beasant. Similarly Dr B R Ambedkar wrote in his Pakistan or the Partition of India :There was carnage,pillage, and outrage of every species perpetrated by the Hindus against the musallmans and Mussalmans against Hindus, more perhaps by the Musslamans against Hindus, than by Hindus against the Mussalmans. This bland statement recognises the enormity of the crimes that took place during those dark days and to thow a veil of amnesia over them and to justify and glorify the perpetrators of such henious crimes as "freedom fighters" and "martyrs" is itself a blatant atrocity and happening now when the Congress and its minions are not in power, adds insult to injury. The Government must dismiss the entire Council for this utterly biased and shameful publication. The response from Gandhi, who hijacked the Khilafat Movement and tried to pass it off as Non Cooperation Movement, was cynical to say the least: Be the Moplah, ever so bad, he wrote, they deserve to be treated as human beings. Not a word of condemnation for the naeless victims of the Malabar Horror called the Moplah Rebellion.  He went on to justify their violence in the follwing words: They are fighting for what they consider as religion and in a manner they consider religious. And such statments from a man regarded as the Apostle of Non Violence exposes the callous and thoughtless anner in which the Congress jumped into political agitations.

The Dictionary lists neraly 40 names of Moplah killers who by no stretch of the imagination can be called "martyrs".  Many of the 60 odd victims of the Tirur Wagon Disaster were convicts on their way to Bellary for internment in the Special Prison set up for Moplah convicts and several of them participated in the killings in Ponnani,Tannur, Pokkottur,Tirunangudi and even Calicut. Their death in the wagon was an accident and even these "accidental martyrs" are showcased as freedom fighters in this book launched by the Respcted Prime Minister. The Indian ouncil of Historical Reseach must be dismissed for this egresious act.

Eugen Hultzsch and the Rediscovery of India's Past

Dr Eugen Hultzsch

India's past seemed like a forgotten dream as ancient India did not write Historcial Chronicles in the manner in which the Western World did. Dates, Dynasties, Events, Kingdoms and Empires fade in and out of view like a vaudeville stuck in an erratic routine. Reflections upon the past, if it happened at all, took place against a literary tradition framed by the Great Epics and distorted images created by court poets, geneologists and bards. The situation was so full of dispair that Hegel even though that India was extra territorial to History and his favorite "pupil" Karl Marx even triumphantly declared that "India vegetates in the eeth of time". The person who rescued India from such charecterizations is Dr Eugen Hultzsch, a Prussian, who made India his Karma Bhumi. 

Eugen Hultzsch was born in Dresden on the 29th of March 1857 and died in Halle on the 16th of November 1927. During the course of his life he transformed the very study of Indian History by undertaking extensive and detailed researches on various aspects of Indian Epigraphy and Paleography,  His Inscriptions of Ashoka was the first major investigation towards establishing the chronology of the great emperor and the inter relationship between the Major and Minor Rock Edicts. Th text of the Inscriptions published by him have not been improved and till this day Historians plunder Hultzsch' work for material on the reign of this Maurayan Emperor. Unfortunately, in Indian Universities, thanks to the dominance of the Marxists who sought to make the younger generation as ignorant and dogmaic as themsevlves, ensured that training in Epigraphy and Paleography is abandoned. In India we have "Historians" like Romila Thapar and others who write on Ashoka without having read any of his Inscriptions in the original. If the Emperor is known today, it is largely due to Hultzsch.

Indian inscriptions on stone   and copper plate surfaces were known from the time of the Antiquarian, Col. Colin Mackenzie. While the more recent Vijayanagara epigraphs written in Telugu or Kannada scripts were read and published by administrator scholars like Elliot, Ravenshaw and others, early inscriptions especially in the Tamil region remained a closed book until Eugen Hultzsch arrived on the scene. On 21st of November 1886, Hultzsch took charge as the Epigraphist of the Archaeological Sorvey of India, Southern Circle. His remit was to document the rich corpus of epigraphs inscribed on the walls of Temples in the region and he undertook this task with vigour and great determination, ably assisted by V Venkkaya, his loyal assistant. The first major task that he undertook was to decipher and publish the inscriptions at Mamallapuram. He wrote in an article in Epigraphia Indica vol X thta "Mahabalipuram can be reached by boat from Buckingham Canal". How distant that seems when we imagine the scene today. Hultzsch collected all the inscriptions found in the site and published them in the very first volume of South Indian Inscriptions, a series that is still extant and has now reached volume 37. Dr.  S. Swaminathan has continued the tradition and has published 3 volumes of Chola Inscriptions in this series. The outstanding contribution of Hultzsch lay in his identification of the biruda, Atyantakama, with the King Narashimhavarman,a Pallava monarch. This method of dating monuments based on the inscriptions found inscribed on its surface or fabric has remained the backbone of ancient Indian Historiography. Hultzsch turned his attention to the Great Temple constructed by Rajaraja I (985-1014) at Tanjavur, his Capital. The Rajarajesvara Temple contains 56 Chola Inscriptions the majority of which were issued by the King and his immediate family. Hultzsch not only published all the Inscriptions found in the temple, but also translated them into English, a feat no other Epigraphist since has achieved  and published them in three volumes. Apart from these works, Hultzsch wrote extensive articles on important inscriptions in the flagship journal devoted to Indian Epigraphy, Epigraphia Indica. His attempt at recovering the dynastic succession of medieval dynasties like the Alupas, Rashtrakutas and the Chalukyas set the framework for the study of the medieval history of South India.

Dr Eugen Hultzsch arrived in India on October 22, 1884 by steamer sailing to Bombay, now Mumbai, from Trieste, Between 1884 and May 1885 he extensively toured the country in search of Sanskrit, Pali texts and documents. He presented two reports to Government on his discoveries and his Reports can still be read as specimens of critical texual criticism. Both his Reports are availbale on archive.org.  He paid particulat attention to the Saivite Mutts at Tiruvidaimaradur and Tiruvisainallur. His predecessor Brunell worked around the Saraswathi Mahal Library and Hultzsch extended the scope of his search. His notes sugget that the medieval period, particularly the Vijayanagara Period, witnessed the creation of a large corpus of commentaries on the various Srauta texts. The  reasons for this have not yetbeen ascertained. Using the colophons of the texts, Hultzsch notonly identified the author but endeavoured to fit him in a tree of texts and he is thus a pioneer in manuscript research in India. 

In the field of Numismatics, Eugen Hultzsch made a singular contribution by arranging the coins of the Madurai Sultans in a chronological framework. Starting with the enigmatic reference to moslem rulers in Madurai, a region traditionally associated with the Pandyas in the Rahela of Ibn Batutta, Hultzsch reconstructed the sequence of rulers almost to the end of the Sultanate follwing the attack by the Vijayanagara prince, Kumara Kampana. 

Looking back at the contribution of savants like Eugen Hultzsch it is certain that Edward Said was wrong when he postulated a direct link between knowledge and political power. It is certainly true that Hultzsch worked in a colonial framework but his contribution certainly trascended an imperial power structure. When Eugen Hultzsch returned to Europe he took with him 483 Sanskrit Manuscripts which he sold to the Bodleian Library, Oxford Universty.

He took up a Professorship in the field of Indology at halle University upon his retirement and died in that city where he is burried.