The Moplah Rebellion: The Outbreak of the Rebellion, the Course of Events and the Suppression PART II

The Memorial for Henry Vallentine Conolly

A look at the world of politics, statecraft, diplomacy and books

PART II

The Moplah Rebellion that shook parts of southern Malabar in 1921 was in many crucial ways a continuation of the Moplah Outrages which erupted with unremitting regularity throughout the nineteenth century. At least 45 serious instances of violence are documented in the two massive volumes entited Correspondence on the Moplah Outrages published by the Madras Government soon after the 1894 Outrages.  The assasination of Henry Vallentine Conolly in 1855 was yet the most serious assault on the Administration and was instigated by an influential Moplah leader, Syid Fasal Pukkoya Tangal, the Koran Reader at Mambrum Mosque. The involvement of religious personalities like Ali Musseliar,Variyankunnath Kunjahammad, Konara Mohammad Koya Tangal in the 1921 Rebellion underscores the continuity with the events and trends of the nineteenth century. In fact, in terms of chronology itself the organization of Khilafat Committees in Malapuram, Tirunangudi, Ponnani and other places in South Malabar predated the announcement of Gandhi extending support to the Khilafat Movement as part of the Non Cooperation Movement. It is one of the many tricks of contemporary historiography to conflate the two and make it appear as though the Moplah Rebellion was an outcome of the Gandhian call to Civil Disobedience and Non Cooperation. It is on record that Gandhi's nominee to the Khilafat Committee Shri Narayana Menon   hardly commanded any respect from the agitators.

The Malabar Knife

The outbreak of violence thoughout the nineteenth century had the charecteristic feature of religious violence with the oath of becoming a "shahid" being taken in the Mosque in the presence of a tangal, a ritual meal and a ritual dedication of the murder weapons. The use of the Malabar Knife, a sharp heavy baded curving cleaver with a keen penetrating end was ubiquitious in the Outrages committed in the 19th century that mere possession of them was enough for conviction according to the special legislation enacted to proscribe them: The Malabar War Knives Act 1854. Incidentally this Act was passed even before the brutal killing of Conolly. There is an unfortunate tendency in so called "progressive" historiography to downplay the religious ideology underpinning these acts of violence and ssimilate them to an undifferentiated "protest " politics and marinate that protest politics with what they consider a "subaltern consciousness". This kind of History Writing is both tendentious and false as it completely negates the historical reality underlying such events. Of course B R Ambedkar was not taken in by the fake ratiocinations trotted out by Gandhi and Nehru to explain away egregious acts of Violnce carried out individually and collectively by the Moplahs. The Newspapers of the day carried reports of what was happening and yet Gandhi and his cohorts did not once condemn the colod blodded fanatical killings. Lord Curzon estimated that 10,000 indigenous persons and around 2,500 Moplahs were killed and around 1000 forcibly converted to the Moplah religion of Islam. He gave these figures in the House of Commons and they seem accurate. 

The Tirurangadi Mosque

The immediate provocation, if provocation was needed, for the outbreak of the Rebellion was the defeat of the Ottoman Empire and the break up of the Middle East Possessions, particularly the uncertainity over the fate of Mecca and Medina. The abolition of the office  of Caliph and "Protector of the Holy Cities" adopted by the Ottoman Emperor was discussed in the Karachi Conference where the idea of protests in India were first discussed. Hence it is clear from the sequence of events that the context of the Rebellion was Religion to which Gandhi in his great wisdom added a dose of heady politics transforming the Khilafate Movement into a mass movement of Moslems asserting their collective identity thereby starting the jaggernaut that finally led to Partition and Nehru's "tryst with destiny".

From April 1920 onwards, long before Gnadhi's call, Khilafate Committees began to be organized in several parts of India where the Shafi School of Islamic Jurisprudence held sway. The highest concentration was in the Malabar and Khalifat Committees were set up in Wallavanad, Ponnani, Ernad and Tirurangudi. The last palce hled particular significance for the rebels as it was there that the rebels of 1894 outrages were burried. Contemporary accounts speak of men being mobilized by the beat of drums and women encouraging even young boys to go out and prove their manhood by killing. This feature of the Moplah Rebellion is rather peculiar and needs further research. The Moplah Rebellion began on the 20th of August 1921 and continued in fits and starts until December of that year when the rebellion was crushed. The Mappila Rebellion Report  provides all the details of the events that transpired. Unfortunately most "Historians" prefer to use oral sources and vernacular material to official records. The vernacular material come prefigured with an interpretation tht is usually attrractive to the so called "progressive" historians, and they accept that version without any dissent. The Government Records, however, document in considerable detail the horrendous suffering endured by the indigenous people of Malabar during those terible days.

The Moplah Rebellion and its History: Real, Invented and Imagined

A look at the world of politics, statecraft, diplomacy and books

PART I

Importnat events in History appear in three distinct forms, avatrs: the real, true and experienced in reality, the invented one that lives in popular memory, around which ballads and folk tales are created and become the collective memory of a social or political group and then there is the imagined, the most dangerous of all. Imagined events are those that are curated for the purpose of political propaganda,a tool for collective mobilization and political legitimation either for appropriating political power or for subverting it. The Moplah Rebellion, unfortunately, has a great deal of the Invented Histories and Imagined Histories, but little by way of actual lived Historically verified and accurate Historical narrative, In India, professional writing on matters Historical are deeply marinated in political ideology that sustains the National consensus of 1947 one that ignored the reality of events and took refuge in slogans, labels and rhetoric. Asking questions about the past invited retribution from the High Priests of Secularism who were  ever ready with their fatwas against any overt questioning of the accepted narrative. Thus the Moplah Rebellion shorn of his History of gruesome massacres, ethnic cleansing barbaric killings has been domesticated in Indian Historiography of what pretends to be "Modern History"as a part of the National Movement, the Khilafate Movement encouraged by Mohandas Gandhi and  his two Muslim collaborators, Shaukat Ali and Mohamad Ali.

Who were the Moplahs? The Moplahs were a non indigenous group of Arabs who settled in the Malabar coast sometime in the ninth or thenth century when the trade between Malabar and Arabia was quite propsperous and the Arabs were the only major community involved. Though we do have in the Geninza Records evidence of Jewish participation in the trade, the Arabs dominated and  their kinsmen along the Malabar coast who had married local women were participants in this trade. Added to this was the strong ideological ties built between the Hwadramath region of Aden/Yemen Peninsula and throughout the medieval period Moplahs and their Hwadramath interculators were riding the Arabian Sea surf towrads commercial and maritime prosperity. We do not hear of any outrage committed by the Moplahs during the period when they dominated trade, shipping and commerce. With the coming of the Portuguese inthe late fifteenth century and  with the imposition of the "cartaz" or kagaz or permission system by the Portuguese, Moplah participation in the inter maritime shipping and commerce of the Indian Ocean declined rather sharply. Kagaz nahin dikayenge , did not work with the Portuguese and given the fact International Law was only an extension of Cannonical Law in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Portuguese treated the moplahs as pirates: rounded them up and sank their boats along with the cargo. Grand dreams of a coalition against the Portuguese first of several "infidels" in the ever expanding Moplah list of enemies, ended in the first political justification for an aggressive war against the Portuguese set out by one  Zainuddin al-Malabari, a Hwardamath scholar settled in Malabar and perhaps educated in Cairo.  His Tufat al Mujaahuddin was the first articulation if "jihad" for purely political and commercial  purposes. Nothing came of these fantasies. 

There is a great deal of fanciful histories of the Moplah Rebellion which casts tha Moplahs as "peasants". Dilip Menon in his undreadable book has argued at length about how the Moplahs constitued a "community of religion" and were oppressed  savagely by the jeminns. We  have already shown that MOplahs were essentially a maritime trading or commercial community. Not a peasant community or society. A false history is created by using the category of "peasant" to analyse the Moplah  Rebellion. In the southern part of Malabar, during the last decade of the eighteenth century, when Tippu Sultan expanded into the region his savagery aganist the Nambudris, the Tiyyas and the Nairs resulted in a large exodus of indigenous people from the region and since the Moplahs supported Tippu Sultan in his aggressive war of expansion they were rewarded with some "land rights" in the tangled skein of land rights studied meticulously by Logan. And when East India Company defeated Tipu in 1799 many of the old indigenous land holders returned to reclaim their possessions. And this was the first of many factors that lay at root of the violence unleashed by the Moplahs against the indigenous people of the land.

TO BE CONTINUED in PART II