Mappila Muslims

Mappila Muslim, often shortened to Mappila, formerly anglicized as Moplah/Mopla and historically known as Jonaka/Chonaka Mappila or Moors Mopulars/Mouros da Terra and Mouros Malabares, in general, is a member of the Muslim community of same name found predominantly in Kerala and Lakshadweep Islands, in southern India. Muslims of Kerala make up 26.56% of the population of the state (2011), and as a religious group they are the second largest group after Hindus (54.73%). Mappilas share the common language of Malayalam with the other religious communities of Kerala.

Quotes

• That at least for a hundred years before the Moplah Outrage of 1921 the region witnessed frequent acts of fanaticism by the Moplahs was observed as follows by a three-judge special tribunal constituted in Calicut to prosecute the offenders of the Moplah Outrage of 1921:
  For the last hundred years at least, the Moplah community has been disgraced from time to time by murderous outrages. In the past these have been due to fanaticism. They generally blazed out in the Ernad Taluk (county), where the Moplahs were, for the most part, proselytes drawn from the dregs of the Hindu population. These men were miserably poor and hopelessly ignorant, and their untutored minds were particularly susceptible to the inflammatory teaching that Paradise was to be gained by killing Kufirs. They would go out on the warpath, killing Hindus, no matter whom, and seek death in hand-to-hand conflict with the troops. In some cases they may have been inspired by hatred of a particular landlord, but no grievance seems to have been really necessary to start them on their wild careers.
  • John J. Banninga, ‘The Moplah Rebellion of 1921’, The Muslim World, October 1923, vol. 13, no. 4, pp. 379–387, p. 380. quoted from J. Sai Deepak, India, Bharat and Pakistan - THE CONSTITUTIONAL JOURNEY OF A SANDWICHED CIVILISATION, 2022

• ... I would say that the Hindu coolies of the Mohammedan tenants of the Brahmin and Nair landlords are worse off than their employers. I have nowhere seen such abject servility as in the Cherma of Malabar.
  • John J. Banninga, ‘The Moplah Rebellion of 1921’, The Muslim World, October 1923, vol. 13, no. 4, pp. 379–387, p. 380. quoted from J. Sai Deepak, India, Bharat and Pakistan - THE CONSTITUTIONAL JOURNEY OF A SANDWICHED CIVILISATION, 2022

• About a fourth part of the inhabitants of Malabar are Moplahs, or Mahomendans, descended from the Moors and Arabians, who have settled there at different times, and married Malabar women: they are the principal merchants in the country, both for foreign and home trade: many are proprietors of trading vessels, navigated by Mahomedan commanders and seamen, in which they make an annual voyage to the Persian and Arabian Gulfs; and after disposing of pepper, cassia, cardamoms, cotton-cloth coir-ropes, and other productions of Malabar, they return with coffee, drugs, dates, and dried fruits. Those on the sea-coast use a corrupt language between the Arabic and Malabar: the Koran and the few books they possess are written in Arabic. The Moplahs engaged in commerce, and enjoying an intercourse with other people, are tolerably courteous and orderly; these in the interior, who are too proud to work or engage in agricultural pursuits, are generally an idle worthless race; parading about the country with a broadsword, or murdering time, in one of the swings already mentioned. These are of a most turbulent revengeful spirit, prone to mischief, especially against the Nairs, whom they consider as infidels, proud and haughty as themselves. When intoxicated with bhang, or opium, they frequently run amuck, and in a dreadful state of phrenzy, murder every person they meet, until they are overpowered and destroyed.
  The Nairs are at constant variance with the Moplahs; and the king of Travencore, jealous of their ambitious revengeful temper, keeps them in great subjection, and levies frequent contributions on their property; to which they reluctantly submit, from knowing they would experience the same treatment from other governments.
  • Forbes, James, Oriental Memoirs Selected from a Series of Familiar Letters Written During Seventeen Years Residence in India, Gian Publishing House, 1988, 4 vol., first published 1813.quoted from Jain, M. (editor) (2011). The India they saw: Foreign accounts. New Delhi: Ocean Books. Volume IV Chapter17

• The former group [North Mapiillas] was seen as relatively more upwardly mobile whereas the latter group [south Mapillas], according to Robert Hardgrave, was: ... entirely separate from those of the rest of Malabar ... The low state of their intelligence, the subservience in which they had hitherto lived, and the absence of any men of learning to instruct them in their new religion, even were they capable of understanding, all tended to provide a race which would prove an easy prey to fanaticism and lawlessness.
  • Robert L. Hardgrave, Jr, ‘The Mappilla Rebellion, 1921: Peasant Revolt in Malabar’, Modern Asian Studies, 1977, vol. 11, no. 1, pp. 57– 99, p. 60.ff quoted from J. Sai Deepak, India, Bharat and Pakistan - THE CONSTITUTIONAL JOURNEY OF A SANDWICHED CIVILISATION, 2022

• It is therefore highly probable that Muslim traders, who frequented the coastal regions, near the important ports, lived there for long or short periods, and some of them might even have settled there on more or less permanent basis. But there is no reliable evidence to show, as has been maintained by some, that they settled in Malabar coast in large numbers in the seventh century A.D. Such a theory is mainly based on the traditions current among the Moplahs, Navayats, and Labbes of South India, but these are on a par with similar traditions current among Christians in the same region which have been rejected by almost all students of history. ... These are all very late traditions and cannot, in any case, be regarded as evidence for large Muslim settlements in Malabar in the seventh century, as contended by some Francis Day, who has recorded some of these traditions current in Malabar and studied the history of the Moplahs, is of opinion that the ‘“Muhammadans obtained no great footing until the ninth century A.D.” (456-7)
  • Volume 3: The Classical Age [320-750 A.D.]

• The Mappillas and other South-Indian Muslims, whatever their date of first settlement, emerged from obscurity several centuries after the rise of Islam. Probably they originally inserted themselves in local society by a special Islamic institution which was particularly vigorous among certain tribes of South Arabia and is still in vogue to­ day among the Muslims of the Maldives and Calicut, and which was called m utca, a ‘temporary marriage’.22 By this means they may have ensured themselves of a spouse in the harbours which they frequented, and this was of extra importance in Malabar on account of the strong taboos on commensality which developed here among the Hindus. The women with whom such marriages were contracted were often, if not always, of low fishermen and mariner castes. Their offspring multiplied in the harbour towns and belonged to the mother, in conformity to the matriarchal custom of Malabar, but was raised in Sunni Islam.
  • Wink A Al-Hind, The Making of the Indo-Islamic World. Volume 1 p 71ff

• Thus the Mappillas (Malayalam Mapila\ Tamil Mappilla, a contrac­tion of maha, ‘big’ and pilla, ‘child’, hence ‘big children’) grew as a foreign community mixed with the lowest castes of Malabari natives, emerging in about the thirteenth century as the privileged intermediaries of trade with the Islamic world. As Muslims they began to differentiate themselves from the Jewish and Christian business enterprises from the eleventh century, when the Colas sacked Quilon, disrupted the organi­zation of the trade guilds, and redirected the trade to the smaller ports. In terms of their social function, therefore, the Mappilla Muslims were merely the latest group of outsiders who came to dominate the overseas commerce of Malabar, taking over the role of the Greeks and Romans and their successors, the Nestorian Christians and the Jews. Since anti­quity, in fact, maritime activity had largely been in the hands of for­ eigners. On the other hand, the stereotype ritual isolation and the unusually rigid caste barriers and concepts of pollution of Malayali society were a relatively novel phenomenon, traces of which do not ap­pear before the eighth century. Such ‘brahmanization’ of the social order as occurred in the early medieval period adversely affected the still relatively open maritime orientation of Malabar in the earlier centuries, when Buddhism and Jainism held strong positions. It was in the period of the Kulashekhara of Mahadayapuram, in the eighth to twelfth cen­turies, that the natives of Malabar became almost exclusively agrarian-oriented and brahmans rose to dominance who fostered an increasingly obsessive thalassophobia among the caste Hindus, while permitting the Jews and the Muslims to seize the overseas trade.23 It is no coincidence that the implantation of Muslim communities becomes better visible the more caste prohibitions against trans-oceanic travel and trade seem to obtain a hold on the Hindu population and turns it to agrarian pursuits and production, away from trade and maritime transport. This, at least, is what the Tuscans and Venetians observe in the thirteenth century.
  • Wink A Al-Hind, The Making of the Indo-Islamic World. Volume 1 p 72

• The Mappillas, then, developed intimate ties with Hindu kings and with Hindu society, but in spite of such ties they made vigorous at­ tempts to prove the pure Arab origin of their religion and thereby to enhance their status vis-a-vis other Muslim groups, particularly the descendants of the Afghan and Turkish invaders of North India. As Buchanan noted in the early nineteenth century: ‘Being of Arabic ex­ traction, they look upon themselves as of more honourable birth than the Tartar Mussulmans of North India who of course are of a contrary opinion’.37 Some Mappillas say they have ancestors who escaped from the terror
  • Wink A Al-Hind, The Making of the Indo-Islamic World. Volume 1 p 76

• Deflating the peasant rebellion theory, Wood too says:29 Almost without exception, every British official concerned with interpreting the Moplah outbreak was prepared to concede that all was not well with landlord–tenant relations in Malabar, and the grievance over insecurity of tenure was repeatedly stressed by them. However, explaining outbreaks as anti-jenmi (anti-landlord) manifestations posed difficult problems with which those Malabar Collectors most responsive to tenant grievance grappled with only very partial success. In particular, since Hindu tenants and labourers admittedly suffered quite as much, if not more, from the great power of the big jenmi, why were outbreaks confined to the Muslim community? Moreover, why should some of the assaults have been directed against Hindus who were not only not landlords, but members of the slave caste at least as vulnerable to the exercise of jenmi power as many of the assailants themselves? Failure by those who stressed the agrarian explanation for outbreaks adequately to answer such questions undermined their case for legislation to grant occupancy rights to tenants, a measure they urged as essential if the Moplah problem were to be solved.
  • Conrad Wood, ‘The Moplah Rebellion of 1921–22 and Its Genesis’, PhD dissertation, University of London, 1975, pp. 32–33. quoted from J. Sai Deepak, India, Bharat and Pakistan - THE CONSTITUTIONAL JOURNEY OF A SANDWICHED CIVILISATION, 2022

• The Moplas of Malabar were a race of Mahomedans active in their worldly calling, energetic in the pursuit of gain, thriving, and increasing in wealth and number; but they had always been over-bearing and intolerant, had hesitated at no violence in endeavouring to obtain their ends, and for many years past had been but too notorious for the perpetration of outrages of the most atrocious character. Prior to 1841 these outrages were the work of single fanatics, without open aid or sympathy from others; but since that year, bodies of Moplas had, in open day, attacked Hindoos of wealth and respectability, murdered them under circumstances the most horrible, burnt their houses or given them up to pillage, desecrated Hindoo temples, and had wound up their crimes by throwing away their lives in desperate resistance to the Police and the Military. These outrages had gradually become more sanguinary and more difficult of repression; greater numbers had joined in them; it had become necessary to employ larger bodies of troops, and to call in the aid of European Soldiers, when in the beginning of 1852, an outrage occurred in all respects more deplorable and formidable than any that had preceded it: men, women, and children were indiscriminately slaughtered, and the Government determined, at the recommendation of the Magistrate, the late Mr. Conolly, to appoint a Commissioner to investigate and report upon the causes of these outbreaks, and to advise the Government upon the means to be adopted for their repression.
  Before he proceeded to state the result of the enquiry then held, he would give a short abstract of one or two cases of outrage, in order that the Council might clearly know the kind of crime with which they were now requested to deal.
  In 1849 a party of Moplas attacked the residence of a Hindoo of high rank and importance, and seized possession of his temple situated on a commanding Hill; they numbered in all sixty-six, and held out for a period of nine days. Troops at an early period sent against them, but the few who ventured into action were repulsed with the loss of an officer and five men. They killed several persons with cold-blooded atrocity, and holding out to the last in the hope of winning the crown to martyrdom by dying in action against those whom they considered unbelievers, were finally destroyed by a Company of European Soldiers.
  In 1851 a case occurred in which the victims were mostly men of note. Four, with a servant, fell in one neighborhood, after which the criminals walked off about eight miles, and invaded the house of a man of eighty years of age, of large possessions and much consideration. He was brutally dragged out, and his body cut to pieces in the presence of his affrighted tenants. The criminals eventually amounted to nineteen; they held out for three days, repulsed a detachment of Native infantry, but were destroyed by a party of Europeans, four of whom were killed. In 1852 fifteen Moplas forced their way into the house of an influential landlord, butchered the whole of the inmates, consisting of fifteen persons, including women and children, and then plundered and burnt the house, an unusually large and substantial one; they then went from place to place, burning, killing, and wounding, and finally attacked the house of another large proprietor, by whose retainers, after a contest sustained for three quarters of an hour, they were despatched. Such was the nature of the outbreaks, into the cause of which the Government, in 1852, ordered that special enquiry should be made. The result of that enquiry was a report, which it was stated that in about ten years prior to 1852 there had been sixteen actual outbreaks, by Moplas, in which murder had been committed or attempted. In these sixteen outbreaks forty victims were killed and sixteen wounded, most of them desperately, and always with intent to kill; sixteen others were sought for but escaped; seventeen of those killed were Brahmins, of whom twelve perished in one house; eleven houses were burnt down, six pagodas partially destroyed, and six others injured and desecrated. The Commissioner made an elaborate enquiry, with the view of ascertaining what had led to these disastrous occurrences, and after avowing his entire disbelief of the existence of an oppression or wrong or injustice suffered by the Moplas at the hands of the Hindoos, he declared his opinion that the true incentive to them had been the most decided fanaticism. The victims or intended victims had all been Hindoos and their slayers or intended slayers all Moplas, who had carried out their purposes with the avowed object of seeking death in arms against those whom they considered unbelievers, with the view of including the joys of their fancied Paradise. The close unity of the Moplas in all that concerned their religion, and the jealousy and hatred of the Hindoos, which were common to them, led to the greatest sympathy when any fanatical outrage was committed. One Mopla would not betray another in matters wherein the honor or advantage of his caste was concerned, and the destruction of the criminals engaged in outrage had no deterring effect, because their crime, in lieu of causing shame, brought only glory. These were the circumstances under which Act XXIII of 1854 was passed by the Council …
  Since that Act was passed there had been but one crime such as those against which the law was pointed, and that was the murder, in 1855, of the Collector and Magistrate, Mr. Conolly, in revenge for his having been instrumental in deporting the Mopla High Priest, who had been found strongly to incite his disciples to outrage, to encourage them in crimes, and to give his sanction to and blessing on their perpetration. On the occurrence of this murder, the Act was at once enforced. The murderers, who, as usual would not be taken alive, were shot, their bodies were burnt in Jail, their property was confiscated, and heavy fines were collected from the inhabitants of their villages, and, although there was nothing in all this to compensate for the death of a public servant, one who, when still a Collector and Magistrate in the Provinces, had been nominated to a seat in the Government, the last of a band of brothers who all but one met a violent death—and nearly all met death in the service of their country—still it was some consolation to Mr. Conolly’s many friends, and he (Mr. Forbes) for one should always be proud to have been among their number, to eel (sic) that sudden death could have come to no one better prepared to meet it; it was also some satisfaction to know that the law once energetically enforced, had not again been broken, and that means had been found to crush the spirit of fanaticism which so long filled the Province of Malabar with dread.
  ... These Acts would expire with the present year, and it was the object of the Bill which he had now to introduce to continue them in force. The spirit of fanaticism which called them forth had not died out, it was but suppressed by the stringency of these laws, which were now, and which would be for many years to come, as essential to the peace of society as they were when first passed. All the local Officers were agreed upon the absolute necessity for the continuance of the present law, and he thought that in the few remarks that he had made, and in the papers which he should print with the Bill, the Council would find sufficient to warrant the measures which he proposed.
  • excerpts from the introductory remarks of H. Forbes when he moved the Bill in the Imperial Legislative Assembly on 30 April 1859 to continue the Moplah legislations of 1855:30 . https://www.eparlib.nic.in/bitstream/123456789/782948/1/ilcd_30- 04-1859.pdf, pp. 322–328. quoted from J. Sai Deepak, India, Bharat and Pakistan - THE CONSTITUTIONAL JOURNEY OF A SANDWICHED CIVILISATION, 2022

• Characteristically, the preparations for an outbreak involved the intending participants donning the white clothes of the martyr, divorcing their wives, asking those they felt they had wronged for forgiveness, and receiving the blessing of a Tangal, as the Sayyids or descendants of the Prophet are called in Malabar, for the success of their great undertaking.
  Once the outbreak had been initiated openly, by the murder of their Hindu victim, the participants would await the arrival of Government forces by ranging the countryside paying off scores against Hindus they felt had ill-used them or other Moplahs, burning and defiling Hindu temples, taking what food they needed, and collecting arms and recruits. Finally, as the Government forces closed in on them, a sturdy building was chosen for their last stand. Often the mansion of some Hindu landlord (frequently the residence of one of their victims) was selected, but Hindu temples, mosques, and other buildings were also used, the main criterion being, apparently, to avoid being captured alive. As a Moplah captured at Payyanad temple in 1898 put it, it was decided to die there ‘as it was a good building and we were afraid lest we would be shot in the legs and so caught alive’.
  By the time the Government forces had surrounded them, the outbreak participants had worked themselves into a frenzy by frequent prayers, shouting the creed as a war-cry and singing songs commemorating the events of past outbreaks, especially that of October 1843 in which 7 Moplahs armed mainly with ‘war knives’ scattered a heavily-armed detachment of sepoys with their charge. The climax of the drama came when they emerged from their ‘post’ to be killed as they tried to engage in hand-to-hand combat.
  Divergences from this ideal pattern were frequent, but the essence of the Moplah outbreak, demarcating it from other forms of violence, resided in the belief that participation was the act of a shahid or martyr and would be rewarded accordingly. As one outbreak participant (who receded at the last moment and was captured) said in explanation of why he and his associates ‘went out’ (i.e. participated in the outbreak): ‘I have heard people sing that those who ... fight and die after killing their oppressors, become shahids and get their reward. I have heard that the reward is “Swargam” (Paradise).’
  The pattern of the Moplah outbreak was dictated by the fact that participants had no intention of evading the heavy hand of justice. On the contrary, their objective was to compass their own destruction by hurling themselves in a suicidal charge against the forces sent to deal with them.
  In the words of a wounded Moplah captured at Manjeri temple in 1896: ‘We came to the temple intending to fight with the troops and die. That is what we meant to do when we started.’ The defining characteristic of the Moplah outbreak was devotion to death.
  • Critically, in his detailed thesis on the Moplah ‘Rebellion’, Conrad Wood narrates the manner of preparation for an outrage by the Moplahs as follows:31Conrad Wood, ‘The Moplah Rebellion of 1921–22 and Its Genesis’, PhD dissertation, University of London, 1975, pp. 12–14. quoted from J. Sai Deepak, India, Bharat and Pakistan - THE CONSTITUTIONAL JOURNEY OF A SANDWICHED CIVILISATION, 2022

• Here’s a relevant observation from William Logan’s Malabar Manual: Tirurangadi, the adhikari of which was killed, lay close to the residence of the Arab Tangal or High Priest who was generally credited with having incited the Mapillas to commit these outrages. The Tangal died shortly afterwards and was buried at the Mabram mosque situated on the river bank opposite Tirurangadi. Fanatics who intend to commit outrages, and those who committed them do, as a rule even now, proceed to this mosque to pray at the Tangal’s Shrine.
  • William Logan, Malabar Manual (Volume 1), Government Press, Madras, 1887, pp. 560–561. quoted from J. Sai Deepak, India, Bharat and Pakistan - THE CONSTITUTIONAL JOURNEY OF A SANDWICHED CIVILISATION, 2022

• How did the Thangals and the other religions leaders maintain the solidarity of the Moplah community? What idiom and language did they use in arousing a collective awareness? Did they provoke and incite their illiterate followers into hostility against the landed upper classes between 1830 and 1880? These are very important questions but difficult to answer in the absence of adequate source material. It is, however, certain that some Thangals did provoke some of their followers into physical violence and, in their own interests, tried to turn the anti-jenmi sentiments of the poor Moplah peasants into anti- Hindu sentiment.
  • D.N. Dhanagare, ‘Agrarian Conflict, Religion and Politics: The Moplah Rebellions in Malabar in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries’, Past & Present, February 1977, no. 74, pp. 112–141, p. 122. quoted from J. Sai Deepak, India, Bharat and Pakistan - THE CONSTITUTIONAL JOURNEY OF A SANDWICHED CIVILISATION, 2022

• Many analysts have noted that the massive growth in Moplah population is appalling and un-explainable in the ordinary course. According to the statistics given by Miller,(1976 Vol.11,Page 316) it was 42.8% during 1831-1851 and during 1891-1921 when the total population growth was 18% the growth in Moplah population was 35%.
  • Tirur Dinesh - Moplah Riots- (2021)