ONE OF THE HINDU PRINCES OF CALICUT COMMANDED EVERY FISHERMAN IN HIS REALM TO BRING UP ONE SON FOR ISLAM
his wedding ceremony to rescue the abducted girl, but is himself killed. His body, cut into pieces, washes up on different parts of the coast, where great miracles follow, in what perhaps bears unspoken links to the Hindu story of Sati whose scattered limbs are worshipped through shrines across India. Either way, though the Portuguese prevailed, it was the Mappilla who was honourable, his adversaries merely agents of greed and disgrace.
The emphasis on honour, however, barely obscures the existential crisis of the Mappilas in the colonial age. By the middle of the 18th century, with few exceptions, the community was poor, many Mappilas tenants of Hindu lords. When Hyder Ali and Tipu of Mysore conquered Malabar, these Hindus fled while the Mappilas collaborated with the invaders. But when defeat came to Tipu, the tables were turned: the old guard returned, and with them arrived British rule.
Through the 19th century instances of violence were many, driven to a degree by economics – a fifth of the land revenue in northern Kerala came from 86 landlords, only two of whom were not Hindus. Mappila tenants could be evicted at will, and as one rebel declared in 1843, “it is impossible for people to live quietly while the…[landlords] treat us in this way.” But to this was also added extremism born from a group of fanatics – between 1836 and 1919, of the 350 Mappilas who took up arms against landlords and committed acts of murder, only 28 were captured alive. The rest, some as young as fifteen, were on a determined path to death, seeking to become shahid, following the strange passion that is today called jihadism. As one man taken alive declared: “No tongue can tell what the good things are which we shall enjoy in heaven…all sorts of delicious things.”
In 1921-22, during a massive rebellion against the British as well as the feudal class, as many as 2,400 Mappilas were killed and nearly 40,000 surrendered when the revolt folded in disaster. That, then, was the last major communal episode in Kerala.
A LESSON LEARNT
In the decades that followed, lessons were learnt, and religious extremism was shunned. When in 1969 a Muslim-majority district was created in Malappuram, there were temporary fears that this would be a “Moplastan” within India, a local manifestation of the two-nation theory. But that was not to be, and instead the Mappilas returned to a previous history from a more confident age, where a mosque could donate land for a temple, and a temple could host an iftar for local Muslims.
There are today fears of radicalism imported from abroad, but then there is also the force of heritage and the wisdom of the past. Challenges might emerge, but, after all, there remain in Kerala those wonderful old songs, where a Mappila could join hands with a Hindu, and even Vararuchi could have a Muslim son.