Book Shelf

Subaltern Studies: Muslims, Dalits, and the Fabrications of History

Edited by Shail Mayaram, MSS Pandian & Ajay Skaria, Permanent Black, Delhi 2005 Pp322; Price Rs 1390

The volume is a book of essays broadly about the history of Muslims and Dalits in the Indian sub-continent.  

Faisal Fatehali Devji’s essay on Gandhi’s politics of friendship offers an interesting insight into contemporary India. Focusing on the Khilafat Movement, it studies friendship in one of Gandhi’s boldest experiments, his attempt to rethink political relations between Hindus and Muslims. In looking at Gandhi as ‘a spoiler within the rhetoric of colonial India’, Devji points implicitly to the importance of Gandhian ideology in contemporary India.

Milind Wakankar examines the anomalous position of Kabir within the frameworks of caste and canonicity. His essay serves as a bridge between the issue of Untouchables on the one hand and Hindu-Muslim relations on the other.

Anupama Rao looks at the history, politics and legal aspects of an incident in which a Dalit kotwal was murdered on the steps of a Hanuman temple, and how authority, property and matriliny in Malabar helped to shape colonial law-making; the rhetoric of the bardic tradition; the nationalist imagination.

M.T. Ansari looks at the history of Mappila peasant ‘uprisings’ in the early twentieth century Kerala. An interesting nugget is from the 14th century tells us that Ibn Battuta  noted that the Muslims were the most respected community in the Malabar area Malabar, but the locals didn’t let them into their house or eat with them. Ansari writes that in 822 AD a Kerala King, Perumal, secretly left for Mecca to meet Prophet Muhammad there. Before disembarking, he changed his name to Abdur Rehman Samiri; he could not return from Mecca because of ill health but sent his representatives with letters of recommendations to the rulers of Malabar. These representatives were thereafter allowed to build three mosques.   

Killings that followed the Moplah Peasant Revolt in northern Malabar in 1921 happened as one of the series of violent uprisings that took place in the wake of the Khilafat Movement. The Jallianwalla Bagh massacre of 1919 took 379 people killed; the Chauri Chaura incident accounted for 23 policemen burnt alive in 1920; and the Moplah rebellion saw 2,337 rebels killed although an unofficial count put the dead at 10,000. The Moplah rebels took over and ruled for five months an area that also contained 40,000 Hindus. According to an Arya Samaji count, the Moplahs killed 600 and forcibly converted another 2,500. The Moplahs claimed Arab descent and were thought to be descended from the Arab traders who came to Malabar in the 4th century AD and were welcomed by the local rulers.

At the time of uprising the Moplahs were not from the privileged class. They were dispossessed peasants who, when pushed to the wall, found their leader in a bullock-cart driver Variamkunnath Kunhamed Haji. The decline of the Muslim Moplahs began in 1836 after a change in the land tenure laws against which the Moplahs kept agitating violently from 1836 to 1919, with the doctrine of shahadat underpinning their desperate campaigns.

The Moplahs in 1921 were only 33 percent of the population of Malabar in Kerala, but in three talukas of northern Malabar — called the fanatical zone — they formed two-thirds of the population. They were overwhelmingly poor, comprising cultivating peasants, landless labourers, petty traders and fishermen. Their landlords were Namboodiri Brahmins and the rich Nair caste. The British came in with the intent to undo the effects of Tipu Sultan’s rule in the area through a ‘land reform’ — based on fixed rent as opposed to the old practice of sharing the produce according to ratio — which made peasant evictions easy. This allowed the British to count on the support of the landed aristocracy.

Evictions went ahead with the British administrators receiving thousands of complaints each from the evicted Moplahs but to no effect. Any suggestions of reform from within the British system were brushed aside as it was feared that reforms would offend the Hindu elite. Instead, the Moplahs were categorised as mindless fanatics whose way of life was that of violence. This spared everyone of the obligation to inquire into the real causes of the peasant revolt. When 1921 came around, the Moplahs were fired by two causes, the Tenancy injustice, and the Khilafat Movement in which Hindus and Muslims were supposed to fight together.

The protest began after hearing the news that the Ali Brothers had been arrested by the British. When the Moplahs came out waving Khilafat and Congress flags, they were mishandled by the police, and their leader Ali Musalyar, a Gandhian, was arrested and later hanged. In fact he had surrendered to the police after being advised by the local Congress leaders to do so.  
Shahid Amin’s essay examines how a persistent image of ‘the Mussalman’ came into being via the work of Hindi writers and publicists in the late nineteenth century. He suggests that this image was not derived from popular memory but conjured up for political deployment. He reveals the enormous mileage gained by this image, both ‘then’ and ‘now’.

Sharing:

Your comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *