Among the various books on Kerala history, The Malabar Rebellion stands out as a major volume, as it corroborates historical and literary sources and investigates a much-debated topic among historians—the Mappilas Khilafat movement, or the Muslim uprising of 1921–22 in Kerala, South India. M. K. Gangadharan organizes the book in ten chapters as he meticulously examines this rebellious movement and asserts the significance of this rebellion in the history of the nationalist movement and freedom struggle of India.
Gangadharan asserts that the Mappila outbreak was an expression of powerful resistance to the British political setup that empowered the jenmis (landlords) and kanamdars (one who held on Kanam Malabar tenure), who most often represented the upper strata of the Hindu caste hierarchy, to oppress and exploit the cultivating tenants, practicing rack renting, high renewal fees, and frequent evictions (p. 30). As a result, the tenants of Ernad and Walluvanad taluks (subdivisions of a district), including a large number of Mappilas, organized themselves in conjunction with the nationalist Khilafat movement and agitated, which frightened and provoked the British to resort to tyrannical procedures. Despite the British regime's efforts to address their individual grievances, the Mappilas, through the noncooperation campaign of the Indian National Congress, rebelled against the regime.
The Gandhian movement had a tremendous impact in Kerala, with large numbers joining the Satyagraha campaign. Mahatma Gandhi visited Malabar in 1921, giving a further impetus to the movement. Khilafat committees sprang up in large numbers, and fostered fraternity between the Hindus and Muslims through the work in Congress; Khilafat committees were a truly remarkable feature of the noncooperation movement in Kerala, in its early stages, but later gave rise to tension between the Hindus and Muslims of Malabar. As a corollary, the noncooperation activities made the nationalist movement in Malabar more widespread and forceful. The mosques became convenient rallying centers for promoting collective action. But though such an organized nationalist movement in Malabar began around the 1920s, the Malayalam novel Indulekha (1889) reflects the emergence of nationalist consciousness during the late nineteenth century. One of the distinctions between the tenancy movement and the Khilafat movement was that the former was organized by middle-class tenants who had received modern education and who adhered to British regime, and the latter was organized by pan-Islamic emotions with religious and ideological connotations (p. 56). The Mappilas in the Khilafat movement expressed their power against the British regime.
The indiscriminate arrest of the Mappilas aggravated their rebellious spirit, and more acts of rebellion became apparent and more arrests were made. Muslims imagined that Hindus were conduits to the police in this violence, and both of these communities, Hindus and Muslims, were in tension and sporadic violence erupted for the next six months. In August 1921, during the early days of the rebellion, instances of forced religious conversion of non-Muslims to Islam can be observed (p. 186). Pukkottur-Melmuri and Urangattiri-Arikkod region (Ernad taluk) and Kodiathur amsam (a subdivision of a taluk) and Puttur amsam (Calicut taluk) were centers of deliberate and systematic forced conversion, out of which seventy-five in Pukkotur area belonged to the low castes (p. 186). In addition, members of affluent Nair families from Melmuri amsam converted to Islam on August 24, 1921. In some of the other amsams, more than 300 Hindus were converted by the rebels (p. 187). On the contrary, some Mappilas resorted to nonviolence and peace, surrendering to the authorities.
The author concludes the study by examining whether the Khilafat movement had any plan and organization behind it. He infers, “on the whole it would appear that in the wake of the Khilafat Movement there was readiness on the part of few Mappilas to rise against the authorities at certain instances, but neither were unorganized nor any organization was behind those uprising” (p. 232). He clarifies that the jihad spirit among the Mappilas was geared toward the British and not against the Hindus of Malabar region. Gangadharan maintains that the rebellion was political in nature insofar as it aimed to subvert the British power. Moreover, though the spirit motivating the rebels was religious, it was not communal in the sense of hostility to another religious community (pp. 244–45). In this regard, the Malabar rebellion holds a significant position in the Indian nationalist movement and the struggle for freedom. The rebellion act failed because the rebels had no idea of independence and its concreteness to the Indian context during the early twentieth century (pp. 247–48). However, this violent event created a rift between the Hindu and Muslim communities that had a far-reaching impact across India that contributed to the partition of the Subcontinent of India and Pakistan in 1947.
Gangadharan's detailed analysis in The Malabar Rebellion reinforces the importance of the rebellion in Malabar and its connection to the nationalistic movement and freedom struggle. This makes the book a highly rewarding study, one that takes significant steps toward integrating careful readings of historical and literary evidence. It should become essential reading for scholars working on the Indian independence struggle.
