There are echoes here of all the rebellions that took place during British rule; that of 1857 and the question of whether this was a planned rebellion, the events of Amritsar in 1919 and the terrible over-reaction of British authority to protest, the eventual widespread attack on property and open warfare which characterised the Quit India satyagraha of 1942.
Historians have always seen the importance of gauging whether the Malabar Rebellion was class conflict between peasant and landlord or a communal divide between Hindu and Muslim. If class conflict underlay communalism – the argument being that, if the landlord class could exploit communalism to divert social violence away from themselves onto a larger community, then ameliorative measures such as tenancy reform would pre-empt a religious divide that would prove disastrous for Indian nationalism. K N Pannikar in Against Lord and State; Religion and Peasant Uprisings in Malabar 1836–1921 (Oxford, 1989) argued along these lines. One very much hoped in reading his book that M Gangadharan, with all his very careful research of the same issues, would be rewarded with a new interpretation and this is indeed the case. He sees instead a bid by the Mappila community to set up an independent Khilafat state.The events of 1921 may have started out as all other Mappila protest over time had started but in August the leadership of the rebellion suddenly sensed there had been a breakthrough and they could in all seriousness, however ineffective and futile it proved to be, declare independence from British rule in the name of Islam. Here was a Taliban statelet in the making. One leader, Chambresseri Tangal had two prostitutes executed. Does he make his case?
In fact all parties involved in the rebellion come out of it with reputations damaged though the author is anxious to clear the Mappilas of the charge of communalism.
Gandhi and Congress were probably always reckless in trying to effect a Hindu-Muslim alliance by linking the grievances over Amritsar with the break-up of the Caliphate for there was no inherent reason why Indian Muslims should sympathise with a satyagraha campaign whose rhetoric was couched in a Hindu terminology. It was the arrest in Calicut of Congress Muslim Yakub Hassan 16 February 1921 that triggered the first phase of large-scale protest. Congress was engaged in a difficult balancing act of not alienating the landlord class whilst raising the hopes of tenancy reform but also exploring entirely new forms of political alliance by setting up a Kerala-wide linguistic province of the party. But the author shows how it fought a losing battle at moderating Mappila resistance. As late as August Congress Secretary K P Kesava Menon went to the epicentre of resistance in Tirurangadi but failed to dissuade the Mappila leadership from violence. Even more damaging than betrayal of Congress's commitment to non-violence, a campaign designed to bring the two religious communities together seemingly broke down into a communal Muslim attack on the Hindu.
The British authorities, always wary of a Mappila outrage as they saw these rebellions, over-reacted. District Magistrate E. F. Thomas earned the sobriquet the ‘Malabar Dyer’ for his heavy handed response to the protest in Calicut. C Rajagopalachari dispatched an open telegram on the 18th: “the District magistrate appears too excited to control the situation created by himself”. The Government tactic was to isolate the Mappila forces in the interior but in so doing fatally cut them off from more moderate Congress influence. When protest did flare up in Pukkotur and Tirunangadi, government forces fired on the protesters, killing six in one encounter and 30 to 40 in another. Predictably the rebellion rapidly spread. There was the disgraceful ‘wagon tragedy’ when on 19 November 70 out of a 100 prisoners died en route in a closed carriage from Tirur to Coimbatore. Government formally declared martial law on 28 August and only its lifting on 25 February 1922 announced the end of the rebellion. The authorities in Madras had even dispatched a warship to Calicut.
The author establishes an Islamic identity to Mappila resistance from its inception. In the mid-nineteenth century its leadership stood for suicidal struggle and martyrdom. Clearly Muslim peasant conflict with the Hindu jemni landlord class was always a factor but I wonder if more should be made of conflict with the intermediary kanamdars who resorted to the practice of melcharth, one way of evicting tenants, for they were westernised Nairs whereas the Nambudiri Brahmin jemnis eschewed western education and the Malabar rebellion was essentially a rejection of the west. But this was not a rebellion inspired by the traditional religious leadership of the ulamas. They quickly distanced themselves. It produced a new leadership. In Tirurangadi there was the respected teacher in the mosque, Ali Musaliar; a neighbour of his, V. K. Haji, a great lover of Mappila war songs, who had once fled to Mecca to escape imprisonment, and the local leader in Pandikkad; Chambresseri Tengal, a title of the Sayyids, who claimed descent from the prophet, and who was believed to enjoy supernatural powers. This however, was no centralised leadership and after one serious defeat in open conflict it turned into guerilla-warfare led by local leaders. Much was driven by rumour. Eg that the British had destroyed the mosque in Tirurangadi. The Afghans had crossed into India on their behalf. The Mappilas went into battle chanting takbir, Allah is great. Theirs was the delusional belief that khilafat rule had replaced British.
But did this deteriorate into communal conflict? Indisputably Hindus fell victim to demands for supplies, some were executed, and some were forcibly converted. The author seeks an explanation for these measures not in terms of communal antagonism but a belief that Hindus were collaborators with the British and that they were dictated by the needs of war. It is a fine distinction. But the attack on Hindus in Malabar was to wreak fatal damage on Hindu-Muslim relations thereafter.
So the question remains, was the Malabar rebellion not so much part of the independence movement but a quite separate proto-Taliban struggle? But here is a very well researched monograph which will be a useful research tool for all future scholars of the rebellion.
