Duravastha: ‘The tragic plight’ of the Malabar Hindus
In his book, Negationism in India: Concealing the Record of Islam, the Belgian orientalist and Indologist Koenraad Elst describe the mainstream interpretation of Indian history as the Indian brand of negationism, which deals with the section of the intelligentsia trying to erase from Hindu memory the history of their persecution by the swordsmen of Islam. He argues that this negationism is led by Islamic apologists and Marxist academics, followed by politicians, journalists and intellectuals who call themselves secularists with active promotion by the Indian state. One of the glaring examples of this trend of historical negationism in India is the shaping of the collective consciousness about the Moplah riots of 1921. Even graphic accounts of brutal violence against women were swept under the carpet to whitewash the brutes despite having enough anecdotes in the popular literature.
Duravastha, tragic plight, by the celebrated Malayalam poet Kumaran Asan, published on 7th September 1922, is one of the early literary works with the Moplah riots of 1921 as the backdrop. The poem narrates the tragic plight of Savitri, the only daughter of a Namboothiri family in the Eranadu region. She is the lone survivor of the brutal massacre her family had to endure from the Moplah rioters. Finally, Chathan, a young man belonging to the lower caste, rescues her and give her asylum in his hut. While describing the house of Chathan, Asan amply criticises the caste discrimination and untouchability prevalent in society during the time. The poem is a romantic tribute to the love between the untouchable Chathan and the Brahmin girl Savitri who lost all her loved ones due to the cruelty of the Mappila rioters.
The poet is unapologetically harsh while naming the marauders who torched the house of this brahmin girl, looted, killed and forcibly converted her kins. She who lived a well-protected, secure life in her father’s house had to endure unimaginable cruelty from the Moplah rioters.
“ഭള്ളാര്‍ന്ന ദുഷ്ട മുഹമ്മദന്മാര്‍ കേറി-
ക്കൊള്ളയിട്ടാര്‍ത്ത ഹോ തീ കൊളുത്തി
വെന്തു പോയോരു വമ്പിച്ച മനയ്ക്കലെ
സന്താന വല്ലിയാണിക്കുമാരി.
കൊള്ളക്കാരൊട്ടാളെ വെട്ടിക്കൊല ചെയ്തും
‘അള്ളാ’ മതത്തില്‍ പിടിച്ചു ചേര്‍ത്തും
ഉള്ളില്‍ നടക്കും തിരക്കിലിരുട്ടിലി-
പ്പുള്ളിമാന്‍ കണ്ണിയാള്‍ ചാടിപ്പോന്നോള്‍”
The poet characterises the Mappila rebels as “cruel Mohamedans” who had spilt Hindu blood and crimsoned the Kerala soil. This “riotous mob of wicked, cruel and monstrous Moplahs” are described as monstrous lots who kick dead bodies, “shout obscene words in an unrefined barbaric language, and who rush into the inner apartments of the women” and “Molest the innocent, noble ladies”. He explains how the rioters were slaughtering Hindus and forcefully converting them to ‘Allah religion.”
“തെക്കോട്ടു വെച്ചു നടന്നു ദൂരം ചെന്നു
പൊക്കത്തിലങ്ങൊരെടുപ്പു കാണായ്
ഉള്ളില്‍ വിളക്കെരിയുന്നു മാപ്പിള-
പ്പള്ളിയാണെന്നു ഞാന്‍ സംശയിച്ചു
പെട്ടു വഴിക്കരികത്താകയാല്‍ നട-
ന്നൊട്ടടുത്തപ്പോളകത്തു കേള്‍ക്കായ്
തിങ്ങി ജനങ്ങള്‍ സംസാരിപ്പതു മിട-
ക്കിങ്ങനെയങ്ങൊരാള്‍ കല്‍പിച്ചതും:
വെള്ളക്കാരെ ചുട്ടൊടുക്കുവിന്‍ ജന്മിമാ-
രില്ല മിടിച്ചു കുളം കുഴിപ്പിന്‍
അള്ളായല്ലാതൊരു ദൈവം മലയാള-
ത്തില്ലാതാക്കീടുവിനേതു ചെയ്തും.”
The girl, Savitri, remember how she somehow managed to run south. Seeing the light of a lamp, she approached the building, which unfortunately was a mosque where the conspirators were planning the massacre of Hindus so that they can establish Allah as the only God of Malayala land. Remembering the horrors inflicted by the Moplah gangs in the Hindu homes, hacking men to death and raping women, the girl wails with the anguish of a caged bird:
“അല്ലല്ല യെന്തെല്ലാം ചെയ്യുന്നു കശ്മലര്‍
നല്ലാര്‍, ജനങ്ങളെ കാണ്‍ക വയ്യേ
അമ്മമാരില്ലേ സഹോദരിമാരില്ലേ-
യീ മൂര്‍ഖര്‍ക്കീശ്വര ചിന്തയില്ലേ!
ഹന്ത! മതമെന്നു ഘോഷിക്കുന്നല്ലോയീ-
ജന്തുക്കളെന്നതില്‍ നീതിയില്ലേ?”
“Doesn’t these butchers have mothers and sisters,
Is there no sense of justice and morality
In what these beasts profess as religion?”
Here the poet tries to introspect as a caste Hindu, looking into the caste system and untouchability as the only reason for all that suffered by the Hindu community in its tryst with organised religions. Although the roots of the Hindu Muslim tensions in Malabar started with the brutal invasion by Tipu and Hyder Ali’s Army, the poet takes the classic middle path apologetic stand. “In Kerala, there are but few Muslims/Who had come from western shores”. His anti-Brahmanic caste sensibilities make him blind about the forceful conversions and violence inflicted on the Hindus of all castes by the Islamic troops of Tipu and later Moplahs in 19th century Malabar. Thus, Asan justifies Mappilas by negating the real reason for their conversion from the Hindu religion.
Yet, the poem triggered an array of disagreement by Muslims from various strata of society. Muslim journals condemned the poem and the poet. They convened protest meetings and passed resolutions condemning the work as anti-Muslim. At Trivandrum, a Muslim literati meeting led by Vakkom Abdul Kader Moulavi and K M Seethi Sahib met Kumaran Asan and requested him withdraw the poem. Eventually, the poem ended up being interpreted as one of the many works of Asan, which is a wake-up call against the evil brahmins and the caste system of the Hindu community, totally undermining the actual premise of the poem, i.e., when marauders were running amok killing and raping Hindus, only a Hindu was there to provide shelter to the protagonist who was orphaned by the Muslim barbarians. Caste did not become a divisive factor here. Hence, Duravastha is a poem that calls for Hindus to recognise the designs of Jihad and to understand how even your friendly neighbour can turn into a monster when ulemas promise heaven for slaughtering kafirs. The poem is revolutionary because it asks for building a consciousness of the Hindu brotherhood.
The plight of Savitri in the poem wasn’t the poet’s creativity alone. A thorough search into the various contemporary reports reveals unimaginable brutality perpetrated upon women by the Moplah rioters.
An accurate description of what had happened during the rebellion can be seen in the memorandum to Lady Reading, submitted by the women victims of the Malabar riots.
“Your Ladyship is doubtless aware that though our unhappy district has witnessed many Moplah outbreaks in the course of the last one hundred years, the present rebellion is unexampled in its magnitude as well as unprecedented in its ferocity. But it is possible that your Ladyship is not fully appraised of all the horrors and atrocities perpetrated by the fiendish rebels; of the many wells and tanks filled up with the mutilated, but often only half dead bodies of our nearest and dearest ones who refused to abandon the faith of our fathers; of pregnant women cut to pieces and left on the roadsides and in the jungles, with the unborn babe protruding from the mangled corpse; of our innocent and helpless children torn from our arms and done to death before our eyes and of our husbands and fathers tortured, flayed and burnt alive; of our hapless sisters forcibly carried away from the midst of kith and kin and subjected to every shame and outrage which the vile and brutal imagination of these inhuman hell-hounds could conceive of; of thousands of our homesteads reduced to cinder-mounds out of sheer savagery and a wanton spirit of destruction; of our places of worship desecrated and destroyed and of the images of the deity shamefully insulted by putting the entrails of slaughtered cows where flower garlands used to lie, or else smashed to pieces; of the wholesale looting of hard earned wealth of generations reducing many who were formerly rich and prosperous to publicly beg for a piece or two in the streets of Calicut, to buy salt or chilly or betel-leaf—rice being mercifully provided by the various relief agencies. These are not fables.
The wells full of rotting skeletons, the ruins which once were our dear homes, the heaps of stones which once were our places of worship—these are still here to attest to the truth. The cries of our murdered children in their death agonies are still ringing in our ears and will continue to haunt our memory till death brings us peace. We remember how driven out of our native hamlets we wandered starving and naked in the jungles and forests; we remember how we choked and stifled our babies’ cries lest the sound should betray our hiding places to our relentless pursuers. We still vividly realise the moral and spiritual agony that thousands of us passed through when we were forcibly converted into the faith professed by these bloodthirsty miscreants; we still have before us the sight of the unendurable and life long misery of those—fortunately, few—of our most unhappy sisters who born and brought up in respectable families have been forcibly converted and then married to convict coolies. For five long months, not a day has passed without its dread tale of horror to unfold.”
The horrendous massacre of the majority community of Malabar and their plight gains no space in the public discourse in post-independent India. On the contrary, Marxians like K. N. Panikkar and E. M. S. Namboodiripad have defined the Mappila riots as a peasant struggle related to the national movement. Most historians, be it the western scholars or the Indian ones, tend to treat the Mappila riots of 1921 as an isolated, independent incident that had no precedents in history. However, M Gangadhara Menon notes that about 35 severe Mappila outbreaks occurred before the rebellion of 1921. During the period of 18 years (1836 to 1853), no fewer than 22 outbreaks took place besides numerous abortive risings and conspiracies as per the Malabar district Gazetteer. Sir Henry Winterbotham;’ No words can depict the abject terror of the Hindus of all ranks and classes when a gang of Mappila fanatics is on the warpath. Án invasion by a hostile army could not cause more consternation or a greater panic’. All attempts at conciliation or parleys are as dangerous as they are futile…” Although the descriptive account of these disturbances of the 19th century was found in various gazetteers and manuals from the British period, the post-colonial Indian establishment preferred to whitewash the Mappila riots as a peasant uprising caused by the economic grievances of the Mappila peasantry.
Islam came to the coast of Kerala via Arabian trade relations. The local Hindu Kings maintained a harmonious relationship with the traders. Nonetheless, there are accounts of certain elements who kidnapped women and children and sold them to foreign traders. Jonaka Mappilas of Nadapuram, curbed by the famous kalarippayattu warrior lady Unniyarcha were such a gang of ruffians. Centuries later, in the year 1793, the joint commissioners of the EIC in British Malabar reported to the governor of Bombay that “along with the great and respectable body of Mappilas there are also very several numerous and peculiar bands of public robbers by profession in Malabar country who from their haunts and general residence is called Jungle Mappilas.” This band of bandits were a constant nightmare for Hindus. The 12th-century story of Unniyarcha and the 18th-century report by the EIC officials state the same thing about the Moplah ruffians: they kidnapped women and children to sell them in the Arabian Slave trade.
The invasions by Hyder Ali and Tipu further empowered the socio-economic fabric of Malabar. The Mappilas acquired power as entrepreneurs and functionaries within the rudiments of the revenue administration of Mysore Sultan. But the acquisition of Malabar under the British administration ended the Mappila hegemony and gave the customary revenue rights back to the local Hindu chieftains whose land were captured by the Muslims during Tipu’s raid. Thus, along with the loss of their upper hand in the maritime trade on the Malabar coast, the Mappilas lost control over the land of the Kafirs. This disgruntlement turned them into ‘rebels’. They never were willing to accept the power of the Hindus whose land, the Muslim army of tipu, once defeated and converted.
Interestingly, while analysing the reasons and trajectory of the Mappila uprising of 1921, the authorities ignore this background aspect. Instead, they glorify the reluctance of the Moplah peasants to accept the upper caste Hindus as the landlords and cover up the rape, conversion, and massacre of thousands of Hindu men, women and children. Some have even gone ahead to the stretch of justifying the genocide of a population, citing that the victims were high caste Hindus. Recently, certain subaltern scholars have been trying to build a victimhood narrative favouring the Mappilas by clubbing them along with the various Hindu tribes branded as criminal tribes by the British to fight against the colonial invasion. Western liberal academia’s apologetic perception of Muslims in Asia as passive victims of European encounters ignores that Muslim rule was also aggressive colonial hegemony in India.
On the other hand, the Indian historians prefer to negate the 800 years of Islamic reign over the Hindus and portray the Indian Muslims as an oppressed class rather than the ruling class for around a century. The point here to be noted is that the colonial academia does not want the Hindus to learn about the harsh truth of Islamic imperialism over India. They do not want the Hindus to remember the heroic resistance for over a millennia, making Hindus a resilient civilisation of survivors. Hence, they deflect the public’s attention towards unnecessarily inflating the misinterpretations about the social fabric based on caste.
Caste is only a red herring for the ‘India experts’ to keep the Hindus perpetually distracted from the actual oppressors and subjugation threatening the existence of the Hindu way of life. That is why those who raped her mother, slaughtered her kin, torched her house, and left her orphaned are not discussed, but Chathan and Savitri’s castes become the only point of discussion. That is why the eminent intellectuals, mass media, and the Indian state shows the audacity to justify the rape and slaughter of thousands of human beings, including women and children by showing their status as high caste Hindus and wealthy landlords and brainwash a generation via textbooks to say that, ” they deserved it because they were caste Hindus”.
Another concept is that the pogrom against Hindus by Moplahs in 1921 was not a communal but a class conflict, not between Hindus and Muslims but between workers who happened to be Muslims and landlords who happened to be Hindus(K.N Panikker). From 1921: A poetic recollection, K.K.N Kurup: “..though religion was the spirit behind the revolt, it wasn’t communal.” In reality, the entire premise of the Khilafat agitation itself was guided by a religious spirit, the spirit of pan Islamism. Congress under Gandhiji wanted the reluctant Indian Muslim to join the national movement and saw the British ousting the Khalifa in Turkey as an opportunity to attract the Muslims and rally them against the British. There was nothing concerning India in the idea of restoration of Khilafat. It is a purely communal cause rather than Indian nationalism. In general, the intelligentsia in India is guided by the ideology of negating the religious motivation of pan Islamism and support the Muslim cause while furthering their quaint idea of secularism. That is why Gandhiji’s call for non-violence could not prevent the Muslims from amassing weapons to attack Hindus. And if it was just an anti-landlord revolt, why did the Moplah rioters targeted only Hindu landlords and spare Muslim landlords? Besides, they attacked Hindus belonging to lower castes also. The establishment of Khilafat Kingdom and Sharia courts, forceful religious conversion of Hindus, destruction of Hindu temples, defilement of Hindu murtis etc., with Islamic clerics as the leaders could only be one thing for a Muslim, Jihad. They killed Kafirs and died for their God. But the secular Indian is afraid to accept this bare fact.
Muslim appeasement by the Hindu elites arose from their fear of the Muslims’ savagery did not save the Hindus then. As per the report by T.L. Strange, Special Commissioner in Malabar, “The Hindus in the parts where the outbreaks have been most frequent, stand in fear of the Moplahs as mostly not to dare to press for their rights against them, and there is many a Moplah tenant who does not pay his rent, and cannot, so imminent are the risks, be evicted. Other injuries can also be put up with, uncomplained of.” Yet, the Mappilas massacred every Hindu he saw. C Gopalan Nair, who documented the Malabar unrest, notes about the Khilafat movement: “The Hindu believed in Hindu-Muslim unity and never dreamed of a day when the Muslim would turn against him; the Moplah had no such delusion; he wanted Muslim swaraj; he worked for it; he was ready for a general rising and bided him time.”
While the Hindu born secularist denies the existence of the savage in his neighbourhood, the beast is very clear about his mission.
