British Raj Official figures: Official figures: Maritime contacts Sangam period Tamilakam Cheras Spice trade Ays Ezhil Malai Confluence of religionsMamankam festival Calicut Venad - Kingdom of QuilonValluvanad Kolattunadu CochinArakkal kingdom Minor principalities Age of Discovery Portuguese period Dutch period Rise of Travancore Mysorean invasion British PeriodBattle of TirurangadiMalabar DistrictNorth MalabarSouth Malabar Battle of Quilon Communism in KeralaLakshadweep Economy Architecture The Malabar rebellion[4] of 1921 (also called Moplah rebellion,[5] and Mappila rebellion,[6] Malayalam: malabār kalāpam) started as a resistance against the British colonial rule in certain places in the southern part of old Malabar district of present-day Kerala.

[6][8] During the uprising, the rebels attacked various symbols and institutions of the colonial state, such as telegraph lines, train stations, courts and post offices.

[17] Contemporary colonial administrators and modern historians differ markedly in their assessment of the incident, debating whether the revolts were triggered by religious fanaticism or agrarian grievances.

[19] However, some contemporary Indian evaluations now view the rebellion as a national upheaval against colonial rule and the most important event concerning the political movement in Malabar during the period.

While the Mappilas were in the vanguard of the movement and bore the brunt of the struggle, several non-Mappila leaders actively sympathized with the rebels' cause, giving the uprising the character of a national upheaval.

[21] Malabar's agricultural system was historically based on a hierarchy of privileges, rights and obligations for all principal social groups in what British administrator William Logan sometimes referred to as the "Father of Tenancy Legislation" in Malabar,[22] describing it as a system of 'corporate unity’ or joint proprietorship of each of the principal land right holders:[23][24] The Jenmi, consisting mainly of the Namboothiri Brahmins and Nair chieftains, were the highest level of the hierarchy, and a class of people given hereditary land grants (''janmam'') by the Naduvazhis or rulers'.

This allowed the Jenmi to return to their homes and regain the lands lost during the Mysorean invasion, with the help of the Company administration and its duly-constituted courts.

[26] This caused great resentment among the Mappilas, who, in the words of Logan, were "labouring late and early to provide a sufficiency of food for their wives and children".

[24] Resentment among the Muslim tentant population due to being vulnerable to rack renting, insecure tenancy, and eviction at the hands of Hindu landlords (jenmi) sustained by British courts, the Mappillas responded in a series of outbreaks, in which they wanted their own death, 29 in number, between 1836 and 1919 were suppressed.

[20][8][23] Diwan Bahadur C. Gopalan Nair in his book, The Moplah Rebellion 1921,[33] writes thus: ...it was not mere fanaticism, it was not agrarian trouble, it was not destitution, that worked on the minds of Ali Musaliar and his followers.

Sumit Sarkar in Modern India quotes an Arya Samaj source that claimed about 600 Hindus were killed and 2,500 forcibly converted during the rebellion.

[6][41] On 1 August 1921,[44] the police attempted to arrest Vadakkevittil Muhammed, the secretary of the Khilafat Committee of Ernad at Pookkottur, alleging that he had stolen the pistol of a Hindu Thirumulpad from a Kovilakam (manor) in Nilambur.

On 20 August 1921,[45] a squad of police arrested a number of Khilafat volunteers and seized records[additional citation(s) needed] at the Mambaram Mosque in Tirurangadi, leading to rumours that the building had been desecrated.

The police opened fire on the crowd, triggering a furious reaction which soon engulfed the Eranad and Valluvanad Taluks along with neighbouring areas and continued for over two months.

[13] [check quotation syntax] Following the mosque incident, the rebels attacked and seized police stations, government treasuries, and entered the courts and registry offices where they destroyed records.

[46] The rebellion soon spread to the neighbouring areas of Malappuram, Manjeri, Perinthalmanna, Pandikkad and Tirur under principal leaders Variankunnath Kunjahammad Haji, Seethi Koya Thangal of Kumaranpathor and Ali Musliyar.

By 28 August 1921 colonial rule had virtually come to an end in Malappuram, Tirurangadi, Manjeri, and Perinthalmanna, which then fell into the hands of the rebels who established complete domination over the Eranad and Valluvanad Taluks.

After the proclamation of martial law and the arrival of government troops, when some members of the Hindu community were enlisted by the army to provide information on the rebels.

[10][11] It is alleged that once they had eliminated the minimal presence of the government, the Mappilas turned their full attention to attacking Hindus while Ernad and Valluvanad were declared "Khilafat kingdoms".

[48] During the rebellion, a Mappila gang under the leadership of Odayappurath Chekkutty from Kalpakanchery protected the Kizhake Kovilakam (a seat of the ruling family of the Zamorin of Calicut) and the Arya Vaidya Sala at Kottakkal.

All over Southern India, a wave of horrified feeling had spread among the Hindus of every shade of opinion, which was intensified when certain Khilafat leaders were so misguided as to pass resolutions of congratulations to the Moplas on the brave fight they were conducting for the sake of religion".

He spoke of the Mappilas as the "brave God-fearing Moplahs who were fighting for what they consider as religion and in a manner which they consider as religious ".Annie Besant, who wanted dominion status for India,[60] opposed the non-cooperation movement, supported the Montague-Chelmsford reforms, who had adverse effect on her popularity due to difference of opinion and later left the political field,[61] recounts in two separate articles in New India on 29 November 1921 and 6 December 1921 as to what happened to the Malabar Hindus at the hands of the Moplahs:[62] Mr. Gandhi...can he not feel a little sympathy for thousands of women left with only rags, driven from home, for little children born of the flying mothers on roads in refuge camps?

Girl wives, pretty and sweet, with eyes half blind with weeping, distraught with terror; women who have seen their husbands hacked to pieces before their eye, in the way "Moplas consider as religious"; old women tottering, whose faces become written with anguish and who cry at a gentle touch...men who have lost all, hopeless, crushed, desperate...Can you conceive of a more ghastly and inhuman crime than the murders of babies and pregnant women?...A pregnant woman carrying 7 months was cut through the abdomen by a rebel and she was seen lying dead on the way with the dead child projecting out of the womb...Another: a baby of six months was snatched away from the breast of his own mother and cut into two pieces... Are these rebels human beings or monsters?A respectable Nayar Lady at Melatur was stripped naked by the rebels in the presence of her husband and brothers, who were made to stand close by with their hands tied behind.

When they shut their eyes in abhorrence they were compelled at the point of sword to open their eyes and witness the rape committed by the brute in their presence.Annie Besant, who once led a walk out in the fifth District Conference held at Manjeri, Ernad taluk after the Montagu–Chelmsford Reforms was opposed in overwhelming support in a resolution in the conference,[63] said on the rebellion:[64] "They established the Khilafat Raj, crowned a King, murdered and plundered abundantly, and killed or drove away all Hindus who would not apostatise.

3 of the Ahmedabad session of the INC, where Gandhiji was appointed as its sole executive authority, on 24 December 1921, in connection with the Moplah Riots:[65] The Congress expresses its firm conviction that the Moplah disturbance was not due to the Non-Co-operation or the Khilafat movement, especially as the...Khilafat preachers were denied access to the affected parts by the District authorities for six months before the disturbance, but is due to causes wholly unconnected with the two movements and that the outbreak would not have occurred had the message of non-violence been allowed to reach them.

Nevertheless, this Congress...is of the opinion that the...disturbance in Malabar could have been prevented by the Government of Madras accepting the proffered assistance of Maulana Yakub Hassan...Here the rebuttal of D.V.

Firstly, is the period of six months the maximum term for which the seeds of disaffection sown into the mind of a notoriously fanatical population could remain potential?

Thirdly, if it is claimed...that...non-violence can quell any kind of armed rising, does it not follow that it should have been conveyed five years ago to England and France and Germany?

And if the Hindus became Mussalmans to save themselves from death, it was a voluntary change of faith and not forcible conversion—Well, even the harmless resolution condemning some of the Moplas was not unanimously passed but had to be accepted by a majority of votes only.The Viceroy, Lord Reading:[citation needed] Their wanton and unprovoked attack on the Hindus, the all but wholesale looting of their houses in Ernad, etc, the forcible conversion of Hindus in the beginning of the Moplah rebellion and the wholesale conversion of those who stuck to their homes in later stages, the brutal murder of inoffensive Hindus without the slightest reason except that they are "Kafirs" or belonged to the same religion as the policemen, who their mosques, burning of Hindu temples, the outrage on Hindu women and their forcible conversion and marriage by the Moplahs.The Rani of Nilambur in a petition to Lady Reading:[34] But it is possible that your Ladyship is not fully apprised 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.A conference held at Calicut presided over by the Zamorin of Calicut, the Ruler of Malabar issued a resolution:[67] "That the conference views with indignation and sorrow the attempts made at various quarters by interested parties to ignore or minimise the crimes committed by the rebels such as: brutally dishonouring women, flaying people alive, wholesale slaughter of men, women, and children, burning alive entire families, forcibly converting people in thousands and slaying those who refused to get converted, throwing half-dead people into wells and leaving the victims to struggle for escape till finally released from their suffering by death, burning a great many and looting practically all Hindu and Christian houses in the disturbed areas in which even Moplah women and children took part and robbed women of even the garments on their bodies, in short reducing the whole non-Muslim population to abject destitution, cruelly insulting the religious sentiments of the Hindus by desecrating and destroying numerous temples in the disturbed areas, killing cows within the temple precincts putting their entrails on the holy image and hanging skulls on the walls and the roofs."K.

[81] The officers and men from the Dorset Regiment who died while taking part in the suppression of the revolt are commemorated in a brass tablet at the St. Mark's Cathedral, Bangalore.