Malabar Hindu Genocide: Turbulence in Timber Zone

 

It was TN Godavarman Thirumulpad of the erstwhile Nilambur Kovilakam whose initiative  turned out to be a historic intervention by the Supreme Court to protect India’s forests. Nilambur  forms  part of the Nilgiri biosphere reserve. Seeing the destruction of forests in Gudalur in the Nilgiris, Godavarman Thirumulpad filed a writ petition in 1995  in the Supreme Court. A bench led by Chief Justice JS Verma passed an interim order  on December 12, 1996, directing that tree-felling and non-forestry activities in forests across the country be stopped. States were directed to form expert committees to identify forests as defined and file reports. Senior Counsel Harish Salve was appointed Amicus Curiae to assist the Supreme Court. PK Manohar, an advocate in the Supreme Court who represented Godavarman Thirumulpad wrote about it  after the expiry of Thirumulpad (The Hindu, July 5, 2016). Manohar highlights that more than a thousand interlocutory applications have since been filed, covering a spectrum of issues concerning forest protection, such as mining, tree-felling,  management of protected areas and forest encroachment. 

Godavarman Thirumulpad belonged to this same Nilambur Kovilakam, where a hundred years back in 1921,  succumbed to one of the bloodiest  massacres in contemporary history  marshaled by  a section of  Sunni Mappila fanatics in the name of Khilafat movement.

Riot in Richest  Timber Plantations 

The first and major riot began in August 1921 at Pookkottur which lies adjacent to the Nilambur timber zone at Eranad in  Malabar, accommodating the richest timber plantations in the world.  C Gopalan Nair, Deputy Collector of Malabar in his work the ‘Mappila Rebellion 1921’ (1923)  describes Eranad which  comprised Nilambur. According to Nair “it is a tract made up of hills, clothed with forest, the eastern portion including the valley of Nilambur which produces teak and other timbers. There were disturbances in every amsom of the Taluk”.

In 1880s, the Mappila elitists, who got education, began to involve in local politics and established Himayathul Islam Sabha (also known as Mappila Sabha). This Sabha never raised Mappila tenancy and agrarian issues in Nilambur or other areas of  south Malabar, and made little efforts on the tenancy question in 1910 to invite public attention to Mappila grievances. Issues of tenancy and agriculture  were not confined to a particular religious group  to be raised  only through  the most brutal violence.  

Armed to the Teeth Mappillas

In late July I92I, in the village of Pookkottur in Eranad taluk, a dispute arose between the Nilambur Raja and a Mappilla, active in the Khilafat  movement. Tension grew in the village, and on August 1, drums began to beat in the mosques of the area, and in the course of the day, more than two hundred Mappillas, shouting war cries, gathered at Pookkottur branch of Nilambur Kovilakam. A large portion of them wore the Khilafat badge on their skullcaps and the majority were armed with war knives, country swords, long spears, formidable bludgeons, and other weapons, including several guns. An outbreak was averted by the interference of Congress  leaders and police officials. But peace remained only for a few weeks.

Murdering Royal Family Members  

Again on August 21, hundreds of  Mappilas armed with guns and swords assembled at Pookkottur on a false hearsay that the Thirurangady mosque has been destroyed. They marched towards Nilambur Kovilakam and on the 21st night murdered sixteen members of the royal family which included twelve males, two women and two children. It was not tenancy issues, but widespread rumours regarding destruction of Thirurangady mosque that led to the outbreak and carnage at Nilambur.

According to Marxist scholar Conrad Wood, at Nilambur,  “Moplah resistance moved along customary ‘fanatical’ lines with mobs assembling in nis karapalli (praying ‘sheds’) then advancing on the Tirumulpad’s kovilakom (palace) to demand its conversion to a mosque, and the head of its principal inmate, indeed of  all kafirs… The emergent swaraj at Pookkottur was clearly Moplah raj”. 

Selecting Timber Belt As Abode of Khilafat  

The arguments of Wood are substantiated by  Dr Hussain Randathani,  Islamic historian and Left fellow traveler. In  his paper titled  ‘Varian  Kunnath Kunhahammad Haji: Mappila  Freedom Fighter of Malabar’  Randathani describes him   as hailing from a rich family. Kunhahammad Haji    was  occupied with timber business, according to Randathani. During the riots of 1921 he made Nilambur his headquarters and ran a Khilafat regime. Why did Varian  Kunnath Kunhahammad Haji select the Nilambur timber belt as his abode for Khilafat, when plains were available?  Randathani’s  recent work, Communists and Muslims is forwarded by Sitharam Yechury secretary of CPI (M).

Nilambur has remained a hot bed  for Red Jihadi  alliance. The largest encounters against Maoists  take place in Nilambur forests. In 2013, 12 people from Nilambur in Malappuram went to Darul Hadees at Dammaj in Yemen, which Salafis refer as Lighthouse of Islam

President of Central Khilafat Committee, Mian Mohammad Haji  Jan Mohammad Muhammad Chotani  and his younger brother Mia Ahmed Chotani  had their business centres at  Lahore, Madras, Karachi, Calicut, Belgaum, Ernakulam, San Francisco and London. They established  an agency in Rangoon and ventured into the teak business; they were able to take advantage of the expanding teak trade, caused by the gradual opening of the Burmese forests after the 1830s .  

Punishment for Harbouring Hindus 

That the Malabar riots were launched by a section of rich Sunni Mappilas against Hindus and also against some Mappilas who sheltered  Hindus is indisputable. According to Conrad  Wood “any Moplah suspected of helping the government or even merely failing to respond to the rebel call for all Mussalmans, or “the Moplah brotherhood (udapurappa)”, to come to the aid of the Moplah cause was almost certain to suffer on falling into the hands of the insurgents. Most notorious was the murder by men of Kunhahamad Haji’s gang on 30 August 1921 of retired police inspector Khan Bahadur Kurimannil Valiyamannil Chekkutti Sahib who had  the temerity to harbour Government servants and Hindus at his residence at Anakkayam, as well as to display on his gate a directive of the authorities that all arms were to be  surrendered”. Anakkayam lies twenty miles away  from Nilambur.

Prominent timber merchants of Malabar  launched the Muslim League in Kerala. In I969, in accordance to the demands of the Muslim League in Kerala and as a reward for its political support, the Communist Government  of EMS Namboodiripad carved out the new Malappuram district  accommodating major timber regions which included the world famous Nilambur teak zone.

Encroachers Having a Field’s Day  

Significantly, the largest encroachments are in Mannarkkad (6,672.54 acres) and  Nilambur divisions (1,691),  where the Mappila  riots took place  and also at Wayanad (4,297.14). Another curious fact is, encroachers have not taken the Government to court for including them in the list of encroachers.  More than three years after the High Court directed the State to recover encroached forest land, the Forest Department has managed to take into possession just 280 acres, or just about 1.5 per cent of the total encroached forest land of 19,277 acres ( Kerala: Only 1.5 per cent forest land reclaimed in Deccan Chronicle, Sept 25, 2017)

Centre of Conversions to Islam 

Nilambur was also centre  of  forced religious conversions to Islam during the 1921  riots. A historic document  has been provided by KP Kesava Menon.  He  joined the Indian National Congress in 1915 and served as the secretary of the Malabar branch of the Home Rule League as well as the Congress.

Menon was fully aware of the forced conversions into Islam during the 1921 Mappila riots in Malabar.  He provided a critical account of the forced conversion of a Thiyya woman of Nilambur in the note, ‘Forced Conversion,’ ‘the Calicut Case,’ published on July 6, 1922.

Kesava Menon’s  notes and an interview published in The Hindu were recently retrieved from the archives of the newspaper (Focus on K.P. Kesava Menon’s accounts of Malabar rebellion in The Hindu, July 8, 2020).The Thiyya woman narrated to  Menon,  who was  secretary of the Kerala Provincial Congress Committee, that she and her children  were taken to Edavanna, where she was called Rabia twice and made to “repeat Kilema”.

The heads of the children of the woman, who wanted to go back to Hinduism, were shaved by Mappila barber on the night they reached Kozhikkode  and “on the next day they were given Mappila skull caps.” She also narrated her misery on how during  the 14 days of her stay  in the Pattanis house in Kozhikkode, she was compelled “to repeat Kilema” as reported in The Hindu. 

In November 2019, CPI (M) Kozhikode district secretary P Mohanan  remarked that Maoists in Kerala were being encouraged and nourished by extreme Muslim  outfits. Marxist octogenarian and former Kerala Chief Minister, V S Achyuthanandan, stated in July 2010 that radical Muslim outfits wanted to turn the State into a Muslim-majority through their communal and  divisive activities.

Travelling to Terrorist Havens  

Nilambur has remained a hot bed  for Red Jihadi  alliance. The largest encounters against Maoists  take place in Nilambur forests. In 2013, 12 people from Nilambur in Malappuram went to Darul Hadees at Dammaj in Yemen, which Salafis refer as Lighthouse of Islam (The Times of India, July 12, 2016) The Deccan Chronicle (July 12, 2016)  reported  an  exclusive commune of self-proclaimed "true" Salafis, surrounded by teak woods and rubber plants,  near Nilambur forests, from where recent reports of men and women leaving for religiously terrorised havens in the West Asia have brought the commune under scanner.

Michael Christopher Low and others argue that the “processes of resistance to British imperialism are all too often handled by historians as part of discrete colonial, national, or regional histories, thereby occluding the interregional connections among various locales within Dar al-Islam. The importance of individuals involved in pan Islamic contacts during the period is  either neglected or kept aside by the Left,  for interpreting events  within an ideological framework as in the case of Malabar rebellion”.