Moplah Riots

The Moplah Riots (also known as the "Moplah Rebellion", "Maappila Lahala" in Malayalam) was a British-Muslim and Hindu-Muslim conflict in Kerala that occurred in 1921. During the early months of 1921, multiple events including the Khilafat movement and the Karachi resolution fueled the fires of rebellion amongst the Moplah Muslim community. A rumour spread amongst the Moplahs that the British rule had ended and the Islamic Caliphate had been re-established at Delhi.

According to one view, the reasons for the Moplah rebellion was religious revivalism among the Muslim Moplahs, and hostility towards the landlord Hindu Nair Jenmi community and the British administration that inevitably supported the latter.

Rebellion and response

On Aug 20, the first incident of the rebellion occurred at Tirurangadi when the District Magistrate of Calicut with the help of troops attempted to arrest a few Moplah leaders who were in the possession of arms, resulting in clashes.

Arsonists took to the street, burning and destroying government property. The initial focus was on the government, but when the limited presence of the government was eliminated, Moplahs turned their full attention on attacking Hindus. One Mohommed Haji was proclaimed the Caliph of the Moplah Khilafat and flags of Islamic Caliphate were flown. Ernad and Walluvanad were declared Khilafat kingdoms [cite book | title = Encyclopaedia of Political Parties: India, Pakistan, Bangladesh : National, Regional, Local | author = O P Ralhan | publisher = Anmol Publications PVT. LTD. | date = 1996 | page = 297] .

By the end of 1921 the situation was brought back under control. The British administration raised a special quasi-military (or Armed Police) battalion, the Malabar Special Police (MSP). These police recruits were trained by the British Indian Army, and during its initial days the recruits were non-Muslims. The MSP attacked the rioters, eventually subduing them.

Wagon Tragedy

Arrested Muslim rioters were to be transferred to the Central Prison in Pothanur (near Coimbatore). They were bundled into a Goods/Freight wagon, and the train started its journey. At Pothanur it was found out that the jail was full to its maximum capacity, and the prisoners were ordered to be taken back. During this time, 66 of the 100 or so rioters had suffocated to death in the closed iron wagon.

According to official records, the government lost 43 troops with 126 wounded while the Moplahs lost 3,000 (with Moplah accounts putting the number at over 10,000). The rebellion was considered as a jihad against all non-Muslims (Hindu and British) to impose Islamic rule in the area.

Annie Besant stated: "They Moplahs murdered and plundered abundantly, and killed or drove away all Hindus who would not apostatise. Somewhere about a lakh (100,000) of people were driven from their homes with nothing but their clothes they had on, stripped of everything...Malabar has taught us what Islamic rule still means, and we do not want to see another specimen of the Khilafat Raj in India." [cite book
last = Besant
first = Annie
authorlink = Annie Besant
title = The Future Of Indian Politics: A Contribution To The Understanding Of Present-Day Problems P252
publisher = Kessinger Publishing, LLC
language = English
isbn = 1428626050 ]

Excerpts from a heart-rending petition to Lady Reading, the wife of the then Viceroy of India from Rani of Nilambur

'We, the Hindu women of Malabar of varying ranks and stations in life who have recently been overwhelmed by the tremendous catastrophe known as the Moplah rebellion, take the liberty to supplicate your Ladyship for sympathy and succour.'

Your Ladyship is doubtless aware that though our unhappy district has witnessed many Moplah outbreaks in the course of the last 100 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 babies protruding from the mangled corpses; 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 helpless 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 hellhounds could conceive of; of thousands of our homesteads reduced to circular mounds out of sheer savagery in 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 pie or two in the streets of Calicut, to buy salt or betal leaf -rice being mercifully provided by the various relief agencies of Government.

Notes

ee also

*Moplah
*Khilafat
*anti-Hinduism

External links

* [http://www.keepmilitarymuseum.org/malabar.php?&dx=1&ob=3 The Malabar Campaign (Moplah Rebellion)]