The Nadapuram Enigma A History of Violence and Communalism in North Malabar (1957–2015, Economic and Political Weekly, Special Article, Vol-51, Issue.No.15, 09 April, 2016

SPECIAL ARTICLE The Nadapuram Enigma A History of Violence and Communalism in North Malabar (1957–2015) P K Yasser Arafath This paper delineates the social history of insidious communal political violence in north Malabar. It focuses on Nadapuram, a rural region in Kerala’s Kozhikode District. The complexities of communal proliferation are products of entanglements of caste, conversion, economic mobility and land relationship. Political discourses at the global stage and efforts in building identity-based alliances have a direct bearing on this region. Changing politics of both the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and the Communist Party of India (Marxist) also has a direct bearing on the social life of the Hindus, while the communitarian politics of Indian Union Muslim League, Islamic doctrinal debates and neo-Salafisation are no less significant in the making of a new Muslim mindscape. These particularities then facilitate in the making of two oppositional and clannish identities in the region. I am grateful to G Arunima for sharing her thoughts and making insightful comments at various stages of this research. Thanks to Sachin Narayanan, K Shaheen, Muhammad Niyas, and Nasrulla Mambrol. P K Yasser Arafath ([email protected]) is assistant professor in the Department of History, University of Delhi, New Delhi. Economic & Political Weekly EPW april 9, 2016 vol lI no 15 E xisting literature on the violent zone in the post-independence Malabar primarily focuses on tensions between two major parties in the region, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and the Communist Party of India (Marxist)— CPI(M). Recently social anthropologists who have examined the conflict situation in north Malabar suggested that mere association with these two political parties produces a fear of death amongst their members (Chaturvedi 2011). However, scholars working on violence in South Asia have not studied the embedded communal tensions in north Malabar region. This paper delineates the social history of the insidious communal character of political violence in north Malabar. It focuses on Nadapuram, a rural region in Kerala’s Kozhikode District. Intermittent, and at times continuous, episodes of conflicts in Kozhikode are rooted in the larger history of social formation, mobility and multitudes of intellectual engagements in the region. With a sizeable Muslim population, and Hindus, mostly from the Thiyya community, this region has a long history of cumulative communal tensions, especially since the 1950s. This is just a coincidence that I write this article a little after a major incident of communal conflict and unprecedented targeted destruction of properties of the Mappila, the local Muslim community in Vellure and Thuneri, two villages in Nadapuram region on 22 January 2015 near Nadapuram panchayat. The episode began in Thuneri and Vellure, when a Democratic Youth Federation of India (DYFI) activist was killed by a member of the Indian Union Muslim League (IUML) who is known to have criminal antecedents. The incidents that followed in these villages, politically dominated by the CPI(M), were unprecedented in scale and character in the history of violence in Kerala and were strongly condemned by a large number of academic, human rights activists and civil society groups (EPW 2015). While the IUML leadership washed off its hands by disowning the self-proclaimed killer, the CPI(M) local leadership has, rather incorrigibly, described this as a “reaction” to the murder, echoing the action–reaction rhetoric in the post-Godhra carnage. However, an examination of the intertwining nature of material relationships, the land, religion, party politics and the religious communities in this region shows that such large-scale arson and looting cannot be located in essentialist narratives. Engagement with communalism in regional settings that also examines its social, ideological, and economic aspects, has, of late, become a topic of interest amongst scholars working on South Asia. There are a few studies on political violence in 47 SPECIAL ARTICLE north Malabar in the post-1950s. But the reluctance to address the communal character of such violence in this region has been most conspicuous. The political anthropologist Ruchi Chaturvedi, in her pioneering study, primarily focuses on the complications of violence between CPI(M) and RSS in Kannur District, Northern Kerala (Chaturvedi 2011). Dilip Menon analyses the social and cultural relations between the Hindus and Muslims in north Malabar from 1900 to 1936 (1994). However, apart from the fragmented vernacular commentaries that vacillate on these issues, one would hardly come across studies that deal with communalism in the northern Malabar region after the formation of Kerala in 1956. I am not trying to essentialise the exclusivity of a region by treating the scraps of its history in isolation or trying to make an indiscriminate “atomisation” of a region’s history, as some detractor of micro-history would argue (Rabb 1983). This paper sees the history of violence in a small region by locating it in the trans-local nature of north Malabar by exploring as to how the problem of communalism is intrinsically connected with region’s own past as well as the present of other regions. Here my understanding of trans-locality is significantly different from the definitions in which the region is irrelevant (Appadurai 1996). Understanding the differences in pattern, and the social/religious groups that have been involved in the violence requires an ethno-historical approach. My being a native or “an insider,” and not a distant anthropologist who visits only for research (Lughod 1993), makes my task easier. In Nadapuram, factors such as family ties, kinship, and pre-conversion status form the most important social markers and my background as someone from the larger Kurunnankandi family helped me in engaging with both the Muslims and upper caste Hindu communities. My status as a “politically disinterested university professor,” the affection of fellow villagers, friendships, and other forms of kinship helped me in the clusters of the Thiyya community, the biggest community in the region. I did not encounter the usual impediments one comes across in this land-locked region, where people have a general disinclination towards sharing information about violence. Nadapuram: From a Medieval Town to a Violative Region Nadapuram is situated within the geographical extension of Kuttipuram Kovilakam (Logan 1887) and is a major branch of Kadathanad Swarupam, a famous 16th century “little kingdom.”1 Though Nadapuram town never experienced communal tussle in its recorded history, violence in the surrounding villages are archaically termed as Nadapuram kalapam (violence). This is because the region’s hilly rural interiors—Vanimel, Valayam, Narippatta, Parakkadavu, Chekyadu, Kakkattil, Mokeri, Theruvamparampu and Thuneri—situated within a radius of 15 km from Nadapuram share a strong emotional, cultural and historical relation with the town.2 Therefore, the whole region, with a medieval Muslim town as the epicentre, evokes multiple emotions and meanings in different contexts and mindscapes. Natives see the region as a representational space of Mappila entrepreneurship since the early 1930s, while outsiders perceive it as a violent zone. This landlocked medieval rural town has a 48 recorded history of 400 years and entered into the medieval texts in the second half of the 16th century. Muslims from Nadapuram were credited for participating in the anti-Portuguese struggle and this makes it the only non-port rural region in Malabar engaged in “jihad” (holy war) against the Portuguese, the perceived “enemy of Islam.”3 Its representation as the first rural non-port town with a settled Muslim population in north Malabar, in a way, questions the hypotheses that date growth of rural Islam in Malabar to 18th century (Dale 1980). From Tuhfat-ul-Mujahideen one can infer that Hadrami Ulema in the 16th century considered it a part of the larger Dar-ul-Islam (abode of peace) and this town remains a major centre of Islamic theology and philosophy.4 Apart from the strong Hadrami presence which remained till the 19th century, architectural remains like Poochakkal Bhavanam (Poochakkal house) manifest a long-standing Sufi Islam as well. According to a preliminary observation by the Kerala Archaeological Survey, this Sufi centre could have been active from as early as 15th century, while local Muslims trace its history to the 12th century, which marks it as the first centre in north Malabar.5 Karamats (miracles) of last Sufi who was popularly known as Poochakkal Aur form a significant part of the Mappila religious narratives even today. Thus, remaining actively a part of the larger Islamic cosmopolitanism and the “shafiite Islamic textual grid” (Arafath 2015), Nadapuram played a significant role in spreading Islam into the interiors of North Malabar from the early 18th century. Eulogised as the “Second Ponnani” in the local narratives, this town had been the intellectual and institutional epicentre of what I term as “the second wave Islam” in which a major part of both Kozhikode and Wayanad Districts witnessed the sprouting of rural Muslim settlements.6 By the early 18th century, the Nadapuram Masjid- Dars complex attracted large numbers of Arabic scholars from all over and its curriculum included all major Hadith compilers and Islamic theologians. The Hadith texts—Saheeh-hul-Sitta (six major Hadith compilers; Bukhari, Muslim, Tirmidi, Abu Davud, Ibn Maja) and medieval texts like Kitab-ul-Baidavi of Nasruddin Qazi Baidavi, Mafathih-ul-Gaib of Imam Razi, Thuhfath-ulMuhtaj-bi-Sharahul-Minhal of Ibn-Hajarul-Hythami and Ihya Ulumuddin of Imam Gazali, Koothu-ul-Qulub of Abu-Twalib-ulMakki—were part of the Nadapuram curriculum since its inception.7 This emphasises the region’s relevance as a rural interior which participated in precolonial transnational Islamic textual circulation in the Indian Ocean knowledge grid. The second wave of Islam witnessed a significant scale of conversion (Arafath 2014) to Islam among the Hindu upper caste population, especially Nairs, and certain tribal communities like Kurichiars who have strict notions of purity and bodily practices. This is significant in terms of difference from other parts of north Malabar where converts were mostly from the “polluting” castes such as Mukkuvans and Tiyyas (Gough 1961). However, Nair conversion was not less common in other parts of north Malabar as well, as evidenced by an entire Nair tharavad (ancestral home of joint Hindu family in Kerala is known as tharavad)—converting to Islam in nearby Tellichery (present Thalassery) in the 20th century (Menon 1994). Apart april 9, 2016 vol lI no 15 EPW Economic & Political Weekly SPECIAL ARTICLE from non-textual ritual practices and the tradition of inheritance, part of the conversion process has also been attested by tharavad names that many Muslims still keep to mark their pre-conversion status. Included in the retained names are Namboorikkandi (land of Namboothiris), Panikkarveettil (house of Panikkar), Koyilot (house of Samanthas/Nairs), Tharavattathu (Nair tharavadu), Manakkal (Namboothiri house), Kuruppumveettil (house of Kurupu), Menakkoth (place of Menon), Illath (Namboothiri matrilineal unit), Manikoth (name of a 16th century Nair family), Pattarukandi (land of Tamil Brahmins), and so on. Additionally, the mosque registers from Nadapuram and Vanimel show that women from families like Kurunnankandi did not have to pay khabarpanam (burial fee) as the burial land belonged originally to them or donated by them and the land rights went to women through karanatthavazhi (matrilineal) till very recently.8 Many of these families received land as a gift or janmavakasham (birthright) for their multiple associations with Nair/Samantha families.9 C V Kunjikrishnan, a local scholar, political leader and himself a Nair by birth, attributes poverty and material possibilities as reasons behind new religious conversion when Nadapuram developed as a major centre of trade. Since the Nairs in the entire Malabar region did not develop a rule-bound caste identity until the 20th century, change of religion for material possibilities was much easier (Arunima 2003). As Kathleen Gough observes, local rulers and elite Nairs, who were “warriorcultivators,” were always short of finance due to less productivity and poor communication till the Mysorean epoch in north Malabar from 1760 (Gough 1961). Muslims retained their land even after conversion as in the case of Kurunnankandi tharavad or land was handed over to them as in the case of Arangadans (six forest-dwellers) who enjoyed the purappadu-paattam (lease) and gradually became the owners of the agricultural land. Thus, it is not the residential segregation of Muslims which was the “reason for lack of conflicts,” in Malabar as argued by Stephen Dale (1973). Instead, it was the land-based economic integration which ensured their amicable social relations with the upper caste Hindus in Nadapuram. In this rural interior, Muslims’ new status as landlords by the 18th century gave them a new socioeconomic status along with a sturdy sense of social hierarchy. While the factors of economic dependency, land possession, and conversion fashioned an amicable intra-community relation between the Nairs and the Mappilas, the emergence of Muslim landownership in the interior resulted in strained land relations with the Thiyya community.10 This was one of the reasons why Thiyya conversion was less significant here unlike the port towns where lower castes benefited from social mobility and economic opportunities. Agrestic necessities, agrarian dependency and an unchanged caste attitude would not have opened up the above-mentioned possibilities for the Thiyya peasant castes in this interior region. Therefore, when the Muslims became a landholding community in the region from the late 18th century, the Thiyya remained kudiyar (settled tenant cultivators). As the caste boundaries were redefined with specific rules of purity and bodily engagements, Nairs treated the Mappilas as purer and admissible, while the Thiyyas were Economic & Political Weekly EPW april 9, 2016 vol lI no 15 out.11 kept C J Fuller’s (1976) description of interdictions; body, sex and daily social engagements, within the Nair community in north Malabar in the late 19th century shows that stringent caste boundaries alienated the Thiyya community in the whole region, and it could not have been different in Nadapuram as well. Thus, sandwiched between two landed aristocracies, Thiyyas started asserting both caste and the religious identity centred on Hinduism by the early 20th century. Bequeathed with the caste reformism and new economic possibilities, Thiyya caste assertion attained a new dimension in this place from the 1930s, as it did in other parts (Osella and Osella 1999). Newly attained caste identity and social mobility of the agrarian Thiyyas, and the disjunction in the region were reflected in Mathamohini Kunjami Mala, written in the early 1930s by a local Arabic–Malayalam poet Puzhakkal Veetil Moideen. This is the first Mala text from the north Malabar region which talked about the tumultuous social relation between kafirs (Thiyyas) and Mappilas in the mid-20th century (Moideen quoted in Vanimel 1993). Cheeru, a Thiyya woman converted to Islam after falling in love with a Soopy—a Mappila—was rechristened as Kunjami. Challenging the conversion, strongly Hinduised Thiyyas dragged her from the hideout and attempted to reconvert (shuddhi) her back to Hinduism and kept her at Thiyya Mooppan’s house; however, she escaped and remained a Muslim (Moideen quoted in Vanimel 1993: 41–44). According to Kunjami Mala, a serious issue broke out in the region when the “violent kafirs” declared a religious procession against “brave Muslims” in front of the Vanimel Jamaat Mosque. However, a “processional conflict” (Menon 1994) was avoided as the Thiyyas withdrew from crossing the mosque, but for Kunjami Mala it was their “fear of maulud, shahadath, takbeer and the tiger-like attitude of the courageous Muslim men.” Though they retracted, the assertion of masculinity by Hinduised Thiyyas is similar to the self-assertion Charu Gupta notes in her study of North India (1998). This Mala represents the first physical expression of Thiyya resentment once they completed the absorption of Hindu identity and social hierarchy, as noted by Menon (1993). Emerging caste assertion of Thiyyas was attested by Kurooli Chekkon, a Thiyya bandit, who attacked and looted both Nairs and Muslims with the help of a Muslim convert from Thiyya community in the mountainous Vilangad, a bordering region between Kozhikode and Wayanad Districts (Aiyappan and Mahadevan 1990).12 Martial Network and Muscular Politics Violence and exalted combat politics in the region cannot be removed from the deeply entrenched tradition of martial emotions and networks. As is well known, the recorded martial tradition of the north Malabar goes back to the early 16th century when the local disputes between families and little kingdoms were solved by the chekavans (mercenaries) from both Nair and Thiyya communities. Kalari, the physical exercise complexes of Nairs and Thiyyas, created a network of martial culture in Malabar from the medieval times, noted Barbosa (2009), the 16th century Portuguese traveller. This promoted the system 49 SPECIAL ARTICLE of ankam (combat) through which civil disputes were resolved and germinated another martial custom—kudippaka (blood feud). Thiyya mercenaries dominated chekavan tradition in the medieval Kolathunadu and Kottayam, while Nairs held sway in the Kadathanadu region. Institutionalised martial culture and the idea of masculinity around the chekavan tradition cannot be excluded from the narratives of ensuing conflicts between CPI(M) and RSS in Kannur, as both attempt to claim the Thiyya community as their electoral constituencies. Additionally, one would see a large number of kalari complexes in Kannur sponsored by various parties. Thiyya-dominated villages in Nadapuram such as Valayam, Kallikkandi, Chuzhali, and Thuneri are situated very close to the extended cultural and physical geography of Kannur. Muslims were also part of the kalari institutions in Kadathanadu and Kuttippuram—two places that were part of the Nair martial network. Though not representative in nature, supposedly the first Thiyya–Mappila tension in the region had broken out when a group of rural Muslim youth stopped Attummanammel Unniyarcha, the exhaustively glorified Thiyya female kalari expert of the Putthuram Veetil family, situated in the present-day Kannur District13 Unniyarcha assumes a physical and social meaning in the song which ridicules the invidious masculinity of the Thiyya men who are represented by her own husband Kunjiraman who “was afraid of real fights.” Similarly, the Mappilas in the region have inherited a strong martial expression of masculinity from the Nairs in the region, even though the Nair martial complexes and tharavads started declining by 19th century.14 By the mid-1980s, sensitised to the aggression of each other, both CPI(M) and IUML reclaimed dysfunctional kalari institutions in places like Mulivayal, Parappupara, Chuzhali, Narippatta, Kakkattil, Vatayam, Vattoli, Valayam, Theruvamparampu, Varikkoli, Avolam, and Vanimel among many other places. Patronised by political parties, IUML and CPI(M), in their respective strongholds, these kalaris managed to produce a strong masculine community consciousness. Forming a strong part of the region’s everydayness, kalari institutions also created a martial sociability in the region till the early 1990s. Abhyasis (martial art experts), a byproduct of this network, became a significant part of the local social and political dynamics, apart from creating a sense of competing martiality. The abhyasis’ hyper-masculinism and idea of heroism led to the birth of martial gangs, belonging to religious organisations and political parties. Formed around martial solidarity gangs like the “LTTE” (CPI-M), “Tiger Sunnis” (traditional Sunnis), and “Thirty Four Brothers,” “Nadapuram Defence Force” (Mappila martial gang), apart from the formal martial volunteer corps like Red Volunteers CPI(M) and Harita Sena from IUML, have been instrumental in the proliferation of violence in the region. During a research trip, I came across a vettu kalari (hacking kalari) where buffalos are hunted and slaughtered in places especially made for this. Situated in central Poyiloor, a border area between Kozhikode and Kannur, these kalaris, as described by an informant, are the training centres for both CPI(M) and RSS, teaching them techniques for clinically killing their political rivals.15 Due to a significant decline in violence from 1988 to 2001 and police vigilance, most 50 of the kalaris in the region have become extinct and have been replaced by other eastern martial forms like karate. Form, Pattern, and the Trajectory of Violence (1957–2015) Thus, the process of rural conversion, agrestic relationship, and extended caste dynamics amongst Muslims, and a religiouslyinvoked caste identity within the Thiyya community played a significant role in the construction, pattern and the consequences of the violence in the region. Despite Nadapuram being perceived as a Muslim dominant area because of the community’s economic and educational mobility and urban visibility, the Thiyyas are actually the most numerous in the region. However, Thiyyas and Nairs live in the interiors in small clusters, while the economically dominant Mappilas are the visible face of region’s urban life, though one does notice mixed clusters intermittently. Like any integrated demography, it produced its own share of joy and an emblematic domain of feast, fair and friendship, as well as occasional tensions that never developed into permanent rivalry amongst groups with clannish interests until the recent episode.16 The first homicide in the region was a direct result of such integrated reality which started taking a different shape due to the larger political change in Kerala. According to local narratives, Kadavath Mammu, a pramani Mappila (landholding Muslim with higher conversion status) was killed in Vanimel by a Thiyya peasant named Motta Pokkan in 1957.17 Known as a “date revenge” (paramour) this can be conjectured as first of its kind in which a Thiyya killed a pramani Mappila in Malabar. This event coincided with the formation of the first communist government in Kerala in which C H Kanaran, the most powerful Thiyya Marxist leader, represented Nadapuram constituency in the communist assembly. Additionally, none of the major political parties had fielded Muslim candidate in the whole region of north Malabar. Thus, I argue that with the formation of the first communist government in which all members of undivided Communist Party of India from Kozhikode District were Thiyyas,18 the Thiyya as a community gained individual confidence and resorted to counter aggression in the region. The second murder which has never been a matter of discussion on the violence in the region so far was a direct fallout of the new land relationship. Land relationship underwent a tremendous change in the region with the new phenomenon of Syrian Christian kutiyettam (migration) which significantly changed the social and demographic profile of Malabar. As part of the larger Syrian Christian “exodus in search of cultivable land” (Varghese 2006), in 1942, Mappilasshery Kurriyachan and his brother Appachan from Kottayam District of Kerala obtained a large tract of garden land from the “Company,” (five landholders from the Arangatan tharavad). Interestingly this land originally was the janmam (birthright) of the Kurunnankandi tharavad who received it from the Ayanjeri Kovilakam (Padikkalakkandi 1993: 51–54). Once the Syrian Christian settlers became the demographic majority in some of these regions, Mappilas started looking for new land in other hilly areas which often were Thiyya dominated; this invited resentment. In 1972, Vazhavecha Parampath Abdulla, a Mappila abhyasi, was killed april 9, 2016 vol lI no 15 EPW Economic & Political Weekly SPECIAL ARTICLE by Thiyya abhyasis in Chittari, a hilly area in the Valayam Grama Panchayath, 8 km from Nadapuram town. New religiosity and political assertion of Thiyyas is reflected in the narrative around this murder. Thiyya tenants claimed this murder was a mistake they committed “when they were shooting a panni (pig)” which destroyed crops. Pramani Mappilas avenged this murder in 1974 by killing Alakkal Kunjikkannan, the prime suspect in this murder case and a prominent Thiyya abhyasi. In Mappilas’ counter narratives, he was shot by mistake as he was taken as a “cow.”19 The creation of a narrative binary centred on two animals, tabooed and sacred for Muslims and the Hindus, respectively, shows that from the early 1970s, the emotional stress around religious identity got a real physical expression in the region and the same helped both parties, CPI(M) and IUML, in consolidating their constituencies around these exclusive emotions. At the same time, many from the region admit that the communist movement and auxiliary developments like new literatures and trade union activism produced a sense of self-assertion among the lower caste convert Muslims and commoners. Mappila commoners faced repressive exploitation at the hands of pramani Muslims. In a constrained social space they were not allowed to inter-dine with the pramani Muslims unlike in other part of the north Malabar where pramani Mappilas were demographically smaller (Gough 1961). One is struck by the extent of interdictions that commoners faced—right to inter-dine with tharavadi Muslims, prohibition from onnam panthi (first serving) in social/ritual occasions, penalisation for speaking in front of them, tortures for keeping turban/topi in pramani’s presence, and proper wage for their labour. Additionally, lower caste people who were converted into Muslims were not permitted even to share the first swaff (row) in many Jamaat mosques in rural areas until very recently. Additionally, the commoners were recognised through their thirupperu (derogatory nicknames), a reminder of the internal hierarchy within the Muslim social life in the region. A few such thirupperu— Chakkara, Thandan, Ambattan—denoted their pre-conversion occupations, while the likes of pakki (uncircumcised penis), motta (tonsured head), tandan (Thiyya headman) were used to refer their low status. Nairs employed the same pattern (same names also) when the Thiyya community began taking up Nair sounding names as part of increasing caste/religious consciousness. Additionally, both the Muslim and Nair elites addressed lower caste Hindus as chekkan (male) and pennu (female), according to M A Vanimel, a local scholar and writer. The Reformist Agenda Muslim social behaviour and the pramani mindscape did not change in the region even after the emergence of a strong “reformist” Islam from the early 1940s. Islamist organisations like Jamaat-e-Islami (JeI) found significant presence in the region much before the establishment of present IUML and it was in Vanimel that JeI-Kerala conducted its first Islamist sermon series (mathaprasanga parampara) in the early 1940s. Haji Sahib, one of the favourite disciples of Abul Ala Maududi—“the foremost ideologue of Islamism” as noted by Irfan Ahmad (2006), conducted this series with the active patronage of Mappila Economic & Political Weekly EPW april 9, 2016 vol lI no 15 pramanis of Vanimel. When such urban-based Islamic reformism (Gellner 1981) reached this interior, it could not change the character of religious dimension which was controlled by the interior elites.20 Similarly, the story of the Salafi/Mujahid reformism was not different. While the Salafiite reformism in urban areas was controlled by the middle class elites like Koyas (Osella and Osella 2008), in the interior parts it was controlled by tharavadu pramanis. As Samir Amin astutely argues in the larger contexts of the Islamic reformism which was inspired by the nahda (rebirth) movement of Egypt (Amin 2009), Islamic reformism in Malabar also remained regressive, ambiguous and elitist till the 1970s, while enabling certain material and theological changes in Muslim civil life. Since the reformist agenda was controlled by pramani attitudes in interior and the urban elites in other places, it failed to be an emancipatory catalyst in Muslim social life. I maintain that, as doctrinal reformism’s focus on theological purity had assertively increased in the early 1970s, the notion of social equality remained a miasma in the argumentative sphere that emerged due to the Islamic doctrinal wars in Malabar. Situations underwent significant changes from the 1970s for two major reasons—one being the emergence of a new wave of religious discourse due to the internal clash in dominant reformist organisations (Ahmad 2009). At a different level, as a consequence of oil boom in the mid-1970s, the “remittance Mappila” (as I termed) emerged; it destabilised the land-based village social relations. As a community, the Mappilas in Nadapuram attained the current economic mobility solely on the remittance of expatriate Mappilas in West Asia. With a new financial assertion through remittance capital, Mappila commoners urged for an intransigent religious identity and space which was controlled by, what I term, the mahal-tharavad-consortium. This consortium ensures the social hierarchy within the Muslim community as the “mahal”—mosque-centric Muslim habitus—are also controlled by the selected members of prominent tharavads.21 The emergence in the 1970s of new Islamic sensibilities which created a deep religious exclusivism in West Asia and Egypt (Mahmood 2005) also reverberated in Malabar at the same time. Communism was recklessly presented as anti-Islam in both JeI and Mujahid discourses. They categorised it as a humanly constructed jahiliya (ignorance) ideology, and being a communist meant to be a murthaddu (deviant). Such rabid characterisations resonated in religious sermons at mosques and waa-du programmes in the new exploration for pure textbased Islamic theology.22 The immediate political beneficiary of such situations were largely the pramani Muslims. Then the IUML aggressively started resorting to the idea of Muslimness and claimed the Mappilas as their electoral constituency. Thus, unlike in Kannur where violence emanates from the competition for social constituency of the same class and caste (Chaturvedi 2011), in Nadapuram, it emerges out of the complex realities of caste, class, religion in the region and outside. The incipient consolidation of communities now began to work as saturated communal identities. It was reflected when Kunjiraman, a Thiyya Congress sympathiser was killed in 1973 by the henchmen of pramani Muslims of Vanimel on the issue of koolitharkkam 51 SPECIAL ARTICLE (wage dispute). Embalmed as the first Thiyya martyr in postindependence Kozhikode District, this murder was presented as a planned Muslim atrocity against the Thiyya community.23 Ever since Kunjiraman was appropriated as a Thiyya martyr, all acts of violence attained religious colour and each death invoked martyrdom among both communities. Concomitantly, the erection of rakthasakhi mandapams (martyr pillars) by the CPI(M) in the rural interiors created a new social meaning for martyrdom by ensuring a seamless physical network of martyr memory. Muslim league responded with equal vigour through a counter-emotive strategy by invoking the concept of Islamic shaheed (martyr) around the Muslim victims and shaheed nagars as counter-monuments.24 This was reflected in the killing of Madompoyil Ibrahim, a Mappila shopkeeper who was killed in a Thiyya dominated area in 1985 and was declared as the first Muslim shaheed in the region. Consequently, the concept of shaheed continuously invoked in the death of Muslim league supporters, though they were not saving Islam by jumping into jihad against the “perceived injustice” by kafirs as Ayesha Jalal points out in the 19th century context (2008). Both parties continue to depend on the clear division of “being a Mappila” and “being a Thiyya.” These communitarian identities get expressed in the everyday conversation in the region. In the close intra-personal conversation, the other person gets crystallised in plural term ingalyal (you people), while the first person is jnalyaal (our people) (Davud 2001: 18). These categories get a different expression—ammalyalum and olyalum (“us” and “them”), while referring to the “other” within the internal interactive space where the other is physically absent. Subsequently, since 1988 one could witness political engagements in the region clearly shaping up the binary of Mappila and Thiyya. This led to sporadic scuffles which culminated in a death in 1985 of A Kanaran, a powerful Thiyya leader, who redefined CPI(M) in the region with religious rhetorics and aggressive Thiyyanism. Kanaran was manhandled in Kulangarathu, 5 km away from Nadapuram. The scuffle happened when he broke into the IUML’s protest march against the “lacklustre and biased” attitude of the police in nabbing the accused in the murder of Nambodankandi Hameed, who was shot dead in 1985.25 Unprecedented violence followed after CPI(M) activists demanded immediate retaliation through public announcement system “for his serious injury” at “Mappila hands.” The violence that followed was irreducibly communal and Mullampath Pakran (Muslim League, Naripatta), Chaluparampath Kunjabdulla (Congress, Naripatta), Sajeevan (Students Federation of India, Thiyya), Variankandi Kunjammed Haji (unknown political affiliation—Vanimel), Yousuf Haji (unknown political affliation) and Kappummal Divakaran (CPI(M), Vanimel)—were killed in the violence. C V Kunjikrishnan urges that while IUML had targeted Thiyya-communists, CPI(M) workers had targeted Muslims, irrespective of the political affiliation. Shift in Character of Violence Though a shift in character of violence in the region is reflected in all killings, Divakaran’s death was different. Although Divakaran himself was a Dalit and the only one Dalit martyr of 52 CPI(M) in the region, his Dalit identity was never recognised by the CPI(M). Divakaran, a partially disabled person, was killed in the violence that erupted following a rumour that the Muslims were stopped from attending the Friday prayer. Remembering from oblique memory of an eight-year old eyewitness to the rumpus that this rumour was first created in the Salafi mosque in Nadapuram, I can now piece together the web of religious rhetoric that subsequently became agential in communal preparation and retaliation in the region. Additionally, the ascendancy of religious narratives, use of symbols and production of cultural imaginaries show the strong investment in the presence of constitutive others which parties were to exploit. In a later period, changes in the narratives have been reflected in CPI(M)’s martyr memorials that translate an emblematic psyche of otherness in the region. What had been engraved as pramani Muslim in 1973 on Kunjiraman’s pillar became Muslim League gunda on Divakaran’s memorial by 1988. The memorial of Vinu at Vishnumangalam reflects the shift in pattern as the inscription refers to the culprits as Muslim terrorists, a term that represents the localisation of global political discourse on Islamist movements and terrorism.26 Far from being considered infinitesimal, this episode also reveals the ways in which communities were perceived through their subcultural identities. People were targeted on the basis of their dress; attacks were carried out after their religious identities were verified according to the wrapping of mundu, the common dress of men in Kerala.27 Pattern of wearing mundu had always been a marker of differences in Malabar from the medieval time (Fawcet 1901). While Muslims leave open the end of the mundu at the left side, the Hindus keep the open end of the mundu on the right side. Local historian M A Vanimel observes that, apart from the new social mobility and fashion aesthetics, a surreptitious fear of such repetition accounted for a large number of men resorting to trousers, a religiously neutral dress to blend well in a conflictual zone. Another compelling outcome of this period was the spread of radical organisations, both Islamist and Hindutva. One such organisation, the National Democratic Front (NDF), though officially formed after the destruction of the Babri Masjid in 1993, was born as a result of these incidents to “defend Muslim umma when IUML failed to do what was expected of them.”28 Though the embryonic enthusiasm for this radical fringe was obliterated due to the powerful mahallu-tharavadu consortiums as most of them are indirectly controlled by IUML, an ineluctable growth of RSS shakhas in areas like Kakkattil, Vattoli, Varikkoli, Kulangarathu continue to flourish. Later on, both Vishva Hindu Parishad and Bajrang Dal strengthened their base in interiors by introducing Bharatmata, Virat Purushan and ultra-nationalistic rhetoric in tune with the changing urban visual aesthetics across the state, “an ugly new national iconography” (Arunima 2014). Cascading effect of the Hindutvaisation and Islamism was bitterly revealed in the first half of 2001 when a local issue was inflated in Chekkyadu, a strong hub of remittance Mappilas, 11km from Nadapuram town. The issue led to the killing of a Democratic Youth Federation of India (DYFI) activist Santhosh, who was shot dead by a remittance Mappila who claimed to have april 9, 2016 vol lI no 15 EPW Economic & Political Weekly SPECIAL ARTICLE “shot him after repeatedly dissuading him from looting.” Retribution violence followed immediately when an elderly pravasi, Moidu Haji, was slashed and his “neck was sawed away” and this metamorphosed into a communal conflict between Thiyyas and Muslims (Menon 2001). In subsequent communal frenzy, large-scale property destruction and looting occurred across political affiliations in the region except Vanimel. A large number of houses, vehicles, and economic establishments of both communities were targeted and Muslims were worst affected as they were visibly better off. Another dimension which was witnessed in the second stage of 2001 was the magnitude of systematic property destruction and plunder in the region. As per an assessment of the local civil society collective, property worth about Rs 18–Rs 20 crore was damaged across religious line, though no upper caste Hindu houses or establishments were attacked. What makes this episode unique in the history of sectarian violence in Kerala is the treatment of the invisible Muslim women, who were frightened for days in Thiyya-dominated areas. They were materialised as new targets of attack and numerous incidents of physical harassment were reported. However, a clear gendered statistics of sexual violence and harassment in Nadapuram is not available as Muslim women in any conflict zone are absorbed into the larger Muslim identity (Kumar 2002). The second stage of violence in 2001 was triggered by an alleged “rape” in Theruvamparampu in which a Thiyya youth, Vinu, was accused of as the prime culprit (Arafath 2012). Vinu was killed in Kallachi town by NDF activists. NDF presented the pain of an alleged rape victim as the pain of the whole community. The questions of community preservation, pride, modesty and female honour were continuously invoked, especially among the remittance mappilas in West Asian diaspora. The “traumatic experience of pain” (Asad 2003), like elsewhere, created a new self-narrative of the Mappilas as a community of inexplicable sufferings in Thiyya–Hindu dominated areas. As the Muslim women became the locus of attack, resonating north Indian style anti-Muslim aggression, communalisation of the pain was no longer difficult. In the context of existing religious and political discourses where the “community pain” has been a major topic, it was easy for Muslim organisations, particularly pravasi collectives, to present the alleged rape as a conscious infliction on Muslims’ social body. In communitarian rhetorics of the region, the pain was presented as the majoritarian agency of power which was used to suppress a cultural minority. However, no references are made on female refugees in conflict zones of Malabar and Nadapuram, as Behera (2006) notes in other South Asian regions. My fieldworks show that a large number female refugees from Theruvamparamp had to remain in neighbouring villages for months. According to Ramesh (name changed), a local branch member of CPI(M) which attained a status of “secular defendants” in Kannur when RSS attacked Muslims in 1970s (Chaturvedi 2011), such forced migrations and making of female refugees were very much part of a larger plan which intended to teach “them” (Muslim) a “lesson.” He takes a great pride in having ensured “their absence” from this place and claims that “they had learned it properly.” Economic & Political Weekly EPW april 9, 2016 vol lI no 15 Vellure: From Insidious to Open Communalism The latest episode of violence in Vellure and Thuneri in 2015, following Shibin’s death, closely resembles many of the tropes of anti-Muslim violence in north India. According to various civil society accounts, eyewitness accounts and media reports, the clinical precision with which property was destroyed could not have happened without meticulous planning at the highest level. Despite the open declaration of his sole responsibility in the homicide by the accused, communally targeted property destruction took place as happened in Gujarat during the riots (Shani 2007). Such situation shows the deep-rooted resentments that were continuously invigorated by the parties in concern. Photographs, eyewitness accounts and regional media reports corroborate the fact that Muslim houses were marked with black flags, sheets, papers for identification and execute a clinical destruction.29 From different sources and the survey I conducted, it emerges that property worth Rs 40– Rs 50 crore was destroyed in which over more than 70 Muslim houses were completely ruined. A local leader of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist Liberation) says that, by allowing party workers indulge in such grotesque acts of the biggest communally targeted property destruction in postindependence Kerala, the CPI(M) rejuvenated the confidence of the party cadres whose masculine aggression was in hibernation since 2001. This observation is significant as both RSS and CPI(M) emphasise on the strength of “masculine fraternity” as Chaturvedi suggests in the case of Kannur (2015). Additionally, when the local police connived with the rioters, women and children were forced to migrate to nearby villages (Onnat 2015). The trajectory of police involvement in the communal tensions in Kerala shows that they are not different from their north Indian counterparts, whose “firings are directed disproportionately at Muslim mobs,” a well-established fact (Brass 2004). An overwhelming change in this episode was the overt presence of the BJP/RSS workers in arson and looting. Though local people have always insisted that the RSS workers clandestinely participated in Nadapuram riots since 2001, it was evident in the first video which recorded communal frenzy in the northern Malabar. Participation of known RSS workers in the attacks that followed the death of a DYFI activist shows that the periodic retributive violence in the region is strongly influenced by new identity consciousness which produced a different level of camaraderie around religion and caste. This led in Nadapuram to the blurring of boundaries between CPI(M) and RSS in conflictual times, while in Kannur both parties fight for and within the ethnographic constituency of the Thiyyas (Chaturvedi 2015). Therefore, contradictory to the political violence in Kannur, here the workers of CPI(M) and RSS get conceived in a singular Thiyya based Hindu reference, while the members of IUML and frontier Islamist organisations like NDF, Popular Front of India and Social Democratic Party of India get absorbed into the archetypal classification of “Muslims.” As noted by Hansen (2008) elsewhere, I would argue that in Nadapuram, the complicated history of the caste, conversion and different patterns of economic mobility have been three most visible agentives and determinants in the making of conflictual times. Therefore, it is, in a way, natural that the 53 SPECIAL ARTICLE party boundaries and ideological singularities get blurred when the riot participants connect with each other through their religious, ethnic and caste kinship (Hansen 2008). Conclusions Apart from the clear disjunction among communities, social relations between the Mappilas and Thiyyas in the region have become more ruptured in the wake of new economic mobility and immutable social assertion within these communities in micro-regional settings. Mostly uneducated people have unscrupulously become the main financial backers of new religious initiatives in the region. Permeating into the inner domain of community through religion has become the method of their acquiring visibility, when the outer domain of social structure is still controlled by pramanis and upper castes, amongst both Muslims and Hindus. At the same time, their survival has depended on patronising uneducated/unskilled village youth by providing them with blue collar employment. This blue collar class which can form into village gangs at many places, from both communities, has become the face of scuffles in the region. The invidious presence of these gangs has been felt in all places where violence occurred in 2001—Theruvamparampu, Chekyadu and Parakkadavu. Having become an indissoluble fixture of interior landscape, they continuously fight for village spaces and engage with moral vigilantism and production of rumours. Rumours, as noted by Anderson (2004), often created a squalid network of fear to have the ground for violence in the region. Far removed from the context of riots is the newly emergent aggressive religiosity in the social psyche of the region. Within the Muslim community, apart from other reasons already mentioned, it is also fermented by the aggressive argumentative space which has been created by the doctrinal war between traditional “Sunni” scholars and “Salafi Islamists.”30 Interestingly, Muslim doctrinal argumentation (vadaprathivadam) in Kerala which often ended up in physical clashes between “reformists” and “traditionalist” had a long history and started in Nadapuram Notes 1 Details of swarupams, see Ganesh (1991). Haridas (2014) locates medieval state structure in Kerala in the conceptual framework of “little kingdoms” developed by Bernard S Cohn. 2 These places are arranged chronologically in accordance with the occurrence of violence in Nadapuram since 1973. 3 Sheikh Zainuddin Al-Makhdhoom-11 (1583/1999), Tuhfat-ul-Mujahideen (Tribute to Warriors), Malayalam translation by C Hamsa (Calicut: Al-Huda Book Stall). 4 Both Sheikh Zainuddin Al-Makhdhoom-11 and Qazi Muhammed, two prominent Islamic scholars whose writings on jihad and Islamic jurisprudence were circulated across the Indian Ocean Arabic Cosmopolis from the late 16th century, had considered Malabar to be part of the larger Dar-ul-Islam and Dar-ul-Aman (land of peace); see Makhdoom II (1583) and Muhammad (2000). 5 Kerala Archaeological Survey withheld a fuller examination due to the tussles between three claimants of this house, namely, Poochakkul family, Kurunnankandi and Masjid-ul-Falahiya. A deeper and scientific examination of this significant medieval structure has been much awaited by local people. 6 Atthilan Bappan, who belonged to Kombees, a prominent landholding and trading tharavad of Nadapuram, built the first Juma Masjid of 54 7 8 9 10 in 1933 (Moulavi 2001). Decades of aggressive Islamic argumentative created its own violative zones and has had an impact on the intra-social relation as Thiyya often get known as kafir, particularly in the rhetoric of puritan neo-Salafism (Arafath 2013). Similarly, demonstrative assertion of new religiosity amongst the Thiyya community has been materially manifested in their celebrations modelled on North Indian processional rituals. This enthusiasm can be seen in Thiyya community’s emerging interests in tira (sacred), pilgrimage tours, renovation of abandoned shrines and groves in the interior. Since the attitude of major political parties towards the new religiosity has been propitious, ritual and cultural separateness between the communities only gets reasserted. One can see all these elements acting together in the making of the latest episode in Vellure, a mixed demographic cluster with a small Muslim population which had earlier depended on the Thiyya agricultural elites. Their achieving of significant economic independence and social mobility in Thiyya-dominated area changed the relations of dependency. In short, the complexities of communal proliferation in the region are the result of entanglements of caste, conversion, economic mobility and land relationship. Political discourses at the global stage and efforts in building identity-based alliances have a direct bearing on this region. Changing politics of both the RSS and the CPI(M) has a direct bearing on the social life of the Hindus, while the communitarian politics of IUML, Islamic doctrinal argumentatives, and the neo-Salafisation are no less significant in the making of a new Muslim mindscape. Subsequently, these particularities facilitate in the making of two oppositional and clannish identities in the region. Like the post-modern global context in which ideocracies present adversaries as other, engagements with religious identity of political opponents has been agential in the production of communalised violence in the region. Such incessant identitarian perusal has been a major impediment in creating a sensory consciousness—that communal conflicts and murders are representational of a feeble sociopolitical condition of any region. Wayanad in 1713 at Korom. Conversations with Bappan’s family members reveal that Varampatta Jamat Mosque, another important mosque in Wayanad, was constructed around the same time by the members of Arangandan family who also hailed from Nadapuram. Presently, these two families are spread across three districts of northern Malabar, namely, Calicut, Kannur and Wayanad. These 18th century rural mosques, along with others, show the interior extension of Shafiite Islam in Kerala. See Shaheen (2015). I obtained this information from a series of conversations with Sheikh Keezhana Ustad, the former Qazi of Nadapuram Jum Masjid and a prominent Islamic scholar in the 20th century Kerala. Marana Vivara Pattika (death register) of Vanimel Jumat Masjid (1988): 3 (41), accessed on 20 December 2004. Such burial rights were continued until very recently in all three major Jamat Mosques in the regions of Nadapuram, Vanimel and Velliyode. Since an assessment based on land records is difficult as most of them are lost, my conclusions in this regard are based on coconut plantation in the region where some tharavads have moonnam kuri pari (harvesting from third-generation plantation). Since average productive life of a coconut tree is between 80 and 110 years, one could infer from the term that Mappilas in the region began to take up coconut plantation about 200–250 years before. 11 According to C V Kunjikrishnan, this situation changed after the 1980s when the Thiyya community began to associate with the new money economy and labour collectives that enabled the communist movement in the region. I conducted a series of interviews with him from 2014 to 2015. 12 Chekkon was the main assistant of “cheap” Avaran, an infamous “Mappila Robbin Hood” from North Malabar in the late 19th century. I conducted a series of interviews with the members of Chatechamkandi family to which Chekkon belonged. Interviews were conducted between 2005 and 2009. 13 According to the Putthuram section of the “Northern Ballad,” this tension was resolved with the intervention of the Muslim muppan (chief), chetty (merchant) and Unniarcha’s own brother Aromal Chekavar. See Sreedhara Menon (2008). 14 Most of the Kovilakams in North Malabar region maintained kalari-thara (martial place). Kuttippuram Kovilakam retained its Kalari until 1971, the year the “Privy Purse” was abolished. 15 This frightening information was obtained from Stephen (name changed) who took me to one such kuzhi kalaris after two weeks of continuous persuasion. 16 Neither recorded nor oral evidence suggest any Mappila–Nair conflicts in the region until now. One would see that Vadakkan Pattukal (North Ballads) talk about very close relations april 9, 2016 vol lI no 15 EPW Economic & Political Weekly SPECIAL ARTICLE 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 between Kadathanadu Nair Rajas and Muslim elites in the region. Both Makhdhoom–11 and Qazi Muhammad, perceive any conflicts between Muslims and Nairs as highly undesired and a dangerous problem which would create large scale internal disorders in the region, see Makhdhoom–II and Muhammad (2000). From the personal archive of Abdul Rahiman, a homeopathic practitioner and a local antiquarian. All three members of the undivided Communist Party from Kozhikode District—Madathil Kumaran (Perambra), Mandoti Kuniyil Kelu (Badagara), C H Kanaran (Nadapuram) and a majority from the neighbouring Kannur District belonged to the Thiyya community. Invocation of “cow” was crucial in the construction of identity and community consciousness in the context of new discourses on nation and conversion since 1920s, see Gupta (2000). See the chapter on K Moidu Moulavi in Karakkunnu (2015). I use the broader definition of “habitus” to locate the structure and power dynamics of “mahals” (see Bourdieu 1990). Anti-communist rhetorics were common in Qutubas at “reformist” mosques and waadu (religious speeches) of the traditional Sunni scholars across Malabar. The Islamic Publishing House a major player in Islamic print at Kozhikode, founded in 1945 under the aegis of JeI, translated a large number of anti-communist literatures by the Islamist scholars across the Islamic world. Included in them are Sayyed Qutub (Egypt), Ali Shariati (Iran) and Masharruddin Siqqiqi (Pakistan). This is inscribed on the martyr pillar of Kunjiraman in Kulapparamp, Nadapuram. Marhoom Madompoil Ibrahim Smaranika (Memoirs of Marhoom Madompoil Ibrahim), (1995), Vanimel. Details of this milieu were obtained on 25 June 2008 from E Chathu, a Thiyya merchant and Congress activist who was an eyewitness to the incident. There are three raktasakshi mandapams in Vanimel panchayath, one in Nadapuram panchayath, three in Valayam, and one in Thuneri. 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