Monsoon Malabar Religion, Language, Memory and Materiality P K Yasser Arafath T he last two decades have seen a huge leap in the studies on the precolonial Indian Ocean region in general and that of Malabar in particular. The younger generation scholars, emerging from various disciplinary realms, influenced by the critical humanities discourses, have taken up a vast range of new themes to locate Malabar and its various religious and caste communities. As the southern and south-eastern Asian parts of the Indian Ocean littoral have gained remarkable attention from both vernacular and anglophone scholars, new research areas have moved beyond the earlier trends that mainly focused on political history, trade routes, and commodity circulations in the Indian ocean region (Ayyar 1938; Bouchon 1988; Das Gupta 1960; Panikkar 1929; Subrahmanyam 1990). Following these studies, scholarship on the Indian Ocean region that emerged in the 1980s examined different layers of Islam that included martyrdom, holy war, violence and communalism (Dale 1980). In the 1990s, there emerged a new trend which explored the multiple coexistences of cultural communities in Malabar and the tensions prevalent within them (Narayanan 1972; Eaton 2000; Miller 1992). As the early anglophone scholars— most of whom were barely familiar with the local language Malayalam—continued to explore Malabar with limited archival sources, a substantial volume of studies was carried out by scholars from the region itself. Enlarging the canvas of the region’s historiography, these studies, in Malayalam and English, engaged with issues such as the caste system, popular culture, textual traditions, and land and money relations.1 Based on local sources, written in various forms of Malayalam language, these studies strengthened our understanding of the region, as most Economic & Political Weekly EPW January 23, 2021 review ARTICLE Monsoon Islam: Trade and Faith on the Medieval Malabar Coast edited by Sebastian R Prange, Cambridge University Press, 2018; pp xvi + 344, £90. Malabar in the Indian Ocean: Cosmopolitanism in a Maritime Historical Region edited by Mahmood Kooria and Michael Naylor Pearson, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2018; pp xxvii + 396, `1,495. of the anglophone Indologists remained unfamiliar with the precolonial local textual traditions and non-port town agrarian villages of Malabar. While the pre/early colonial Malabar continued to generate enormous academic interests among the Western Indologists, a new set of scholars form Kerala began to explore the British colonial past of the region which was also shaped by sea, rain, forest and transnational mobility of ideas (Panikkar 1989; Menon 1994; Arunima 2005). From peasant revolts of the 19th to 20th centuries and the intricate web of martial-genealogical-matrilinealtharavad complexes (author’s emphasis) of the Nair community to the spread of communist movements, these historians with interdisciplinary training opened up new questions. In the subsequent decades, scholars have probed questions that include social mobility, migration, communitarian social reformism, and political violence (Osella and Osella 2000). With the beginning of this millennium, there emerged a range of scholars who began to deal with different aspect of lives on the Indian Ocean with a special focus on Malabar. Their work stretches from the transnational migration of the Malabar scholars and traders (Ilias 2007) and the circulation of puritan Islamic ideas and epistemological developments in light of colonial modernity (Arafath 2017) to the sensibilities around Muslim masculinity (Kasim 2018); and the anthropological vol lVi no 4 lives of Islamic rituals (Muneer 2015) to the Muslim matrilineal systems (Sebastian 2016) and conjugality (Abraham 2010) and so on. The emergence of such a corpus of research, conducted by scholars from the region itself, has made a huge shift in the domain of Malabar studies. This was a result of their ability to open up a range of vernacular archives that remained outside the academic purview of the Western Indologists who studied Malabar in the past. It is in this context that a couple of recently published books that focus on the Malabar region in the Indian Ocean littoral shall be located. They are Sebastian R Prange’s monograph, Monsoon Islam: Trade and Faith on the Medieval Malabar Coast (2018) and a collection of translations, Malabar in the Indian Ocean: Cosmopolitanism in a Maritime Historical Region (henceforth Malabar in the Indian Ocean [MII] 2018), a jointly edited volume by Mahmood Kooria and Michael Naylor Pearson. These works not only revisit some of the older arguments in the light of new archival findings, but also bring out certain fresh materials before historians for their further perusal. While Prange’s primary focus is on the preBritish Malabar from the 12th to the 16th century, some chapters in MII bring out some fresh research materials, despite the fact that a good number of them overlap with the existing works of the same contributors who already published slightly altered/shortened/ enlarged version of their works elsewhere (Kooria and Pearson 2018: 1–63; 76–120; 307–37; 338–54). Monsoon Malabar Placing medieval Malabar in the larger panorama of trade–faith–discourse, Prange argues that the history of this region took its shape from the monsoon currents 31 REVIEW ARTICLE in the Indian Ocean region that brought together people, traders, ideas and commodities from different parts of the world, stretching from Africa to Europe. Prange begins his discussions with two highly problematic modern terminologies—“Hindu Sovereign” (2018: 1) and “Hinduism” (p 14)—for identifying medieval Malabar from during 12th–16th centuries. Similarly, he makes every effort to place Muslims and their religious institutions in the mid-centuries in this putative “Hindu region.” It is true that historians’ enthusiasm for deploying such collatable categories from the present for harmless technical identifications has largely been understood by now. However, using historiographically important and politically loaded modern terminologies such as “Hinduism” and “Hindu Sovereign” as assertive categories for cultural identification in precolonial Malabar is highly problematic. Such an account can push a lot of local complexities into the back burners of history and help the narrative of the cultural nationalism that is dominant in India today. Prange’s categorisation of the precolonial region as “Hindu” and its rulers as “Hindu sovereigns” clearly overlooks a long history of intersected cultural sensibilities of the region which experienced the strong presence of heterodox religions like Buddhism for a long time.2 The scholars who skilfully examined the rich vernacular sources that show the porous nature of the religious and cultural lives in the region and beyond have been very critical of such definite categories for Malabar during the period under discussion (Narayanan 2016: 42–43). Prange’s apparent disengagement with such vibrant discourses in Malayalam texts is clearly a matter of historiographical concern.3 However, in the well-knitted five chapters that are thematically organised, Prange advances the arguments that historians opened up earlier. The new sources he uses for this purpose remain a major attraction of the book. They include various Arabic sources (mostly translated), a range of hitherto overlooked European travel records, and a whole new corpus of Cairo Geniza records, and a few important visual materials. Prange 32 uses all these materials to make a fundamental argument that the Monsoon Islam of the Indian Ocean was shaped by merchants not sultans, forged by commercial imperatives rather than in battle, and defined by the reality of Muslims living within non-Muslim societies. (2018: 3) Even though this argument had found its way several times and forms in the past, the long process through which the author reaches to it with new evidence is the attraction of this book. Pointing to the established fact that the growth of Islam in the region was not a smooth process as many commentators of Islam would like us to believe, Prange brings to it the complexity of transregional mobility of Islamic scholars and various religious texts, along with the intricate web of commercial activities in the Indian Ocean, stretching from Africa to South East Asia. Starting from the 12th century that was believed to have marked the collapse of a centralised rule in Malabar to the 16th century,4 Prange weaves together the establishment, growth and the dissemination of Islam in the region. For doing so, he looks at Muslims’ negotiation with two powers that controlled two interconnected spaces in Malabar— the land, controlled by Samuthiri rulers, and the sea which was controlled by the Portuguese from the late 15th century. Thus, he tries to analyse how Muslims’ engagements with such spaces helped them transform from a “prosperous merchant community to a militarised frontier society” (p 23). This transformation was influenced by two other spaces as well—the “mosque” and the “palace” (of the Samuthiri). The spaces that Prange weaves together, reflect a complicated interconnectedness in which long-distance trade, state, cultural organisations, scholars and knowledge networks played with each other.5 In the light of vibrancy found in these interconnected spaces, Prange challenges one of the early Orientalist tropes—“the end of Islamic golden age” between the 12th and 16th centuries. Evidently, this period in the Indian Ocean region was “marked less by decline, than by economic expansion, institutional innovations, and cultural creativity” and Prange gives enough materials to prove his point (p 17). The intellectual and epistemological vibes one sees in the spaces such as ports and mosques show that the oriental narratives of “death of Islamic golden period” have overlooked Muslim intellectual traditions beyond the Abbasid domain.6 Prange proves that a strong Islamic community emerged in an Indian Ocean littoral region through multiple negotiations, adaptations, accommodation, and contestations during the period under discussion. Broadly known as “Mappilas,” they evolved as a distinctly vernacularised community of Muslims, subsequently (pp 55–57). Prange understands the demographic growth of the Mappilas as a result of two major processes—the conversion of lower caste “Malayali Hindus” and liaisons of foreign Muslims with “Malayali women.” He reiterates the fact that the growth of Islam in Kerala cannot be understood as a result of a unidirectional Islamic preaching that the Hadrami/Arab scholars are believed to have taken up. However, what remains problematic in the argument is the deployment of a “Malayali” identity for the period in which such imaginations did not exist. As noticeable in his other categories like “Hindu,” he completely overlooks the fact that such linguistic imaginations did not sprout in the region before the mid-19th century. Therefore, the “women” who Prange refers to, had to wait much longer to enter into such imaginations.7 Ambitious deployment of such culturally loaded, non-existent anachronistic categories for a special period in the Oceanic history seems to have emerged from author’s enthusiasm to place “Muslims” in a religiously identifiable “Hindu territory” which was actually known for its caste-based kinship networks than an archetypical framework based on what we know as Hinduism from the 19th century. Trust and Trade Without investing much energy in the complexities of terminologies and available theoretical enunciations around them, Prange makes two prescient reasons that placed Malabar as a major player in the mercantile canvas of the Indian Ocean. The political neutrality January 23, 2021 vol lVi no 4 EPW Economic & Political Weekly REVIEW ARTICLE of Samuthiri rulers towards Muslims becomes the fundamental facilitating reason, while the embedded ethical sensibilities around the idea of “trust” made the region a continuous mercantile attraction. According to Prange, the “trust” factor had decided the character of trade networks among the monsoonmerchants across the Indian Ocean region for centuries.8 The trust-based, what can be termed as the “Malabar Model of Business,” also resulted in the emergence of the matrilineal-matrilocal-tharavadu complexes among Muslims. Such trust-based intimate kinship and matrimonial institutions among the coastal Muslim families and other communities remain one of the interesting facets of Indian Ocean Islam.9 The trust factor also created a strong bond between the Jewish traders and Muslims in the Monsoon trade grid, a factor that remained unexplored in the Indian Ocean studies. The Jewish traders not only travelled in Muslim-owned ships but also willingly accepted the Islamic legal structure and norms in the matters related to trade and financial exchanges (pp 62–63). However, the breach of trust between traders and the others in the grid was treated very seriously by medieval states and merchants. The players across the “ocean of trust” repudiated such misdemeanors as criminal offence which invited public humiliation and penalties. One of the vices that Makdhum II attributes to the Portuguese in the 16th century is very important in this context. For Makdhum II, it was the Portuguese who introduced a dishonest, untrustworthy and treacherous trading method throughout this grid, transforming the “ocean of trust” into an “ocean of deceit” in the first quarter of the 16th century (Makhdum 1999). The trust built between the local population and incoming Muslim traders, thus, led to the proliferations of mosques that emerged “as both symbol and manifestation” of Islam in Monsoon Malabar. Situating the spatial domain of mosques as an essential part of Muslims’ political and religious negotiations in the region, Prange traces the history of “monsoon mosques” to king Cheraman Perumal, the first putative Muslim convert from Malabar. These mosques reflect the growth of a self-assuming Muslim community in the region under the watch of designated religious authorities like qadi. Even though the mosques are located in the loosely defined problematic framework— “Hindu-ruled Malabar” (p 100)—Prange’s arguments about the relation between the mosque-based Muslims, coastal elites and Malabar’s economic prosperity gives a fresh impetus to readers. He rightly understands that the number of mosques in “Monsoon Malabar” reflected the economic and mercantile interests of the region as much it reflected the religious sensibilities of Muslims during the period in concern. Prange cogently argues that the numerous mosques that came up in the region did not necessarily reflect the actual population of Muslims. Rather, it should be understood as an enthusiastic anticipation from early Muslim traders and scholars from different parts of the world for a thriving Muslim community in future (p 120). A close reading of one of the instances in this book can illustrate the reason why Muslim women in today’s Malabar are able to tell a different history of knowledge-based social mobility. This mobility can be traced back to masjid-dars complexes in medieval urban centres that admitted Muslim girls for religious learning.10 For Prange, the vernacular architectural style of the “monsoon mosques” illuminates Muslims’ “relationship to the prevailing social order.” Muslim mosque builders in the region borrowed the architectural and aesthetic ideas along with the material and labour necessary for their creation (p 125). As these “monsoon mosques” represented a long history of friendship and exchanges, it was very natural of the Portuguese to begin their racially influenced religious persecution by destroying and desecrating such mosques across the region. It was an attempt to erase a history of shared lives, and Malabar was not an aberration. The Portuguese carried out such violence against such knowledge-based religious centres across the “ocean of trust” from the first decade of the 16th century (Prange 2018: 140–41). There was a peculiar relationship between these monsoon mosques Economic & Political Weekly vol lVi no 4 EPW January 23, 2021 and the palace of Samuthiri, the other spatial domain on focus in the book. The intense dialogical relationship with these two spaces, along with the productive participations of ports, got transitioned with the diabolic entry of the Portuguese in the city of Calicut.11 Spatial Characteristics While dealing with the “palace,” Prange reworks some of the existing arguments and sheds new insights in the light of new archival sources, written in different languages. Even though there are dents of errors and flattening terminologies to describe intimate social systems like sambandam (167), this chapter tells us how the spatial characteristics of Samuthiri’s monsoon palace were shaped, directly and indirectly, by other spatial domains like ports until the 16th century.12 For example, one can see the dynamics of property rights in the “palaces” and the elasticity that the Muslim ulema brought to the notions about property and profits in the spatiality of the shafiite mosques. They, collectively, shaped the growth of Calicut as one of the most sought-after monsoon locations in the mercantile grid of the Indian Ocean, connecting Africa, Europe and Asia. The dialogical of these spaces also formed a complex system of crime, punishments and justice before the Portuguese. However, the significance of this town was later shifted to other trade emporia of the coast within the first two decades of Portuguese presence in the region. Largely based on secondary sources and a few translated primary sources, the last and final chapter of the book, “The Sea” elaborates upon the relationship between pepper networks and piety. Moving slightly beyond a much-beaten road, Prange elicits the translocal network of pepper trade and its relevance in shaping the political economy of regional states on the western coast (pp 226–28). Assuming pepper to be a non-utilitarian luxury good with exotic value in Western Europe, where the elite houses kept it for exhibiting power, affordability and their international contact, Prange points out how the utilitarian pepper in the “monsoon ocean’s” local networks strengthened the layers of circulatory knowledge 33 REVIEW ARTICLE in South Asia. This chapter shows how translocal pepper networks were intrinsically connected with the thriving capillaries of pilgrimage circuits that in turn strengthened monsoon Islam’s pietistic sensibilities. Thus, the multiple pepper networks by the shore and core of the ocean enabled multiple convergences of ideas and scholars in the region, stretching from Morocco and Mogadishu to Mecca and Ma’bar. Certain assumptions in this chapter, coming out from new sources, only reiterate the complex world of knowledge travels that connected “monsoon Muslims” with scholars from the desert. Now, it is an established fact that the thoughts of early Islamic scholars such as Abd al-Qadir Jilani, Ahmad ibn Ali Rifai, Ibn Hajar al-Hytami were disseminated across the monsoon settlements from the early centuries of Islam. Such networks and sensibilities resulted in the birth of a number of monsoon clusters that experienced ethnic differences and social hierarchy. However, it was the genocidal attacks from the Portuguese that weakened their economic stability and social growth in and around Calicut. However, Prange seems to be reluctant to use terminologies like “genocidal” and “pogrom” when it comes to the Portuguese—similar purposes are clearly recognised in a number of recent research works while using them generously when it comes to Muslims. For instance, he uses the term “pogrom” to describe a minor retaliatory attack by Muslims against some Jews in Kodungallur which was outside the Samuthiri’s domain (p 195) in the 16th century. Influential Muslim scholars like Makhdum II declared that such internal disorders ( fitna) and clashes among local communities such as Nairs and Jews to be highly condemnable.13 Samuthiri and the Six Pack Mappila Prange uses a few early colonial visual images from different Western repositories to prove some of his arguments. However, these images, along with many others, can take younger historians to new worlds of enquiries. As the visual narratives and early colonial gazes at the Malabar body remain an unexplored area in South Asian historiography, 34 these images point out how pre-British Europeans, belonging to various colonial powers, imagined about the “dark” and “naked” bodies of the colonised while showing their “definite interests in the Orient,” as Edward Said noted (Said 1979: 11). The pictorial imaginations of the Mappilas, the Nairs, and the Samuthiri rulers show how early Orientalists’ political subjectivity made a significant “hold upon” their presentations of the Orient which mostly came up “in accordance with” their relations with the local rulers and native populations (Foucault 1995: 25–26). For example, the early Dutch paintings in the book show how Europeans highlighted their biological and racial differences with the “Malabar body” while envisaging the centrality of nakedness in Malabar. The close physiognomic resemblances that the Samuthiri rulers and the Nair soldiers share with the ripped body of African males in those visual narratives not only shows the racial sensibilities of the early colonisers about their exotic “frontiers” but also the ways in which they understood the impact of biopolitics in the process of subjugation. While barefooted Muslims (Mappilas) and the Nairs are shown in the most rustic demeanour with their sartorial identifications like the scull caps, European Christians are presented as fully clad, refined human beings in the most expensive fibers, befitting the footwears and ornaments. The tall, dark, and almost naked Samuthiri at his scantiest best, and extremely masculine native male figures with their aggressive postures show the ways in which the discourse around eugenics and the racial other was set in motion in the Indian Ocean littoral in the 16th century itself. Similarly, the two paintings with toned Muslim men holding their spears suggest the “warmongering” nature of the Mappilas, who were continued to be imagined as an unfinished civilisational project of the Europeans in the subsequent centuries (Prange 2018: 53, 168, 185, 246). These paintings show that the ethnographically oriented Dutch travelers continued to debate “dirty” Muslims throughout the 17th century South Asia in their texts and paintings.14 However, the absence of any discussion about the visualisation of native body in the early colonial imaginations continues to intrigue the readers about the “hermeneutical blindness” in South Asian historiography, particularly when the Malabar body became centre of Europe’s eugenic imaginations from the last quarter of the 16th century.15 According to Talal Asad, the “capitalist Europe,” emerging out of “feudal Christendom,” continues to locate people of the orient within the framework of “civilised” and “savage” since “the Vasco da Gama epoch of Asian History” (Asad 1973: 103–04). Thus, it is pretty much clear that, much before the British construction of “fanatic Mappila,” both the Portuguese and the Dutch ethnographers pushed the imagination of savage Mappila in their accounts through multiple registers.16 Prange’s account gives us certain clue as to how the early colonial sources gazed at the “Malabar body” and communities such as Nairs and Mappilas, the two groups that disturbed them the most in different ways. Texts, Inscriptions, Translations While Prange focuses on the 12th–16th centuries, Kooria and Pearson (2018) in their anthology of translations present a few relevant sources that can help scholars of Indian Ocean studies expand many existing arguments, including the ones that Prange elaborated. Chronologically organised, this volume deals with a wide time span and brings to the fore certain interesting texts that broadly deal with the lives of various religious communities across the Malabar coast. Though the chapters on Islamic religious traditions dominate the volume, a couple of hitherto unexplored/underexplored sources throw light on other communities and caste groups in the region. Resonating with what Prange argued in his book (2018), Istvan Perczel’s (2018: 76–140) annotated translations reflect on a complicated world of religious communications and tensions within Christian communities in the early modern Indian Ocean region. Even though a notable part of this long essay has been published twice with different titles (Istvan 2018), readers can still see an interesting realm of January 23, 2021 vol lVi no 4 EPW Economic & Political Weekly REVIEW ARTICLE religious communications in the Christian world where clashes and tensions occurred due to consistent reiteration of power and authority by conflicting denominational heads and the medieval states. Similarly, Meera G Muraleedharan’s refreshing translation (pp 121–40) contributes to our understanding of caste tensions in the region of Malabar. Apart from showing the denominational tensions between various foreign missionary denominations in Monsoon Malabar, this translation also reflects how the Dutch missionary orientalists like Philippus Baldaeus were enthusiastic to present the oriental body and lives as abnormalities, like his contemporaries elsewhere. If Perzcel’s translations show a Christian argumentative sphere in the 16th century, Muraleedharan’s chapter shows how perplexed European writers were after witnessing the complicated world of Brahminical lives based on “purity,” in the 17th century. Micheal Pearson’s reproduction of a small part of Charles Dellen’s writings on Malabar from the original English translation (1698: with minimum tweaking with modern spellings), further supplements Muraleedharan’s text and gives us some brief ideas about a puritybased Brahminical punitive regime in the 17th-century Malabar. Dellen, an early French orientalist who travelled in Malabar, was excited with the people in this “exotic orient” with their rare customs. The translation shows his lack of apt vocabulary and intense bewilderment with regard to region’s unique social institutions like sambandam. For example, Dellen uses the clear categories such as “husband” and “wife” for unmarried men and women in intimate sambandam relationships (182), clearly based on his European normative sensibilities. Following the narrative pattern of the oriental-phobic writers in the post-Reformation Europe, Dellen also shows how early Islamophobic narratives were slowly setting in the colonial imaginations. For this medical professional, Muslims in the Malabar region were “vile and treacherous sort of people, abundance of them live upon piracy, and attack all ship they meet” (p 188). Such descriptions were far removed from early orientalists’ imaginations in which Prophet Muhammad was already established as “a wicked monster and damned soul” after the Europe experienced attacks of the Ottoman Turks, the “the scourge of God and present terror of the world” as the Europe understood them (Vitkus 1999: 210). However, the chapters on Islamic institutions, inscriptions and texts in this volume show an integrated Muslim community in Malabar under the guidance of popular Islamic scholars who evolved a multilateral method of everyday conversations with other faith communities. Prange’s chapter in this volume on the utilitarian “monsoon mosques” shows how they resembled local temples in terms of architecture, showing Muslims’ continuous negotiations with the local power structure, communities and materiality (pp 338–53).17 The inscriptions—the visual texts in such mosques and shrines— in monsoon Malabar are the earliest literised visual communications through which the ulema engaged with the faithful in their community before the colonial period. A large number of such inscriptions, bearing Quranic verses and Hadith, are the live testimonies that show how the ulema understood the possibilities of architecture as a medium of visual communications. The chapters of Shukoohys (pp 1–64; 307–37) that consume one third of this volume point to the fact that the visual texts in precolonial Malabar played a significant role in the early discursive realms of Islamic communities in the region. Although considerable parts of their chapters (pp 6–32; 313–35) have already appeared in an earlier work,18 the detailed translations of a few hitherto overlooked inscriptions show the enthusiasm of the early ulema and patrons of Islamic piety for creating visual texts for urban Muslims in the cosmopolitan space of the mosques in the region.19 The pietistic and political relevance of such didactic visual texts was supported by hortatory texts of various kinds, authored by organic scholars like Qadi Muhammed in relation to Portuguese violence across the region from the 16th century. These texts include poetry, legal compendiums, historical accounts, and hortatory speeches like Khutubat-al Jihadiyya. In Economic & Political Weekly vol lVi no 4 EPW January 23, 2021 his translation of this text (pp 64–75), Kooria claims to have “introduced” it with annotation after having “found” it at two different private collections from Malabar (pp xxii, 64). However, the original manuscript from Panngil Ahmed Musliyar collection which Kooria claimed to have “introduced” was already published with elaborate annotations by N A M Abdul Kader (2012: 22–36), a major Arabic scholar from the region. Kader has also translated the same text, closely following the spirit and the language of the Arabic original in the same year.20 Except a small section which is missing from Kader’s translation,21 Kooria’s translation in the present volume bears uncanny similarities with Kader’s translation while his annotations seem to have been informed by the rich explanations that Kader provided in his Arabic compilation. Apart from numerous instances of synonym substitutions, the author seems to have also borrowed exact lines from Kader’s translation.22 Oceanic Vernacular Apart from such non-Malayalam texts and inscriptions, a couple of chapters in this volume establish that the poetic tradition in Malayalam language has considerable value for reconstructing the history of communities in the Indian Ocean. Underexplored Malayalam texts like Patappattu throw lights on the early anti-colonial resistance from local communities (pp 141–72). S Parameswara Aiyar (known as Ulloor), who wrote a fairly detailed introduction in English to the Patappattu, understood such literary imaginations in Malayalam as the “historical perspective of our ancestors” (Aiyar: ii). In his detailed study of this text V C Sreejan argues that the marking difference of this song was its departure from the existing literary conventions by taking up a political and secular subject (Sreejan: 2012: 141–42). Despite the fact that Kooria makes the same argument in the brief note without referring to Srijan’s widely known work (2018: 142), his partial translation of the Patappattu shows the usefulness Malayalam vernacular texts for retelling the stories of tensions and confrontations in the early colonial Malabar region and beyond. 35 REVIEW ARTICLE Similarly, in Abhilash Malayil’s “translated summary,” a fresh addition to the vernacular history of the region, one would see a complex picture of ports, translocal travels, labour, religion and everyday emotional tensions of people (Malayil: 232–57). While Malayali’s well-crafted summary of a lengthy oracular text in Malayalam reflects on a range of emotions such as love and separations among traders and the social reality of caste lives in the region, Gagan D S Sood’s translations of the Persian letters that the Bengali traders wrote from Cochin in the mid-18th century show how the mercantile families in the ocean world reassured their families of their emotional supports and care (Sood 2018: 201–31). These letters are of immense value for understanding the layers of emotions around love, intimacy, children, maritime uncertainties, familial anxieties, unpredictable deaths, unending hopes, and intense piety among the stranded sailors. These proud Shi’ite traders were writing letters to their relatives and the others in Bengal, when a popular Sunni scholar from Malabar began to discredit Shi’ite Islam and their practices. P K M Abdul Jaleel’s ingenious translation of Shaykh al-Jufri’s (1727– 1808) Arabic works unravel the intense theological arguments in the early modern Indian Ocean world (pp 258–81). Richard G Marks’s translation of Rabbi Jacob Sapir’s work further opens up such tensions “within” the Jewish community of Cochin, based on ethnicity, color and ritual observances, in the mid-19th century (pp 282–306). In short, these two volumes, despite certain palpable theoretical and ethical issues, enrich the growing domain of Indian Ocean studies. The new sources they introduced are very important to reimagine the significance of Malabar in the Indian Ocean mercantile-cum-religious grid from the 12th to the mid-19th century. This grid connected people, places, goods, cultures, gastronomies, medicines, technologies, texts, scholars, scribes, sartorial markers, races, and emotions. P K Yasser Arafath (yasserhcu@gmail.com) teaches at the Department of History, University of Delhi. 36 Notes 1 See Koya (1994); Krishnan (2000); Kunnhi, (1982); Varier (1997); these works are to be taken as representative ones as I need to omit a large number of Malayalam books due to space constraints. 2 Namboothiri (1987); for the complex fluidity of religious lives of the region, see Krishnan (2000). 3 For an entirely different take on Cera empires in Kerala, see Balakrishnan (2010). 4 For a debate around the “centralised Malabar,” see Nayarayanan (2013); Balakrishnan (2010). 5 It was Stephen Dale (1980), who categorised the Mappilas as a frontier community. However, his classification has been doubted by historians like K N Panikkar who finds problems in using such transplanted categories; see Panikkar (1982). 6 Miri Shefer-Mossensohn is one of the major historians who counter the “decline theory” of “Islamic golden age” by looking at the knowledge production centres in Ottoman Turkey from the early 14th century. Mossensohn establishes strong presence of thinkers, scholars and scientists in Turkey who continued to explore the idea of Ijtihad; see Mossensohn (2015). 7 See Arunima (2006). For Muslim scholars’ imaginations about “Malayali-Muslim”/“Kerala Muslim” in the 19th century, see Arafath (2017). 8 Historians from Kerala did reflect on the idea of trust before. According to them, the sensibilities around trust were strengthened by other factors such as honesty, peace, and security, and they were intrinsically connected with the growth of Calicut as a mercantile superpower during the period in concern; see Narayanan (2011); Gangadharan (2007). 9 For a detailed account of matriliny and its complexities in the region, see Arunima (2005); Sebastian (2016). 10 Recently, scholars have uncovered a long history of female education activities among various Muslim communities, and tried to locate them “as a continuation of established tradition, based on the precedent of the prominent female transmitters of the Companion Generation;” see Sayeed (2013). Notwithstanding Ibn Batuta’s descriptions about female education in the 14th century, historians continue to search “for the educated Muslim women” in the 21st century Malabar, see Lakshmi (2012). 11 Many Arabic texts of this period registered the diabolic nature of the Portuguese. They were not different from the pattern of violence that the Spanish conquistadors conducted in Latin America during the same period see Galeano (2010); Todorov (1999). 12 Prange’s descriptions about women in precolonial sambandam relations as “wives,” and describing them as the “Kshatriya women of the Nair caste” are symptomatic of his unfamiliarity with the vernacular sources that deal with local complexities during the period in concern. One wonders if the Sudra–Nair women in relationships with elite Brahmins considered themselves as “wives” (bharya or veli in Malayalam) as understood by the early orientalists who did not have a vocabulary to place such women in such exotic social institutions; for the complexities of this institutions, see Arunima (1996); Kodoth (2001); these works and many other local sources also show that all Naduvazhis or kings in medieval Kerala were not the children of Namputhiri Brahmins as Prange presumes and many stories of pedigree evolved alongside the imagination of communities and invention histories in the 19th century in legitimate genealogies were a great matter of concern. Similarly, the “Kshatriya” 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 January 23, 2021 status given to Nair women also invites a major question: when did a section of the Sudra– Nairs begin to assert their Kshatriya identity in Malabar? What did local sources talk about Nairs’ claims of Kshatriya status between the 12th and 16th centuries? For a detailed study of the idea of fitna in the imagination of Malabar ulema in the presence of the Portuguese, see Arafath (2018). See Pelsaert’s exotic description of the body and demeanour of Muslim men and women in the 17th during, very similar to his compatriot Dutch writers’ visualisation of Malabar and its people, see Pelsaert (1995). For Africa, see Coly (2019). For “fanatic” Mappila, see Ansari (2005); My current research project entitled, “Naked Samuthiri and Sartorial Mappila: The Malabar Bodies in Colonial Imaginations” situates the portrayal of this region and its people in the Portuguese, Dutch and British sources. Sebastian Prange’s chapter on Malabar mosques in this volume significantly overlaps with his long chapter on the same idea in his book; see Monsoon Islam, 2018. It is interesting that neither the editors nor the authors felt it necessary to mention clearly if such heavy self-borrowing has happened in this volume; see Shokoohy (2003). However, a couple of serious factual mistakes the authors make in their chapter: “The Malabar Mosque: A visual Manifestation of an Egalitarian Faith” (pp 307–08) are noteworthy; (i) The misleading statement in a footnote— “today women are barred from entering mosques in Kerala”—not only overlooks century-old debates and activities in the region regarding women’s entry into the mosques but also thousands of mosques under various organisations such as Kerala Nadwatul Mujahidin and Kerala Jamat-e-Islami that allow women for prayers. Similarly, thousands of mosques under traditional Sunni organisations have started keeping a portion of their mosques for Muslim women travelers. Similarly, the authors’ statement—“Khutba, the sermon usually delivered after the Friday prayer”—is another serious factual mistake. It is universally recognised that Khutba should be delivered before the Friday prayer and delivering such is a mandatory ritual, irrespective of the sectarian differences within Sunni Islam. However, the author claims to have found an “ineffectual” standalone translation with “many mistakes” published in 2014. Interestingly, such a stand-alone translation does not exist, and Kader’s anthology was neither reprinted nor republished in 2014. This part is found in Kader’s Arabic compilation but got “missed out” in his English translation due to “technical error,” as he put it in my telephonic conversation with him. “Either the reward and booty or the martyrdom and eternal bliss” (Kat der 2012: 34; Kooria 2018: 70); similarly there seem to have been many mistakes in the translation, for example for the Arabic word sa’a’dat Kooria uses “victory” instead of the correct translation “happiness” (p 70); for akn’af he uses “frontier” instead of “shelter”/“shades” (p 70); for watan he uses “home” instead of “place” or “country;” for Ribat he uses “guard” while it is widely known as establishing “military tents/fortification” (p 75); while protecting the forts/tents in the Arabic original becomes “guarding the frontier” (p 75) in this volume. Interestingly all these terminologies were already used correctly in the right context in Kader’s translation. Such mistakes and presence of sentences vol lVi no 4 EPW Economic & Political Weekly REVIEW ARTICLE Abraham, Janaki (2010): “Wedding Videos in North Kerala: Technologies, Rituals, and Ideas about Love and Conjugality,” Visual Anthropology Review, Vol 26, No 2, pp 116–27. Ansari, M T (2005): “Refiguring the Fanatic, 1836– 1922,” Muslims, Dalits and the Fabrications of History, Shail Mayaram, M S S Pandian, Ajay Skaria (eds), New Delhi: Permanent Black, pp 36–77. Arafath, Yasser P K (2017): “Literarization and Trans-Islamism: Life and After-life of Sayyed Sanaulla Makthi,” Reasoning in Politics: From Political Philosophers to Politician Seeking Philosophy, Pani, Narendar and Behera, Anshuman (eds), London: Routledge. — (2018): “Malabar Ulema in the Shafiite Cosmopolis: Fitna, Piety and Resistance in the Age of Fasad,” The Medieval History Journal, Vol 21, No 1, pp 25–68. 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Galeano, Eduardo (2010): Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent, New Delhi: Three Essays Collective, pp 12–14; Ilias, M H (2007): “Mappila Muslims and the Cultural content of Trading Arab Diaspora on the Malabar Coast,” Asian Journal of Social Science, Vol 35, pp 4–5, 434–56. Kader, Abdul N A M (2012): “Al Khutubat al-Jihadiyya” (The War Speech), Al Aydyulugiya Wa Nnidal (Ideology and Struggle), Calicut: University of Calicut, with the support of National Mission for Manuscript, New Delhi. Kasim, P Muhammadali (2018): “Mappila Muslim Masculinites: A History of Contemporary Abjectification,” Men and Masculinites, Vol 20, No 10, pp 1–16. Kodoth, Praveena (2001): “Courting Legitimacy or Delegitimizing Custom? Sexuality, Sambandam, and Marriage Reform in Late Nineteenth Century Malabar,” Modern Asian Studies, Vol 35, No 2, pp 349–84. 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Economic & Political Weekly vol lVi no 4 with very close resemblance and substituted with synonyms are plenty in this chapter. Apart from misstating substitution with synonyms as translation, this author also stands far from being the first person to annotate Kutubat al-Jihadia. His annotations very closely follow the painstakingly elaborated annotations that Kader provided in the Arabic anthology; irrespective of the fact that Kooria uses different compilations of the same hadiths with a few extra. According to J Devika (forthcoming) such “plain borrowing” from lesser-known scholars without acknowledging their hard work has become a new trend among the “celebrity” academics in Kerala. References EPW January 23, 2021 Osella, Filippo and Caroline Osella (2000): Social Mobility in Kerala: Modernity and Identity in Conflict, London: Pluto Press. 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