Anti-Colonial Violence in the 1921 Malabar Rebellion
As the current Hindu right-wing regime continues to perpetuate the century-old colonial stigmatization of a Muslim peasantry led anti-colonial rebellion in British India, a historical communist recuperation of the movement and its legacies is warranted.
Malabar rebels being taken to trial at Calicut, Malabar District. Illustration: Jamhoor (Original image: Wikimedia)
“If for the freedom of this country anybody in Kerala had been able to put up a bold fight against the British empire, if anybody in Kerala can claim to be brave and determined, it is these brave and poor Muslim peasants, who facing guns and cannons, defied the white soldiery and even their mechanized divisions as if they didn’t care a straw for them and carried on a brave struggle for freedom” - A.K. Gopalan, Indian communist revolutionary, 25th August 1945
In August 1947, while the newly born Republic of India celebrated its hard-won independence from British colonial rule, the fervent communist leader A. K. Gopalan, destined to become the country’s first opposition leader, remained imprisoned in the southern region. His crime? Delivering a fiery speech on August 25, 1946, in Perinthalmanna, then part of the Malabar district in the Madras presidency, the southernmost administrative province of British India. The speech boldly asserted the anti-colonial and anti-feudal roots of the 1921 Malabar Rebellion, one of the bloodiest uprisings against British rule in India, led by Mappila Muslim peasantry across the southern Malabar district. Gopalan’s view reflected the cumulative thinking of the communists in the region, while colonial and most nationalist accounts viewed the Rebellion as a communal and "religious uprising".
The skewed colonial and the nationalist projection of the rebellion as a religious uprising once entertained by the likes of the Indian National Congress and its leaders like Mohandas K. Gandhi, continues to resonate today via Hindu far-right organizations like the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). The ideological fountainhead of India’s current ruling party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), RSS and its affiliates demonize Mappila rebellion as an early manifestation of the Taliban mindset in India. In 2021, the Narendra Modi regime removed 387 martyrs of the rebellion from the ‘Dictionary of Martyrs of India’s Freedom Struggle,’ published by the Ministry of Culture and the Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR), recasting the anti-colonial uprising as a “religious conversion” movement.
This article examines the communist perspective on Malabar Rebellion that offered a class analysis to understand its underlying causes, implications and the politics of violence in decolonial movements. This history of sustained communist efforts not only rescues the legacy and memories of the rebellion from its tarnished image as a communally motivated uprising, but also repositions the use of violence as acts of decolonial resistance, a position once decried by nationalists like Gandhi. Such ideological re-positionings of the yesteryear helps those combating the far-right’s attempts today to bring back the initial communal interpretation of the rebellion for political gains.
Areas of Malabar district affected by the Mapilla rebellion. Source: Madhyamam
Behind the Rebellion
When the British established the Malabar district in 1792, following the collapse of Tipu Sultan's Mysorean regime, they introduced colonial private property and taxation laws that entrenched local landlords (Janmis) as the absolute landowners. Previously, in Malabar's agrarian economy, landlords were co-proprietors with Kanakarans (middle-caste land supervisors) and Verumpattakarans (lower-caste/Muslim cultivators), who had customary rights to one-third of the agricultural produce but no right to evict tenants. Tipu Sultan's reforms had established direct land settlements with tenants, reducing the power of Naduvazhis (supralocal chiefs) and local Nair chieftains. However, under British rule, the Mappilas, lower-caste Muslims in southern Malabar who had previously experienced some relief from the aristocracy's oppressive social relations, found their situation reversed.
“The growing Mappila peasant discontent in the southern Malabar hinterlands, such as Eranad and Valluvanad, began to solidify through the growing tenancy movement of the late 19th century. They organized local anti-landlord protests, using tactics such as non-cooperation and social boycotts against upper-caste Hindu landlords.”
Notably, the colonial property laws shifted the revenue burden onto peasants, leading to arbitrary rent hikes and frequent evictions. New taxes, flawed revenue surveys, and land over-assessment sparked widespread, sometimes violent, protests. Heavy tolls on traders in interior Malabar worsened conditions for traders and middlemen. This fuelled growing resentment against the British and upper caste Hindu landlords. Consequently, land issues, including forced evictions of tenants by Janmis with colonial support, prompted responses from the local Muslim clergy. Traditional intellectuals such as the Musliar, Qazis, and Ulama helped foster an anti-colonial temperament in the region, with teachings from figures such as Veliyamkod Umar Qazi and Sayyid Alavi Thangal.
The growing Mappila peasant discontent in the southern Malabar hinterlands, such as Eranad and Valluvanad, began to solidify through the growing tenancy movement of the late 19th century. They organized local anti-landlord protests, using tactics such as non-cooperation and social boycotts against upper-caste Hindu landlords. Historian K. N. Panikkar observed that the passionate speeches of local Mappilas, rooted in their experiences of misery under the feudal order, had a greater impact at protest meetings than those of urban intellectuals. Furthermore, local tenancy associations helped build solidarity among peasants against the Janmi landlords. However, Mappila insurgent actions before the 1921 movement were localized, limited and discontinuous, with only 351 rebels involved in 32 incidents between 1836 and 1919. Many of these uprisings involved small groups of Mappila peasants attacking Hindu landlords, British officials, and even fellow Mappilas who collaborated with the colonial regime and local feudal authorities.
Immediate Trigger for the Malabar Rebellion?
In the early 20th century, the anti-colonial nationalist movement gained significant support among the Mappila tenant cultivators and small farmers. This surge in support was largely driven by Gandhi's efforts to link the Congress-led anti-colonial Non-Cooperation movement with the Khilafat movement within British India that aimed to restore the Ottoman Caliph to his previous position as the figurehead of the global Muslim community following the breakup of the Ottoman empire by Britain and its allies after the First World War. In southern Malabar, combined with tenancy issues (e.g., high rents and the constant eviction of tenants by Janmis with state support), an unparalleled unity of Hindus and Muslims drove the joint Non-Cooperation-Khilafat momentum.
The struggling Mappila peasantry engineered a strategic alliance with anti-colonial and anti-landlord political platforms (e.g. Kudiyaan Sangham’s and Indian National Congress) from 1916 onwards. Notably, Khilafat conferences urged those over 21 years of age to join the Indian National Congress and fight for Swarajya (self-rule) and the restoration of the Ottoman Khilafat. At Congress party conferences in South Malabar, such as the Manjeri Conference on April 28 and 29, 1920, resolutions were passed with similar demands. The joint banners of the Non-Cooperation, Khilafat, and Tenancy movements in South Malabar angered the colonial state and upper-caste Hindu landlords, leading to punitive actions against the peasantry and agricultural workers.
On August 1, 1921, Vadakkan Veetil Mammad, the chief accountant of Chinnanunni of the Nilambur Kovilakam (royal household), was dismissed after becoming secretary of the local Khilafat Committee. Mammad's demand for his rightful dues led to a lawsuit. Further police intervention in favour of Nilambur Kovilakam, alleging Mammad for stealing a gun, escalated tensions. Many believed that this was a conspiracy attempt to tame Mammad and weaken the Khilafat movement.
Mammad's incident acted as a trigger point, leading to an urgent meeting on August 21 in the small town of Pandikkad. There, local leadership, mainly popular Muslim clergy of the region, took charge of active mobilization against the feudal-colonial nexus. For instance, Chembrasseri Thangal and Variyam Kunnath Kunjahmmad Haji were tasked with coordinating efforts in the southern sub-district unit or taluk of Eranad in the Malabar district, while Ali Musliar was assigned specifically to the town of Tirurangadi in Eranad, and Seethikoya Thangal took responsibility for the Valluvanad taluk. This rallying of leadership set the stage for the widespread rebellion that followed.
On August 26, 1921, the Mappilas fiercely fought the British in the Battle of Pookkottur after influential landlords urged the district administration to deploy the army. The battle resulted in the death of over 300 Mappilas and several British soldiers, including Commander Lancaster.
Ali Musliyar during the uprising.
As the British feared the rebellion gaining momentum, they deployed militarized police forces. Special units raided mosques and homes in Tirurangadi searching for the popular cleric Ali Musliar. Rumors of an attack on the revered Mamburam mosque, housing the shrine of Sayyid Alavi Thangal, ignited massive protests. This led to confrontations with the military, resulting in massive casualties. Rebels cut postal and telegraph lines, damaged railway tracks, set fire to court records, and looted treasuries. The British forces’ withdrawal from some areas fuelled the belief that their rule was collapsing - a sentiment that spread rapidly among the rural poor.
This Malabar Rebellion also led to the formation of the short-lived sovereign state "Malayala Rajyam (kingdom)" under Variamkunnath Kunhammad Haji, who mobilized thousands of warriors and established an alternative administrative system, including separate currency, passport and taxation system, effectively choking the British colonial regime and upper caste Hindu landlordism for months. This indicated the heights of decolonial aspirations bursting in the region.
It took the British nearly six months to reassert control over the region. Confronted with the Mappilas' relentless resolve, the British established the Malabar Special Police to quell the uprising. Their iron-fisted counter-insurgency campaign was devastating, resulting in the deaths of 2,339 rebels, wounding over 1,500, and capturing and torturing nearly 6,000.
Mappila (Moplah) prisoners go to trial at Calicut, Malabar District, after being charged with agitation against British rule in India. Image: Wikimedia
Demonizing the Oppressed
Colonial states often used targeted criminalization to suppress dissent, employing derogatory stereotypes to demonize entire communities. Terms like "effeminate Bengali," "martial races," "untrustworthy Arabs," and "barbaric" were used to label groups and communities based on perceived characteristics. In British Malabar, for example, reports from the 1792-1793 Joint Commission identify Mappilas as a criminalized community. Mappila peasant unrest was criminalized under laws like the Mappila Outrageous Acts of 1854, framing their resistance as religious fanaticism. These targeted criminalization efforts provided the pretext for the colonial state to vilify the 1921 rebellion and discredit its participants.
“In British Malabar, for example, reports from the 1792-1793 Joint Commission identify Mappilas as a criminalized community. Mappila peasant unrest was criminalized under laws like the Mappila Outrageous Acts of 1854, framing their resistance as religious fanaticism.”
The communitarian dynamics of class distribution in the region played a crucial role in misrepresenting the Mappila rebellion. The colonial administration had long sought to delegitimize resistance from the Mappila verumpattakkudiyan community of landless agricultural labourers by labelling them as religious ‘fanatics’. Such stereotypes portrayed Mappilas in southern Malabar as inherently violent, irrational, and bigoted, and these narratives were used to frame and quell the 1921 rebellion as a sectarian and partisan uprising.
Initially, the Indian National Congress supported the Khilafat movement, successfully encouraging the Mappila community to join the Congress. This alliance gained significant traction in the late 1910s. However, once the agitations turned violent, Congress withdrew its support and condemned the rebellion. At the Ahmedabad session of its working committee in September 1921, Congress expressed regret over the violence, echoing the colonial narratives and reinforcing the movement's vilification. M. K. Gandhi criticized the Malabar rebellion for its use of violence, a stance that many local Congress leaders saw as a betrayal. After the brutal British suppression of the Malabar rebellion and the revocation of the Non-Cooperation Movement in 1922, the Congress Party's political struggles in Malabar fell into dormancy for a prolonged period.
Furthermore, even radical thinker and political figure Dr. B. R. Ambedkar criticized the Malabar rebellion, accusing the agitators of disturbing Hindu-Muslim relations—a stance that echoed colonial narratives. Such strong criticism, fixated on the violence rather than the rebellion's substantive anti-colonial objectives, overshadowed and misrecognized its true nature in public discourse for a long time.
A Daily Telegraph Report on August 29, 1921, depicting the Malabar rebellion as an act of communal violence. Image: Wikimedia
Locating the Class Character of the Peasant Rebellion
Unlike Ambedkar, Gandhi and Congress, The Communist Party of India (CPI) lauded the Malabar rebellion, noting in their 1921 document The Present Events in India:
“Like the rising of the Kisan Sabhas in the north, the Moplah [Mappila] rising in the southern coast of Malabar in August-September of this year, is also a protest of underpaid and overworked agricultural labourers and poor peasants against the oppression of landlords.”
CPI criticized Congress for its inaction in supporting the Mappilas—primarily poor farmers and laborers—during their struggle against British colonial forces. They questioned the political substance of Congress’s steadfast preaching of non-violence, arguing that it functioned to pacify resistance even amid brutal oppression and massacres, ultimately reinforcing the interests of the colonial regime.
E. M. S. Namboodirippad, a key leader of the Indian Communist movement and Chief Minister of Kerala in independent India, was born and raised in the region profoundly affected by the 1921 rebellion. He viewed this uprising as one of the most significant anti-colonial movements in the subcontinent since the 1857 Sepoy Mutiny. Drawing parallels with the Easter Rebellion in Ireland, Namboodiripad likened the Malabar Tenancy Acts—enacted to address the unrest of 1921—to the 1916 Anglo-Irish Treaty, which sought to resolve the tensions of the Irish revolt.
Namboodirippad also explicitly criticized Congress politics and its leadership for their misrecognition of the 1921 rebellion. He contended that bourgeois leaders of the national movement had sought to "teach the art of non-violent surrender" rather than learning from the peasants' revolutionary resistance. He argued that the violence in Malabar was no greater than that in Balliya, Bagalpur, and Satara during 1942–43. While Congress and figures like Jawaharlal Nehru celebrated the revolutionaries of these later movements, they condemned the 1921 Malabar rebellion. EMS even viewed the 1921 revolutionaries as "braver" than those involved in the Quit India movement of 1942.
A photograph of Variyam Kunnath Kunjahmmad Haji. Image: Cover of the book ‘Sultan Varian Kunnan’ by Ramees Muhammed.
A.K. Gopalan, a leading Communist Party figure, reflected on the program Congress had during the 1920s as a catalyst for mass mobilization and praised the Khilafat movement of 1921 for its nationwide impact. He found the Mappila Rebellion particularly stirring, despite its lack of coherent leadership and strategy, noting that the rebellion's acts—looting government treasuries, attacking police stations, and occupying a local court to declare Swaraj—demonstrated anti-colonial valour. Gopalan highlighted rebel leader Variyam Kunnath Kunjahammad Haji's role in steering the movement towards an anti-feudal stance, particularly his instructions that peasants seize rice from landlord fields and redistribute the proceeds in cash.
For Gopalan, the class consciousness of the Mappila peasants emerged from the century-long anti-feudal movement. He criticized the erection of memorial statues to colonial officers, funded by feudal lords, and instead called for the commemoration of the rebel martyrs who laid down their lives in their fight for land and peasants. Gopalan delivered his renowned speech at the 1946 annual commemoration of the Malabar Rebellion organized by the Communist Party in Perinthalmanna. This was one of the first public acknowledgments of the rebellion's historical significance, held in the very region where the uprising occurred.
“For Gopalan, the class consciousness of the Mappila peasants emerged from the century-long anti-feudal movement. He criticized the erection of memorial statues to colonial officers, funded by feudal lords, and instead called for the commemoration of the rebel martyrs who laid down their lives in their fight for land and peasants.”
In 1946, on the 25th anniversary of the Malabar Rebellion, the Communist newspaper Deshabhimani published an article titled “The Call and the Warning” This article was a verbatim reproduction of a resolution passed by joint Communist party committees of Travancore, Kochi, and Malabar. It declared that the 1921 Mappila rebellion, centered in Tirurangadi and surrounding areas, was an unprecedented anti-imperialist struggle.
Similarly, M.N. Roy, a founder of CPI, also emphasized the economic roots of the rebellion in his influential work India in Transition. He argued that the uprising was a response to the oppressive alliance between landlords and the colonial government. Furthermore, since the peasants faced severe exploitation by moneylenders and landlords, who were predominantly from the Hindu community, the resistance movement initially involved looting their homes.
Archival records indicate that in 1921, Abaninath Mukherjee, another founding member of CPI, wrote to Lenin about the Malabar rebellion, framing it as part of a broader anti-colonial peasant struggle in India. Lenin forwarded Mukherjee's letter to Bukharin on November 14, 1921, with a note urging greater attention to Indian revolutionary movements. Mukherjee criticized colonial narratives that depicted the rebellion as merely fanatic, arguing that such portrayals were deliberate attempts to sow communal discord and divide anti-colonial forces. He emphasized the rebellion's class nature and countered claims of religious bigotry by highlighting the death of Khan Bahadur K. V. Chekkutty, a local Muslim police inspector killed by the Mappila rebels.
Furthermore, at the Fourth World Congress of the Comintern on November 5, 1922, the agrarian question was identified as critical for regions such as India, Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Persia. This Fourth Congress emphasized that feudal oppression was a major barrier to peasant emancipation and cited the Mappila rebellion as a key example where the struggle against feudal exploitation and dues reflected broader movements for national liberation against imperialist and feudal systems.
The Communist Approach to Violence in Decolonial Movements
The Communist Party of India (CPI) emerged from the Congress Socialist Party in British Malabar after an October 1939 secret conference, where leaders resolved to transform their organisation into a CPI unit. By the early 1940s, the CPI publicly announced its existence and actively worked to spotlight and legitimize decolonial movements in the region, particularly the 1921 rebellion. Communist literature, both spoken and written, reignited discussions about the nature of rebellion, and re-signified associated peasantry-led violence in the movement as a retaliative outburst of an oppressed peasantry.
“As in the case of the Malabar Rebellion, the central question for the communists was: How can one preach non-violence to those who have always been the object of social violence?”
The CPI viewed the Malabar rebellion as primarily a peasant uprising rooted in class struggle. Their analysis explored how class dynamics intersected with other social identities, such as religion and caste, in shaping the rebellion. Despite its violent methods, they staunchly defended the rebellion's anti-colonial essence, opposing the mainstream view that non-violence was the sole legitimate means to combat colonial and feudal exploitation. Thus, the Communists challenged the political forces that swiftly condemned the rebellion’s use of violence in a moralistic and ahistorical manner. They also historicised colonial narratives that branded Mappila peasants as habitual criminals with an inherent propensity for violence, interpreting this as an effort to delegitimize their class-based demands.
The Communist approach to the violent tactics used by the rebelling peasants in 1921 was far from isolated. In the following decades, major anti-feudal and anti-colonial struggles—such as those in Punnapra and Vayalar in Travancore, as well as Kayyur and Karivellur in northern Malabar—saw the Communists both advocating for and participating in violent means of protest. In this epoch of anti-feudal violence, Namboodiripad argued that violence and non-violence should not be viewed in isolation. He famously asserted:
“When there is social violence, it is bound to be reflected in violence all around…Increase in the consciousness of the people can also lead to increase in violence. There has for long been violence of the rich against the poor; now the poor are resisting. This is taken as a sign of greater violence.”
The Communist Party viewed the British colonial regime and feudal landlordism as inflicting greater violence on the populace in the region. They did not see these systems as advancing the interests of workers and peasants; therefore, the use of violence against them was seen to serve the democratization of society. As in the case of the Malabar Rebellion, the central question for the communists was: How can one preach non-violence to those who have always been the object of social violence?
In this context, the often-under-highlighted communist positioning of the Malabar rebellion, both in its foregrounding of the anti-feudal and anti-colonial causative factors that led to the rebellion as well as in its ideological defence of the methods of resistance engaged in by the rebels, must garner greater significance. Such forms of historical consciousness alone can combat far-right Hindutva forces in India who continue to downplay the rebellion’s significance and resort to colonial and nationalist misrepresentations to portray Muslims as historical antagonists to a constructed Hindu unity.
Munavir Ali A. P. is a PhD scholar at the Department of History, University of Calicut, Kerala, India. He is also the convener of the All-Kerala Research Scholars Association at his university campus.