Original research for this article was done while the author was a Fellow of the American Institute of Indian Studies. An earlier version was read at the Conference on South Indian Religions held at Bucknell University, June 1975.

¹ The name Mappilla is given to Malayali-speaking Muslims who reside along the entire length of the Malabar coast, the area presently included in Kerala State. However, this article will be largely concerned with Mappillas in the area between Mt Deli and Cochin, the area defined as Malabar District by the British who took the area under direct control in 1792.

² I have discussed the nineteenth-century outbreaks in my article, ‘The Mappilla Outbreaks: Ideology and Social Conflict in Nineteenth Century Kerala’, Journal of Asian Studies, XXXV (11 1975).Google Scholar A good survey of South Asian Muslims in the British period is Peter, Hardy'sThe Muslims of British India (Cambridge: University Press, 1972).Google Scholar

³ The most recent articles on the nineteenth-century outbreaks are Conrad, Wood's ‘Historical Background of the Moplah Rebellion’, Social Scientist (Trivandrum: 08 1974), pp. 5–33,Google Scholar and his ‘The First Moplah Rebellion against British Rule in Malabar’, Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 10, Pt 4 (10 1976), pp. 543–56.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁴ One exception was the disjointed but insightful account of Holland-Pryor, P., Mappillas or Moplahs (Calcutta: Government Press, 1904), pp. 1–10.Google Scholar

⁵ Madras Record Office, Tellicherry Consultations, Diary 27B (1763–1764), p. 117. A similar attack had occurred in Calicut in 1742.Google Scholar See Tellicherry Consultations, General, XIII (1741–1742), 6 07 1742, p. 195.Google Scholar

⁶ It is important to recognize that the eighteenth-century outbreaks were merely noted in the records of an essentially commercial organization, while most of the later attacks were carefully investigated by a colonial administration.

⁷ Zayn, al-Din al-Ma'bari, Historia dos Portugueses no Malabar por Zinadim. Manuscripto arabe do seculo XVI publicado e traduzido por David Lopes (Lisboa: Imprensa Nacional, 1898). The references in this article will be to the above edition.Google Scholar However, there is a good annotated translation of the Arabic text in English by Nainar, Muhammad Husayn, Tuhfat al-Mujāhidīn, Bulletin of the Department of Arabic, Persian and Urdu, No. 5 (Madras: University of Madras, 1942).Google Scholar

⁸ Little is known of Zayn al-Din's life, although he appears to have been born in Malabar, perhaps at Cochin. 'Abd al-Hayy b. Fakr al-Dīn al-Hasani includes a brief sketch in his Nudhat al-Hawātir (Hyderabad: Osmania Oriental Publications Bureau, 1954), Pt IV, pp. 118–19. This biographical dictionary also gives Zayn al-Din's last name as al-Malibari rather than the more traditional al-Ma'sbari. The latter name would indicate that the family originally came from Coromandel, India's southeast coast.Google Scholar

⁹ The last date mentioned in the text is A.D. 1582/83.Google Scholar

¹⁰ This was translated into English by Briggs, John with the title, History of the Rise of the Mahomedan Power in India (London: Paul, Trench and Trubner, 1908–1910), 4 vols.Google Scholar

¹¹ Rowlandson, M. J. (trans.), Tuhfut al-Mujahideen (London: John Murray, 1833).Google Scholar

¹² Zayn, al-Din, Historia, p. 5.Google Scholar

¹³ For an introduction to the history of Portuguese expansion and colonial rule see the already classic account of Boxer, C. R., The Portuguese Seaborne Empire, 1415–1825 (London, Penguin, 1973).Google Scholar The early years of the Portuguese in India are studied by Whiteway, R. S. in The Rise of Portuguese Power in India, 1497–1550 (London: Archibald Constable, 1899).Google Scholar The sixteenth-century Portuguese viewpoint is best seen in Fernão, Lopes Castanheda, Historia do Descobrimento e Conquista da India pelos Portugueses (Coimbra: Imprensa da Universidade de Coimbra, 1924).Google Scholar

¹⁴ Zayn, al-Din, Historia, p. 67. The identification of the three Asian cities is suggested by Nainar, Tuhfat al-Mujāhidīn, Appendix C, p. 101.Google Scholar

¹⁵ Zayn, al-Din, Historia, p. 44.Google Scholar

¹⁶ The traumatic effect which Portuguese ‘discoveries’ had on the peoples of Africa and Asia who had the misfortune to be discovered is rarely discussed, or discussed with sympathy, in Western scholarly literature. As J.H. Plumb writes in his introduction to C.R. Boxer's book cited above: ‘Few European historians will face up to the consequences of the murderous western onslaught on India and the East, which broke not only webs of commerce but of culture, that divided kingdoms, disrupted politics and drove China and Japan into hostile isolation’. Boxer, The Portuguese Seaborne Empire, Introduction, pp. xxiv–xxv.Google ScholarSerjeant, R. B. has made an important contribution to our understanding of Muslims' reactions to this onslaught in Hadramawt and the Yaman in his book, The Portuguese off the South Arabian Coast (Beirut: Libraire Liban, 2nd ed., 1974).Google Scholar

¹⁷ Zayn, al-Din, Historia, pp. 44–7.Google Scholar

¹⁸ This eyewitness testimony was given by the early sixteenth-century Portuguese factor in Cannanore, , Barbosa, Duarte. See Dames, Mansel Longworth (ed.), The Book of Duarte Barbosa (London: Hakluyt Society, 1918–1921), II, 76.Google Scholar

¹⁹ al-Din, Zayn mentions these counterattacks in several separate passages, but see, especially, Historia, pp.44–7.Google Scholar

²⁰ Nambiar, O. K. has discussed the greatest of the Mappilla seamen, Kunj'Ali Marrakar, in his book, The Kunjalis, Admirals of Calicut (Bombay: Asia Publishing House, 1963).Google Scholar Kunj 'Ali Marrakar was captured and later executed in Goa in 1600, but he was still remembered in an anonymous Portuguese survey of their fortresses in Asia written about 1635 as ‘the chief enemy of the state and the destroyer of Christians’. See Veiga, A. Botelho da Costa (ed.), Relacão Das Plantas e Descripcões De Todas Fortalezas que os Portugueses Tem no Estado Da India (Lisboa: Biblioteca Nacional, 1936), p. 56.Google Scholar

²¹ François, Pyrard de Laval, The Voyage of François Pyrard of Laval, Translated and Edited by Albert, Gray (London: Hakluyt Society, 1887), I, p. 446.Google Scholar

²² Zayn, al-Din, Historia, p. 19.Google Scholar

²³ Hadīths are the traditions of the Prophet Muhammad, and after the Qur'ān they represent the second most important source of Islamic law.Google Scholar

²⁴ Zayn, al-Din, Historia, p. 20.Google Scholar

²⁵ Alguns Documentos Do Archivo Nacional Da Torre Do Tombo acérca das Navegacoes e Conquistas Portugueses (Lisboa: Imprensa Nacional, 1892), p. 240. There are, of course, innumerable references in Portuguese sources to conflicts with the ‘Moors’, but only rarely does any Portuguese writer show the slightest interest in, or even allude to, Muslim attitudes. This is generally true of other European writers as well.Google Scholar

²⁶ Shinar, Pessah makes a similar point regarding the Maghrib in his article “'Abd al-Qādir and 'Abd al-Karīm: Religious Influences on their Thought and Action’, Asian and African Studies, Annal of the Israel Oriental Society, I, (1965), 139–74.Google ScholarShinar, writes: ‘As the student of western Islam well knows, saint worship had become extremely widespread in the Jibāla and Rīf since the 13th century and the martyrs of the Holy War in this region literally ran into the hundreds’. (p. 167).Google Scholar

²⁷ Apart from the available Arabic sources I have studied the British and Portuguese records, but I have not had an opportunity to examine more than a fraction of the Dutch materials. For an introduction to Dutch activities along the Malabar coast, see Poonen, T. I., A Survey of the Rise of the Dutch Power in Malabar, 1603–78 (Trichinopoly: St. Joseph's School Press, 1948).Google Scholar

²⁸ Pyrard, , The Voyage of François Pyrard of Laval, I, 347.Google Scholar

²⁹ Quoted in Menon, K. P. Padmanabha, A History of Kerala (Cochin: Ernakulam Press, 1924–1937), II, 56.Google Scholar

³⁰ Menon, , A History of Kerala, II, 56–7.Google Scholar

³¹ Nambiar, O. K., Portuguese Pirates and Indian Seamen (Bangalore: O.K. Nambiar, 1955).Google Scholar The song is printed on the last, unnumbered page. This book is an earlier version of Nambiar's work, The Kunjalis, Admirals of Calicut. Some of these ballads have been collected by Menon, C. Atchutha in his book, Vadakkan Pattugal (Madras: University of Madras, 1935). I plan to make a separate study of these ballads in the near future.Google Scholar

³² Jan Vansina describes such historical poetry in general as a kind of propaganda. See Vansina, Jan, Oral Tradition (London: Penguin, 1973), pp. 148–9.Google Scholar

³³ Pyrard, , The Voyage of François Pyrard of Laval, II, 527.Google Scholar

³⁴ There are two recent works which discuss aspects of the spice trade from the Dutch and English perspective, although neither has more than brief mentions of the Mappillas. See, respectively, Gupta, Ashin Das, Malabar in Asian Trade, 1740–1800 (Cambridge: University Press, 1967),Google Scholar and Nightingale, Pamela, Trade and Empire in Western India (Cambridge: University Press, 1970).Google Scholar

³⁵ (Sir) Fawcett, Charles (ed.), The English Factories in India, I (New Series) (The Western Presidency 1670–1677) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936), p. 322. A qādī is a judge of the religious law.Google Scholar

³⁶ India Office Library, Letters from Tellicherry, I, 08 1729 to 08 1731, p. 70.Google Scholar

³⁷ Madras Record Office, Tellicherry Consultations, Diary 25A, 1758–1759, pp. 117–18.Google Scholar

³⁸ Atjeh was the first area in Indonesia where Muslim kingdoms were established, at least as early as the thirteenth century. See the article by Pickaar, A. J., ‘Atjéh’ in the Encyclopedia of Islam, New Ed., Gibb, H.A.R. et al. (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1960), pp. 739–47.Google Scholar

³⁹ This information is taken from Schrieke, B. J., Indonesian Sociological Studies (Hague: W. van Hoeve, 1955–1957), III, 235.Google Scholar

⁴⁰ In fact, the Mappillas are known to have fought with the Atjehnese in their battles with the Portuguese during the sixteenth century. See Schrieke, , Indonesian Sociological Studies, III, 245.Google Scholar

⁴¹ Hurgronje, C. Snouck, The Achehnese, translated by O'Sullivan, A.W.S. (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1906), I, vii.Google Scholar

⁴² Siegal, James T., The Rope of God (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), pp. 75–6.Google Scholar

⁴³ Ibid., p. 82.

⁴⁴ Wittek, Paul, The Rise of the Ottoman Empire (London: Royal Asiatic Society, 1938).Google Scholar See especially Ch. III: ‘Emirate of March-Warriors to Empire’. Wittek, of course, based his theory on the social as well as the ideological characteristics of the frontier. Little enough is known of the social characteristics of Mappilla society during the period being discussed; nor is it so immediately relevant to the theme of the present article. However, it is worth noting that Pyrard's description of the early seventeenth-century fortified Mappilla settlements does reveal a heterogenetic and egalitarian society similar in many ways to that described by Wittek. See Pyrard, , The Voyage of François Pyrard of Laval, I, 341–2.Google Scholar

⁴⁵ Madras Record Office, Supervisor's Records, Magisterial, 1793–1794, p. 446.Google Scholar

⁴⁶ Holt, P.M. et al. (ed.), The Cambridge History of Islam, II, The Further Islamic Lands (Cambridge: University Press, 1970), p. xx.Google Scholar Holt's concept can be interpreted as a specific example of the anthropological theories of social boundaries. See, for example, the volume edited by Barth, Frederik, Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Cultural Difference (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1970).Google Scholar For a recent discussion of the political and military frontier in North India, see Richards, J. F., ‘The Islamic Frontier in the East: Expansion into South Asia’ in South Asia, No. 4 (10 1974), pp. 91–110.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁴⁷ I have described some of the evidence for this in my article on the nineteenth-century outbreaks cited above, n. 2. I have also discussed what is now known of pre-nineteenth-century Mappilla agrarian relations in an article entitled, ‘The Mappillas during Mysorean Rule: Agrarian Conflict in Eighteenth Century Malabar’ (forthcoming).Google Scholar