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Mass Movement, Famine and Epidemic A Study in Interrelationship

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

Dick Kooiman
Dick Kooiman
Affiliation:
Amsterdam Free University
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Extract

Meenakshipuram is a small, dusty village in Tamilnadu's Tinnevelly (Tirunelveli) district, very close to the south Kerala border. In 1981 this inconspicuous place, and several other villages in its immediate vicinity, made big headlines in the Indian daily papers when thousands of harijans or ex-untouchables decided to leave Hinduism and to embrace Islam. This spectacular case of mass conversion created a terrible shock among caste Hindus and threatened to upset the always precarious communal balance. Rumours circulated about Arabian sheikhs who had come to give tangible expression to the immense richness of Islamic belief by handsome distributions of oildollars. More serious investigation, however, showed that the harijans in this region had been suffering from oppression by aggressive landlords, harassment by police authorities and acute prejudices by caste Hindus for a very long time. A growing awareness of this social degradation has led many of these harijans to convert to Islam.

Type
Articles
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 25 , Issue 2 , May 1991 , pp. 281 - 301
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1991

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