The Malabar Rebellion

摘要

There are echoes here of all the rebellions that took place during British rule; that of 1857 and the question ot whether this was a planned rebellion, the events of Amritsar in 1919 and the terrible over-reaction of British authority to protest, the eventual widespread attack on property and open warfare which characterised the Quit India satyagraha of 1942.rnHistorians have always seen the importance of gauging whether the Malabar Rebellion was class conflict between peasant and landlord or a communal divide between Hindu and Muslim. If class conflict underlay communalism - the argument being that, if the landlord class could exploit communalism to divert social violence away from themselves onto a larger community, then ameliorative measures such as tenancy reform would pre-empt a religious divide that would prove disastrous for Indian nationalism. K N Pannikar in Against Lord and State; Religion and Peasant Uprisings in Malabar 1836-1921 (Oxford, 1989) argued along these lines.