1921 Uprising In Malabar: The Making Of A Book
Nitheesh Narayanan
The centenary of the historic Malabar Rebellion fell in 2021-22 and Kerala’s young Left activists commemorated the struggle by organising a hundred seminars across the state. During the seminars and campaign organised by the Democratic Youth Federation of India (DYFI), I began collecting materials about the 1921 uprising in Malabar, also known as the “Malabar Rebellion”.
The other reason that forced DYFI to run a state-wide campaign to highlight the true character of the movement was that the Indian Council for Historical Research (ICHR) dropped the names of Malabar Rebellion martyrs from their list of Indian freedom fighters. It was the RSS-controlled central government’s offer of an official status for British colonialist propaganda. The British slandered the rebellion to resist its spread to other parts of India, which would have posed an irresistible challenge to their regime in the subcontinent. This narrative – constructed and widely spread by colonial masters – was actively taken up by the Sangh brigade which promoted it across social media and right-wing media platforms. With ICHR’s decision, this narrative received official acclamation from the central government.
Kerala’s Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan inaugurated the seminar series with an insightful speech exposing many of Hindutva’s lies and distortions about the Malabar Rebellion. Most of the speech forms the preface of our book, The 1921 Uprising in Malabar. I was also invited to speak at some of the seminars, as part of which began my search for various archival sources to see how the rebellion was understood during the colonial period. Immediately I was amazed by not only the clarity and independent thinking of early Communists who wrote and spoke about the rebellion, but also by the courageous anti-colonial consciousness of the leaders of class struggle. Within a few months, my research culminated in the book.
Two more incidents also occurred during the same period. Sardar Udham, a movie on the heroic life of Indian freedom fighter Udham Singh and the Jallianwala Bagh massacre was disapproved of being sent for Oscar nominations, because of the strange reason that it had “too much hatred for the British”. Moreover, the Jallianwala Bagh memorial, the place which invokes the undying spirit of the Indian freedom struggle, was transformed into a picnic spot in the name of “beautification”. Removal of the Malabar Rebellion warriors from ICHR’s list of freedom fighters came along with these and many other attempts to erase the true spirit of India’s history. The seminars were a protest against these attempts to sabotage the country’s brave past.
I began by collecting early Communist writings on the Malabar uprising and this generated more interest in me. One of the many inspiring findings from this research was Lenin’s role in letting the world know about the anti-colonial and anti-landlord nature of the struggle in Malabar. He asked Indian Communist Abani Mukherji to send a report to the Communist International about the same, and he ensured the report was translated into multiple languages and published in the organ of the Comintern. While Lenin could recognise the revolutionary capacity of the movement, Malayala Manorama, the Malayalam newspaper owned by the landlord class, spent most of its pages articulating the uprising as a ‘fanatical act of ignorant Muslims’. No doubt why the Malayali working class is more affectionate towards Lenin than to Malayala Manorama! Indian Communist leaders like M N Roy, Saumyendranath Tagore, E M S Namboodiripad, A K Gopalan, P Ramamurthi, et. al, followed this tradition of Lenin.
Soon, in one of the meetings with the editors of the LeftWord books, I proposed the idea of an edited volume comprising all early Communist writings on the Malabar Rebellion. “We are doing it”, replied LeftWord Editor Vijay Prashad, “and you are the editor”, he added. I was not sure about me being the editor, but this certainly marked the beginning of the making of the book. The book will find its place in the collection of essential readings on the history of the Indian Communist movement and any time the Malabar rebellion is brought into the debate, people are going to pick it up – I was confident about its future. However, I believed that it would be an injustice if the work was not edited in a comprehensive manner, by aligning all the writings and preparing an introduction. “Either you give me a long article for the book,” I wrote to Vijay, “or you join me to write the introduction and be the book’s co-editor”. He agreed in a second and the introduction we wrote together became the most extensive text in the book. I remember how the initial draft expanded almost five-fold by the time we finalised the introduction.
The historical material for the book was collected from different archives, from the PC Joshi Archives at the Jawaharlal Nehru University and the Teen Murti Library in New Delhi to the Madras Assembly debates and various newspaper archives. Senior CPI(M) leader Subhashini Ali agreed to give us an extended version of an already published article, which also narrated the experience of her family members who had safely stayed in one of the rebellion-hit areas. Pinarayi Vijayan agreed to offer the preface for the book. The cover, designed by young socialist artist Abhinav (@politicalpopular) brilliantly captured all essence of the book.
Anti-colonialism is integral to the class struggle. The book 1921 Uprising in Malabar documents this spirit of Marxism from the southern part of India. These Communist writings will remain relevant forever and across the world. It is a collection of brave Communist writings that offer sharp methods of class analysis and anti-colonial consciousness. It is also a book about Communist internationalism, for there is a Malabar in every part of the world where people have risen against chains.
(The 1921 Uprising in Malabar, published by LeftWord books, is available here)
Nitheesh Narayanan is the editor of Student Struggle, a Central Secretariat member of SFI, and a PhD scholar at the Jawaharlal Nehru University’s Centre for the Study of Social Exclusion and Inclusive Policy. He is also a Researcher at Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.
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