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Nerccas: saint-martyr worship among the Muslims of Kerala

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 December 2009

Stephen F. Dale  and
M. Gangadhara Menon
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Saint worship is a form of religious expression common to most Islamic societies, but it is especially important in the religious life of the Māppiḷas, the Muslims of Kerala State, South India. The Māppiḷas' largest public festivals are a variant of saint worship known as nerccas. These are expensive and elaborate ceremonials which combine nominally Islamic elements with certain features of indigenous folk festivals. Thus, while the focal point of each nercca is the reverence shown to a pīr, shaykh, or shahīd, all the festivals are conducted within a ritual framework derived from the worship of folk deities in Kerala. The nerccas are important just because of this hybrid character; that is, they provide examples of an especially complex variety of Islamic saint and martyr worship. However, the festivals are equally important when they are viewed solely as a source of information about Kerala Muslims, for the Māppiḷas possess only the most fragmentary records concerning their own past and the nerccas offer one of the most important means by which it is possible to study the history and religious culture of this important Muslim community.

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Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies , Volume 41 , Issue 3 , October 1978 , pp. 523 - 538
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Copyright © School of Oriental and African Studies 1978

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References

1 Māppiḷa or Māppiḷḷa is a title which was originally applied to all the foreign, commercial communities in Kerala. Christians were known as Nasrāni Māppiḷas, Jews as Jūta Māppiḷas and Muslims as Cōnakan Māppiḷas. At present, however, the term Māppiḷas is generally used to apply to those Muslims living in the areas north of Cochin; in the south they are known as Mettan, the Malayalam form of mlechcha. The most reasonable explanation for the origin of the term is that given by Mr. M. R. Raghava Varier, the epigraphist at Calicut University. He suggests that Mappiḷa is derived from mahā ‘great’ and piḷḷa ‘accountant’. This makes sense considering that all three foreign communities were originally mercantile settlements. The authors would like to acknowledge their great debt to Mr. Varier for his invaluable advice during the writing of this article.

2 ‘Northern Kerala’ is used here to refer to the territory north of Cochin. Most of this area is made up of the old British Malabar District with the addition of a small amount of territory added to Kerala State in the north at the time of the reorganization of the Indian states on a linguistic basis in 1956.

3 For a survey of Māppiḷa history see Miller, Roland E., Māppila Muslims of Kerala, Madras, Orient Longmans, 1976Google Scholar. See especially oh. iv, part A, ‘The new political situation’, pp. 158–72.Google Scholar

4 There seems no way of determining how the term nercca was originally used, but the Māppiḷas' use of the word could have derived from the idea of an individual commitment, a vow to make offerings if prayers were granted. Hindus use the term in this sense when offerings to folk deities are made.

5 The term for the leaders of the Māppiḷa ‘ulamā’ is generally given as taṅgaḷ, the honorific form of tān ‘you’. Taṅṅaḷ is an alternate spelling for the honorific plural, and the Māppiḷa use of the word may derive from this meaning. However, taṅṅuḷ is not the most usual form of the plural and the Māppiḷa usage probably comes from another meaning of the word, the use of taṅṅuḷ as an honorific title among certain Brahmans in northern Kerala.

6 These dances are derived from the exercises performed in the kalaris, the fencing schools or gymnasiums in which traditionally the upper caste Nāyars were trained in the arts of war. At present the Māppiḷas' association with these kalaris can be seen most clearly in the parichakali, a martial dance performed by some Māppiḷas in northern Kerala and described by Raghavan, D. in his book, Folk plays and dances of Kerala, Trichur, Rama Varma Archaeological Society, 1947, 22.Google Scholar

7 Māppiḷa songs in general are briefly discussed by Miller, Roland E. in his Māppila Muslims of Kerala, 288–90Google Scholar. M. Mohiyuddin, a postgraduate student in the Dept. of Malayalam of Calicut University is at present working on a study of these important songs.

8 Vēla, like nercca, is a Dravidian word while pūram comes from a Sanskritic root. It is important to emphasize that this classification is both oversimplified and tentative, for local Malayali festivals often go by different names than vēla and the terms vēla and pūram are not always used in a regular and mutually exclusive manner. There has been virtually no systematic research into the nature and evolution of Kerala festivals; it is difficult to find a comprehensive description of even such famous festivals as the Trichur pūram.

9 Interview at Kondōtti, , 17 03, 1976.Google Scholar

10 Iyer, L. A. Krishna, Social history of Kerala, II. The Dravidians, Madras, Book Centre Publications, 1970, 129Google Scholar. Iyer here actually refers to pūrams. This may reflect the varying application of the term (see p. 527, n. 8, above) or Iyer's own lack of concern with classification.

11 The Shī'ite background of the Kondōtti Taṅṅaḷs was definitely affirmed by 'Abd al-Raḥmān Taṅṅaḷ who generously provided the authors with every possible assistance during their visits to Kondōtti. There is a brief history of Shaykh Muḥammad Shāh I in Malayalam by Mitankutty, Ibn, Hazrat Mḥammad Shāh Taṅṅaḷ, Kondōtti, Makkoli Ahmadkutty, 1964Google Scholar. It is worth noting that Thurston, Edgar in his Castes and tribes of South India, Madras, Government Press, 1909, IV, 461–2Google Scholar, quotes an account given by one P. Kunjain, the first Mappiḷa to become a Deputy Collector in the Indian Civil Service, in which he says that the ‘followers of the Kondotti Tangal … are believed to be heretics (Shias). The number of them is dwindling.The reason why they are believed to be heretics and as such outcasted, is that they are enjoined by their preceptor (the Tangal) to prostrate before him. Prostration (sujud), according to strict doctrines, is due to God alone’. This prostration reflected the Taṅṅaḷs' Ṣūfī role. See below p. 530.

12 Tipu Sul;ān was the son of Ḥaydar 'Alī, an illiterate Muslim soldier who had usurped power in the neighbouring Hindu kingdom of Mysore and who used the state's resources to become the most powerful South Indian ruler in the late eighteenth century. There is still no reliable history of Mysorean rule in Kerala, but for a general introduction to Mysorean history see Rao, M. Shama, Modern Mysore, Bangalore, Higginbothams, 1936, 2 vols.Google Scholar

13 Five songs recorded at Kondōtti, on 11 04, 1976Google Scholar. The authors are grateful to M. Mohiyuddin of the Dept. of Malayalam, Calicut University, for his assistance in translating these songs. Nizami, Khaliq Ahmad has a detailed discussion of the Chistī order in his work, Some aspects of religion and politics in India during the thirteenth century, Bombay, Asia, 1961, 181–219.Google Scholar

14 Pl. takāyā; more often referred to with regard to Turkish Ṣūfism and then spelt tekiyē.

15 Āshiyāna is literally translated as ‘nest’ or ‘roof’.

16 Abu, O. discusses this interesting dialect in his Malayalam work, Arabee Malayāla sahitya charithram, Kottayam, India Press, 1970.Google Scholar

17 See Braune, W., ‘'Abd al-Ḳādir al-Djīlānī’, Encyclopaedia of Islam, second ed., I, 69–70.Google Scholar

18 Tamilnadu Archives, Joint Committee, Report, 1793, I, pp. 78–9.Google Scholar

19 This custom, like the nerccas themselves, may have been borrowed from folk religion or more immediately from the worship of Brahmanical deities. Traditional Hindus generally consider the oil used in cleaning idols in temples to have special curative properties, and oil from various temples can be found in orthodox Hindu homes of all castes.

20 The Turkish fez was presumably a late nineteenth- or early twentieth-century innovation when Indian Muslims came increasingly to revere the Ottoman sultan as the last great Muslim sovereign. As an example of this appeal, during the Balkan Wars of 1911–12 Māppiḷas at the small town of Perintalmanna arranged for a 40 day prayer vigil at the local mosque for the victory of Turkish arms.

21 Shīrīnī, literally ‘sweet’ in Persian, is another example of the patina of North Indian Islamic culture in Kondōtti.

22 The standard description of the Māppiḷas is provided by Innes, C. A. and Evans, F. B. (ed.), Gazetteer of Malabar and Anjengo, Madras, Government Press, 1908, 189–98Google Scholar. Roland E. Miller is the first scholar to have recognized the importance of this strain of Islamic devotional religion in the Māppiḷas' religious life. Writing about this element Miller says: ‘Reading back from the Māppila veneration for outside teachers that continued into the twentieth century and the venera tion of saints that continues to the present, it may be surmised that Sufi activity was at least a minor element in the process of the community's growth.The fact that Mappila pious poetry commemorates twelfth-century Muslim saints such as al-Jīlānī and al-Rifa'ī and the fact that the thirteenth century witnesses some Ṣūfī activity in the neighbouring Tamil Nadu indicates that this influence might have entered after the twelfth century’ (Māppila Muslims of Kerala, 53).Google Scholar

23 The argument is made in detail in Dale, Stephen F.'s article, ‘The Islamic frontier in southwest India: the shahīd as a cultural ideal among the Mappillas of Malabar’, Modern Asian Studies, XI, 1, 1977, 41–55.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

24 No contemporary records of this event are known to have survived at Malappuram. The only known account is contained in an heroic epic by Vaidyar, Mahākavi Moinkutti entitled, Malappuram kissapattukal, translated by K. K. Muhammad Abdul Kareem, Alwaye (Kerala), N. A. K. Hajee, second ed., n.d., 94Google Scholar. C. A. Innes places the event sometime in the early nineteenth century (Gazetteer of Malabar and Anjengo, 444Google Scholar) and C. Gopalan Nair, perhaps borrowing from Innes, places the conflict in ‘the first decade of the last century’. See Nair, 's book, The Moplah rebellion, 1921, Calicut, Norman Printing Bureau, 1923, Appendix I, p. 2.Google Scholar

25 The possibility of violent conflict between groups of participants in the varavus from neighbouring localities is a feature of the vēlas. Thus, during the vēla at Āryankāvu near Ottapalam in the modern Palghat District people expect violent conflict between the participants of the vēla varavu from the neighbouring desams (hamlets) of Erappa and Karekkad.Here the competition is between two groups of Nāyars each carrying as an offering a huge sybolicm figure of a horse. The groups compete to be the first to enter the compound of the kāvu and this leads to the exchange of blows at the entrance.However, such conflicts at kāvus rarely lead to fatal injuries and are usually tempered by a spirit of sport. Therefore, it is possible that the violent tradition of the Malappuram nercca represents only a peculiarly intensified variant of the sporting competition which characterizes the non-Brahmanical folk festivals.

26 A few of these songs, one of which describes the battle of Badr, have been translated. See Fawcett, F., ‘War songs of the Māppilas of Malabar’, Indian Antiquary, XXX, 11 1901, 499–508Google Scholar, There were more than 30 violent attacks carried out by Māppiḷas upon Hindus and sometimes Christians during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These have been described in considerable detail by William Logan. See Malabar, third ed., Madras, Government Press, 1951, 556–95Google Scholar. Dale, Stephen F. has offered a recent interpretation of these incidents in his article, ‘The Mappilla outbreaks: ideology and social conflict in nineteenth century Kerala’, J of Asian Studies, XXXV, 1, 1975, 85–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Menon, M. Gangadhara provides another viewpoint in his article, ‘Mappila outbreaks of nineteenth century Malabar (an enquiry into their nature and causes)’, J of Kerala Studies, II, 2, 1975, 141–56.Google Scholar

27 There is still no adequate published account of the Māppiḷa rebellion, but Hardgrave, Robert has a good introductory article entitled ‘The Mappila rebellion, 1921: peasant revolt’, Modern Asian Studies, XI, 1, 1977, 57–101.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

28 Government of Kerala, G.O.-P-No. 431/71 PD dated Trivandrum 10/12/72. The Central Government of India refused to allow pensions to these Māppiḷas under the Central Scheme of Pensions to Freedom Fighters ‘as there is incontrovertible evidence to show that the Moplah Kebellion was a communal movement’ (Union Home Minister Uma Shankar Dikshit's statement in Indian Lok Sabha on 22 August 1973 as reported in the Hindu, 23 08 1973.Google Scholar

29 Evans, F. B., ‘Note on the rebellion’, in G. R. F. Tottenham, The Mapilla rebellion, 1921–22, Madras, Government Press, 48.Google Scholar

30 Telegram from Madras quoted in telegram from Viceroy of India to Secretary of State for India dated Simla, 21 08 1921Google Scholar, India Office Records, C/p&J/1782, item 5335, 1921.Google Scholar

31 Tottenham, , op. cit., ch. ii, ‘The prelude to the rebellion’, 13passim.Google Scholar

32 Roland E. Miller has a lucid explanation of the sectarian division within contemporary Māppiḷa society. See Māppila Muslims of Kerala, 265–88Google Scholar. The authors found themselves embroiled in this controversy when an article appeared in a Calicut newspaper reporting visits to the nerccas. One day following the appearance of this report we were cross-examined by a group of young, college-educated Māppilas who were severely critical of our attendance at the festivals, evidently because they felt that the visits helped to bolster the legitimacy of these un-Islamic practices.