The question, where is Kerala, can be answered empirically by simply stating that it is in the southwestern corner of India. However, if we think historically as much as with the present, Kerala has been part of much larger geographies. In ancient times, Greek and Roman geographers like Strabo and Pliny wrote about Kerala’s connections with the Roman Empire through the trade in pepper. For travellers like Ibn Battuta in the 14th century, Kerala was part of a larger Islamic cosmopolis, given the settlement of Arab traders and their descendants, and the growth of particular customs like matriliny among the Mappilas. Early European travellers, from the 15th century on, were convinced of the legend that the good Christian king Prester John, who would revive the fortunes of Christianity against a resurgent Islam, ruled in Kerala. We know that Vasco da Gama on his first voyage bent down and prayed at a local shrine in Kerala to goddess Bhagavathi, imagining her to be the Black Madonna.
In more recent times, Malayalis have migrated across the ocean to southeast Asia, west Asia, and Africa, creating local communities that maintain their filiations with Kerala through remittances that have promoted the economy and well-being of the state. The novels of author Vilasini, set in Malaysia, Benyamin, set in Dubai, and TD Ramakrishnan’s novel Mama Africa (2019), set in Uganda – now in its 11th reprint – are just a few stellar examples of a cosmopolitan literary imagination for which the world is its oyster. This wide-ranging impression of history has not been reflected as much in a writing of history that has been largely land-bound, concentrating on kings, temples, and land relations. Younger scholars of late have become more attentive to the oceanic history of Kerala, paying attention to Indian Ocean Islam as much as to sonic histories connecting the southwest coast and west Asia.
If an earlier history was a default Hindu history, we are increasingly seeing younger scholars engaging with the overlapping histories of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism within the sliver of land beside the sea that is Kerala. Of course, there continues to be a division of labour (with a few honorable exceptions) in historical work – Hindus work on other Hindus, Muslims work on Muslims, and so on. There is another challenge to be met. Since the formation of the state of Kerala in 1956, there has been a concerted imagining of a history of Kerala as an entity, which does not reflect the different pre-independence trajectories of Malabar (part of Madras Presidency), and the princely states of Cochin and Travancore.
In the imagining of a unified history of the region, certain founding myths have been important as in the idea of the navotthanam or renaissance which looks at the emergence of modernity in social relations, literature, and so on in the early 20th century. A pantheon of social reformers from Narayana Guru, Ayyankali, Mannathu Padmanabhan, et al and the literary trinity of Vallathol, Kumaran Asan, and Ulloor Parameswara Iyer have been enshrined as the makers of the modern (echoing the European trope of the Renaissance). A very Hindu pantheon. Here again, we are left with the question – so what of other groups like the Christians or Muslims? Did they not contribute to the imagining of modernity in Kerala?
A consequence of such a narrow imagining is that many figures get sidelined or are made to play a secondary role. Take, for instance, the well-known heroic story of the pioneering journalist Ramakrishna Pillai in Travancore, editor of Svadeshabhimani, who was exiled for his persistent attacks on the monarchy, in a prose that matched passion with scurrilous innuendo. What is not often remembered is that the newspaper was founded by Vakkom Mohammed Moulavi, a Muslim intellectual, reformer, and publisher of note. Vakkom Moulavi braved the authoritarian repression of the monarchy, suffering fines, closures, and the constant dismantling of journals that he helped found. One can think of many such figures who need to be restored to the Malayali imagination, including the reformer Makthi Thangal, or the marvelous work of recuperation done by Sanal Mohan in thinking with the Dalit Christian theologian Poykayil Yohannan.
Vakkom Moulavi was not merely a ‘local’ figure; he was tuned in to the currents of Islamic modernism emerging from Cairo (through Rashid Rida’s influential journal Al Manar) as well as northern India and the Deoband school. Again, we have to conceptualise a larger map of Kerala that connects to an oceanic Islam as much as an Islamic cosmopolis that extended across the space of the former Mughal, Ottoman, and Safavid empires. The journals that the Moulavi edited, from Deepika to Islam, concerned themselves not only with questions of modernisation, reform, and the fostering of Arabi Malayalam to promote literacy and engagement among Muslim women but articles in these journals exposed the readership to a larger world of letters across the globe, speaking about political ethics, democracy, and social and economic developments across the empire. They aimed at worlding Kerala and making a new person who thought with the filiations of the world and wider geographical affinities.
In the attempt to write a history of Kerala that is truly inclusive of its diversity, the Vakkom Moulavi Foundation Trust is organising a seminar from January 8-10, 2025 in Thiruvananthapuram, bringing together scholars working on the larger map of princely states in India. The seminar will attempt to think through the idea of the Islamic inflections of Indian modernity through papers on the former princely states of Travancore, Hyderabad, Kashmir, Bhopal, and Rampur as also the wider currents of thought in the Indian Ocean.
For more information on the event or to attend, email vmft.tvpm@gmail.com
Dilip Menon is a historian and a professor at the University of Witwatersrand. He is also the Director of the Centre for Indian Studies in Africa (CISA).