The Keyi Mappila Muslim Merchants of Tellicherry and the Making of Coastal Cosmopolitanism on the Malabar Coast
04 Oct 2017-Vol. 5, Iss: 2, pp 145-162
TL;DR: The Keyi Mappila Muslim merchants of Tellicherry (Thalassery) on the Malabar Coast were one of the few early modern Indian merchant groups who succeeded in carving out a powerful political and social configuration of their own on the western coast of the Indian Ocean during the British period as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: The Keyi Mappila Muslim merchants of Tellicherry (Thalassery) on the Malabar Coast were one of the few early modern Indian merchant groups who succeeded in carving out a powerful political and social configuration of their own on the western coast of the Indian Ocean during the British period. Today, several branches of Keyi families remain a cultural unit in the Islamic community of Kerala. This article attempts to locate the group in the larger theoretical context of Indian Ocean cosmopolitanism and argues that the Keyis developed a distinct and significant type of coastal cosmopolitanism in an Indian Ocean setting; Chovakkaran Moosa, an influential merchant from a Keyi family during the colonial period, serves as a representative figure. Through their trade and financial relationships with British and local elites, and the characteristic architecture of their warehouses, residences, and mosques, the Keyis successfully integrated the practices of a global cosmopolitan space into a local vernacular secluded commercial space. This article presents a synthesis of a lively coastal urban and local rural cosmopolitanism that included several networks and exchanges, foreign and native collaborations, and an amalgamation of local and external cultural spheres.
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TL;DR: The authors examines how Gulf migration has shaped the affective dimensions and expanding territorial imagination of the New Malayalam Cinema, which has positioned labour migration as one of its central thematic concerns.
Abstract: Mainstream Malayalam cinema of the south Indian state of Kerala has, for the most part, attempted to sidestep the significance of Gulf migration to the region’s development. Part of the reason for this historical neglect has been the prevalence of a particular hegemonic vantage point within the films that has centralized the narratives of the landed elites in Kerala, eliding the various historically marginalized communities within the state. This article engages with a recent development within the film industry. It examines how Gulf migration has shaped the affective dimensions and expanding territorial imagination of the New Malayalam Cinema, which has positioned labour migration as one of its central thematic concerns. It is argued that this shift was made possible by the displacement of the universalized territorial imagination of the landed elites in the state that dominated its film industry for most of its history. Subsequently, this article will closely study how director Zakariya places his debut film Sudani from Nigeria (2018) within this new cinematic category, and will demonstrate how he portrays the region of rural Malappuram in north Kerala as a nexus of various migrant experiences, crucially invoking an underlying older order of cosmopolitanism prevalent in the region, fuelled partly by the history of Gulf migration and partly by a tradition and history of migration and transnationalism that predates the formation of the Indian state.
01 Jan 2023
TL;DR: The Malabar consensus as discussed by the authors is based on the English East India Company's early nineteenth-century investigations into land tenure and land tax and identifies an agreement of opinion between two EIC revenue officers, Thomas Munro and Francis Whyte Ellis, otherwise known to occupy rival intellectual positions.
Abstract: This article proposes a systemic connection between cash-crop gardening, commercialisation and individually-owned landed property in late eighteenth-century Malabar on the southwestern coast of India. The discussion starts with a focus on the English East India Company’s (EIC) early nineteenth-century investigations into land tenure and land tax. It identifies an agreement of opinion between two EIC revenue officers, Thomas Munro (d. 1827) and Francis Whyte Ellis (d. 1819), otherwise known to occupy rival intellectual positions. Both of them agreed on the existence of privately-owned landed assets in the region. This article calls this agreement ‘the Malabar consensus’ and argues that it was founded on an objective, if not intimate, examination of a set of specific historical conditions. The first section explores the tenurial category janmam or the aṭṭipēṟu of the eighteenth century and describes certain procedural innovations in the realm of landed and agrarian assets which mark a generalised transition along the coast of Malabar during the early modern centuries. The second section attempts to explain a set of economic opportunities that the aṭṭipēṟu stakeholders, finding themselves in a political and economic transition, found available in the eighteenth century. These innovations and the opportunities they provided were instrumental in creating a substantial class of parvenue landowners, and also an equally significant social class of share-croppers and wage-earners whose emergence characterised the early modern Malabar experience.
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