SECOND JIHAD AGAINST HINDUS OF MALABAR - PART 2
INDEX
1. THE MOPLAH REBELLION - Part I
Second Jihad Against Hindus Of Malabar- Part 1
2. Petition of Malabar Ladies to Lady Reading
Second Jihad Against Hindus Of Malabar- Part 2
3. Prominent Persons Comments On The Moplah Rebellion Second Jihad Against Hindus Of Malabar- Part 3
4. Malabar’s Agony - Article 1 Published on 29 November 1921
When thousands of Hindu women were raped and many of them killed by the Moplah Muslims during the Moplah rebellion in August-September 1921, the brutalised women of Malabar led by the senior Rani of Nilambur gave a heart-rending petition to Lady Reading, the wife of Lord Reading, the then Viceroy of India.
Taken from Chapter 5 titled ‘Moplahs’ of the book ANTI-HINDUS by Prafull Goradia and K. R Phanda [2003 ed.]
Petition of Malabar Ladies to Lady Reading
To
Her GRACIOUS EXCELLENCY
THE COUNTESS OF READING,
Delhi.
The humble memorial of the bereaved and sorrow-stricken women of Malabar.
MAY IT PLEASE YOUR GRACIOUS AND COMPASSIONATE LADYSHIP.
We, the Hindu women of Malabar of varying ranks and stations in life
who have recently been overwhelmed by the tremendous catastrophe known as the Moplah Rebellion, take the liberty to supplicate your Ladyship for sympathy and succour.
Your Ladyship is doubtless aware that though our unhappy district has witnessed many Moplah outbreaks in the course of the last one hundred years, the present rebellion is unexampled in its magnitude as well as unprecedented in its ferocity.
But it is possible that your Ladyship is not fully apprised
of all the horrors and atrocities perpetrated by the fiendish rebels;
of the many wells and tanks filled up with the mutilated,
but often only half dead bodies of our nearest and dearest ones who refused
to abandon the faith of our fathers;
of pregnant women cut to pieces and left on the roadsides and in the jungles,
with the unborn babe protruding from the mangled corpse;
of our innocent and helpless children torn from our arms and
done to death before our eyes and
of our husbands and fathers tortured, flayed and burnt alive;
of our hapless sisters forcibly carried away from the midst of kith and kin
and subjected to every shame and outrage which
the vile and brutal imagination of these inhuman hell-hounds could conceive of;
of thousands of our homesteads reduced to cinder-mounds
out of sheer savagery and a wanton spirit of destruction;
of our places of worship desecrated and destroyed and
of the images of the deity shamefully insulted
by putting the entrails of slaughtered cows where flower garlands used to lie
or else smashed to pieces;
of the wholesale looting of hard-earned wealth of generations
reducing many who were formerly rich and prosperous
to publicly beg for a piece or two in the streets of Calicut,
to buy salt or chilly or betel-leaf —
rice being mercifully provided by the various relief agencies.
These are not fables.
The wells full of rotting skeletons,
the ruins which once were our dear homes,
the heaps of stones which once were our places of worship —
these are still here to attest to the truth.
The cries of our murdered children in their death agonies
are still ringing in our ears and will continue to haunt our memory
till death brings us peace.
We remember how driven out of our native hamlets
we wandered starving and naked in the jungles and forests.
We remember how we choked and stifled our babies' cries
lest the sound should betray our hiding places to our relentless pursuers.
We still vividly realise the moral and spiritual agony that thousand of us passed through when
we were forcibly converted into the faith professed by these blood thirsty miscreants;
we still have before us the sight of the unendurable and
life long misery of those — fortunately few — of our most unhappy sisters
who born and brought up in respectable families
have been forcibly converted and then married to convict coolies.
For five long months not a day has passed without its dread tale of horror to unfold.
Your gracious Ladyship's distracted memorialists have endeavoured without exaggeration,
without setting down aught in malice to convey
at least some idea of the indescribably terrible agonies
which they and thousands more of their sisters have been enduring for over five months now
through this reign of inhuman (rightfulness inaugurated and carried on in the name of the Khilafat.
We have briefly referred without going into their harrowing details
to our heartrending tale of dishonour, outrage, rapine, and desolation.
But if the past has been one of pain and anguish, the future is full of dread and gloom.
We have to return to a ruined and desolated land.
Our houses have been burnt or destroyed;
many of our breadwinners killed; all our property looted; our cattle slaughtered.
Repatriation without compensation means for us ruin, beggary, starvation.
Will not the benign Government come to our aid and
give us something to help us to begin life anew?
We are now asked to settle down as paupers in the midst of the execrable fiends
who robbed, insulted and murdered our loved ones —
veritable demons such as hell itself could not let loose.
Many of us shrink from the idea of going back to what there is left of our homes;
for though the armed bands and rebels have been dispersed
the rebellion cannot be said to be entirely quelled.
It is like a venomous serpent whose spine has been partly broken,
but whose poison fangs are still intact and
whose striking power, if diminished, has not been destroyed.
A few thousands of rebels have been killed and a few more thousands have been imprisoned,
but as the Government are only too well aware many more thousands of rebels, looters, savagely
militant evangelists and other inhuman monsters yet remain at large, a few in concealment,
but most, moving about with arrogance openly threatening reprisals on all non-Moslims
who dare to return and resume possession of their property.
Many refugees who went back have paid for their temerity with their lives.
In fact, repatriation, if it is not to be a leap from the frying pan into the fire,
must mean for the vast bulk of your Ladyship's
impoverished and helpless memorialists and their families
a hard inexorable problem of financial help, and
adequate protection against renewed hellish outrages from which
immunity would be utterly impossible as long as
thousands of men and even women and children of this semi-savage and fanatical race
in whom the worst instinct of earth hunger, blood-lust and rapine
have been awakened to fierce activity- are fret' to prey upon
their peaceable and inoffensive neighbours who — let it be most respectfully emphasised —
because of their implicit trust
in the power and the will of a just and benign Government to protect them,
had suffered their own art and capacity for self defense to emasculate and decay.
We, Your Ladyship's humble and sorrow-stricken memorialists do not seek vengeance.
Our misery will not be rendered less
by inflicting similar misery upon this barbarous and savage race;
our dead will not return to us if their slayers are slaughtered.
We would not be human, however, if we could ever forget
the cruel and shameful outrages and indignities perpetrated upon us
by a race to which we have always endeavoured to be friendly and neighbourly!
We would be hypocritical if, robbed of all our possessions
we did not plead for some measure of compensation
to help us out of the pauperism now forced upon us;
we would be imbecile, if knowing the ungovernable, anti-social propensities and
the deadly religious fanaticism of the Moplah race
we did not entreat the just and powerful government
to protect the lives and honour of our humble sisters
who have to live in the rebel-ravaged zone.
Our ambition after all is low enough;
sufficient compensation to save us and our children from starvation, and
enough military protection against massacre and outrage are all that we want.
We beseech Your Compassionate Ladyship to exercise all the benevolent influence
that you possess with the government to see that our humble prayers are granted.
But if the benign Government does not consider it possible
to compensate us and to protect us in our native land
we would most fervently pray that free grants of land may be assigned to us
in some neighbouring region which though less blessed
with the lavish gifts of nature may also be less cursed
by the cruelty and brutality of man.
We beg to remain. Your Ladyship's most humble and obedient servants,
No comments:
Post a Comment