Digging deep into ‘travelogues’
KOCHI: Kerala has always been a site of pluralism with diverse religious and ethnic groups co-existing from early times. Muslims and Christians, as religious minorities in Kerala, have a rich tradition of historiography.In his book ‘Community and History - The Early Narratives of Kerala’, Sreenath Muraleedharan K closely scrutinizes the two communities through the two early narratives ‘Tuhfat al-Mujahidin (16th century) and ‘Varttamanappusthakam (18th century) to unravel some of the hitherto unnoticed contours of the cultural geography of the region from where the state of Kerala evolved
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An analysis of ‘Varttamanapusthakam’ by Paremmakkal Thoma Kathanar, considered the first travelogue in Malayalam, and perhaps in any Indian language, and ‘Tuhfat al-Mujahidin, supposedly written in 1583 by Shaykh Zainuddin Makhdum II, reiterate the fact that history is interpretative and community plays a significant role in this process.
“Apart from being literary works which narrate history, both deal with the multi-fold negotiations that the ‘nazrani’ and ‘mappila’ communities made with the Portuguese colonialism,” writes Muraleedharan, who is an assistant professor in the Department of English and Language at Amrita University, Kochi.
The book is Muraleedharan’s doctoral research which was awarded a Ph.D by the University of Hyderabad. He looks at the minority identities of nazrani and mappila communities in the historical continuity of present Kerala. The identify of a community goes beyond statistical data, especially because of its present, which encompasses tensions within and tensions with other communities, is not static.
These present tensions -- which include commonality and conflict, association and dissociation, claim of superiority -- link both past and future and form significant features of community identity. “I also try to observe how these communities negotiated with the ‘national’ identity imagined by the Hindu ruling class in favour of themselves. The aspirations of the masses hardly find a place in their ‘national’ interests.
I read ‘Varttamanappustakam’ and ‘Tuhfat al-Mujahidin’ as instances of intervention made by two minority communities in the non-western imagination of the ‘nation’,” he writes. He adds, “ Though these works were written in the eighteenth and sixteen centuries respectively, I consider my observations on the ‘nazrani’ and ‘mappila’ communities as historical junctures, extending their impact beyond their times.”The book is very relevant in today’s context in the backdrop of recent discourses on secularism.
In analysing these two historically important texts, Muraleedharan argues that both ‘Tuhfat al-Mujahidin’ and ‘Varttamanappushtakam’ places a sharp critique on dominant understandings of secularism and its various political projects. He also argues that these two books written by two community leaders contend the exclusionary practices of secularism by pointing out that eastern traditions of secularism have always been deeply religious.‘Community and History’ is an important work to understand not just to unearth community histories but also to know how such histories, which are by and large considered fragmented histories, played a key role in the making of the region and its future.