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.
2. 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 appraised 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.
3. 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 frightfulness inaugurated and carried
on in the name of the Khilafhat. 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;
may 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 free 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 selfdefence to emasculate and decay.
4. 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 whom 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 your 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,