Against Lord and State: Religion and Peasant Uprisings in Malabar, 1836 to 1921

K. N. Panikkar's study of thirty three Mappila peasant uprisings in the Ernad and Walluvanad taluks of Malabar between 1836 and 1921, culminating in the 1921 rebellion, argues that the risings were fundamentally a peasant response to a colonial land settlement that secured landlords' proprietary rights while leaving Mappila tenant cultivators insecure and liable to eviction, and that Islamic religious idiom was the language through which that class grievance found expression rather than the uprisings' underlying cause. Panikkar situates the 1921 rebellion as the culmination of this decades long continuum of agrarian resistance rather than as an isolated communal outbreak.