Jews and Mappilas of Kerala: A study of their history and selected song traditions

This dissertation restudies the history and selected archival musical recordings relating to the Jews and Mappila Muslims on the Malabar coast of Kerala, India. These two communities arose out of transoceanic migrations and interactions over the longue durée, and in reconstructing their past, this work aims to uncover traces of their links to each other and to others across the seas. This is a part of a larger project, Re-Centring AfroAsia, which seeks to trace human and musical migrations between 700-1500CE. Previous studies, apart from suffering from colonial biases, have tended to focus on a single religion, a single community, or a single discipline, with the aesthetic fields remaining largely untapped as a source. This work combines diverse sources and methodologies – using a musical archive, restudies, field interviews, field recordings, as well as a range of secondary sources, and crosses over multiple fields of study. The field research threw up certain inadequacies in the existing secondary literature, which this dissertation has attempted to untangle: 1) Ideas and reform movements of the twentieth century have affected the interpretation of past cultural practices in Malabar. This is true of studies of both Jews and Mappila Muslims. 2) The role of Sufism and Sufi tariqats in the propagation of Islam in Malabar has been historically underplayed in the literature. The influence of Jewish mystics on the Malabari Jewish community is also rarely identified as such. 3) While the Mappilas' links with Arab nations are known, their Tamil roots are relatively understudied. The latter emerged in my restudy of the archival music selection. 4) A minority of elite Jews in Kerala seem to have taken over the historical narrative of the entire group, skewing almost all secondary literature right from the early colonial period into the twentieth century. It is apparent that the Malabari Jews have been denied a voice in most of these works, and so my field work with the Jews primarily focused on this subgroup