Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the questions of 'historicism' and discursive ruptures in the vernacular history writing tradition of Mappila Muslims in Malabar. The influence of various trends including secular scientific history and Subaltern Studies project are also analysed.

Paper long abstract:

This paper is an attempt to look at the discursive impacts of post- colonial South Asian historiography on Muslim identity movements of North Kerala in South India, focusing on the 'Muslim History Conference' held in Kozhikode, Kerala in December, 2013. Apart from more than a hundred of papers that were presented by mostly 'non-professional historians' in Malayalam what was significant about this conference was the addition of the term 'Muslim' to the title of the conference. This addition, however, is not seen as an attempt at communal history but is rather one of documenting community history, in a way similar to that attempted by historians on Dalit castes in South India. This paper analyses the influence of Subaltern Studies project and particularly volume 12 'Muslims, Dalits and the Fabrications of History' and its discussions in Malayalam vernacular publications and in a Mappila Muslim public sphere as a background to the conference. This paper focuses specifically on the critique of Nationalist and Marxist historiography by Professor M.T. Ansari's essay in Subaltern Studies Volume 12 'Refiguring the fanatic: Malabar. 1836-1922' and it's celebratory reception by the Muslim organisations in this region in past few years . In this paper an attempt is made to understand the 'discursive ruptures' in Mappila Muslim history-writing tradition(of pre-colonial origin) in vernacular along with the recent influences of academic/professional history-writing. Overall, this paper attempt to explore the academic origins of a new popular history in the context of Mappila Muslims of Malabar.