1921

"More than 40 Hindus were taken to the Tangal with their hands tied behind their back, charged with the crime of helping the Military with supplying them milk, tender coconuts etc. and 38 of these Hindus were condemned to death. He superintended the work of murder in person and seated on a rock near a well witnessed his men cutting at the neck of his victims and pushing the bodies into the well. Thirty-eight men were murdered, one of whom a pensioned head constable to whom he owed a grudge had his head neatly divided into two halves.17"

"Of the wells and tanks filled up with the mutilated, but often 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 roadside 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 helpless sisters forcibly carried away in 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 the thousands of our homesteads reduced to cinder-mounds out of sheer savagery and a wonton spirit of destruction; of our places of worship desecrated and destroyed; of the images of the deity shamefully insulted by putting the entrails of cows where flower garlands used to lie, or else smashed to pieces …18"

"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. 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.... 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... Many refugees who went back have paid for their temerity with their lives. We, Your Ladyship's humble and sorrow-stricken memorialists do not seek vengeance..."

"Muslims first settled on India’s southwestern shore a century or so after the death of the Prophet Muhammad. For nearly eight hundred years they traded peacefully. Then, in 1498, the Portuguese arrived, and these Muslims, Mappilas as they were known, became the first to experience what all South Asian Muslims were eventually to suffer: the fate of being caught between the hammer of European pressure and the anvil of Hindu society. The Mappilas responded by developing a tradition of holy war and martyrdom. The tradition is enshrined in an epic work, the Gift to the Holy Warriors in Respect to Some Deeds of the Portuguese; it is celebrated in the body of Mappila literature, nine-tenths of which is devoted to martial songs; it has been manifest in outbreaks of religious violence—there were thirty-two, for instance, between 1836 and 1919, in which 319 Mappilas were killed, and the process reached its climax in the rebellion of 1921-22, in which, according to the Mappilas, up to 10,000 lives were lost."

"I have given the subject every attention and am convinced that though the instances (of Mappila outrages) may and do arise out of individual hardships to tenants (Mappila and Hindu), the general character of the dealings of Hindu landlords towards their tenants whether Mappila or Hindu, is mild, equitable and forebearing' ... "it is no sin, but a merit to kill a Hindu Janmi who evicts" ... "Since land is with the Hindus and the money with the Mappilas, to get the land, the Mappilas encouraged (or resorted to) fanaticism" ... "And finally the result was that there was steady movement whereby in all Mappila tracts, the land was passing slowly but surely to the possession of the Mappilas""

"Sankaran Nair points out to several other tortures like skinning Hindus alive and making them dig their own graves before their slaughter. The Congress leaders disbelieved the stories from Malabar initially and Gandhi himself spoke of the ‘brave God-fearing Moplahs’ whom he described as patriots who were ‘fighting for what they consider as religion, and in a manner which they consider as religious’. He went on to add: ‘Hindus must find the causes of Moplah fanaticism. They will find that they are not without blame. They have hitherto not cared for the Moplah. It is no use now becoming angry with the Moplahs or Mussalmans in general.’ Ironically, his allies, the Khilafatists, passed resolutions congratulating the Moplahs for their heroism."

"The first warning was sounded when the question of condemning the Moplas for their atrocities on Hindus came up in the Subjects Committee. The original resolution condemned the Moplas wholesale for the killing of Hindus and burning of Hindu homes and the forcible conversion to Islam. The Hindu members themselves proposed amendments till it was reduced to condemning only certain individuals who had been guilty of the above crimes. But some of the Moslem leaders could not bear this even. Maulana Fakir and other Maulanas, of course, opposed the resolution and there was no wonder. But I was surprised, an out-and-out Nationalist like Maulana Hasrat Mohani opposed the resolution on the ground that the Mopla country no longer remained Dar-ul-Aman but became Dar-ul-Harab and they suspected the Hindus of collusion with the British enemies of the Moplas. Therefore, the Moplas were right in presenting the Quran or sword to the Hindus. And if the Hindus became Mussalmans to save themselves from death, it was a voluntary change of faith and not forcible conversion—Well, even the harmless resolution condemning some of the Moplas was not unanimously passed but had to be accepted by a majority of votes only. There were other indications also, showing that the Mussalmans considered the Congress to be existing on their sufferance and if there was the least attempt to ignore their idiosyncracies the superficial unity would be scrapped asunder."

"Dr. Munje said in another part of his report that, eight hundred years ago, the Hindu king of Malabar (now Kerala) on the advice of his Brahmin ministers, made big favor to the Arab Muslim to settle in his kingdom. Even he appeased the Arab Muslims by converting the Hindus to Islam to an extent to making law for compulsory conversion of a member of each Hindu fisherman family in to Islam. Those, whose nature is to practice idiocy rather than common sense, never can enjoy freedom even if they are in the throne. They turn the hour of action in to a night of merriment. That’s why they are always struck by the ghost at the middle of the day.”.... “The king of Malabar once gave away his throne to idiocy. That idiocy is still ruling Malabar from a Hindu throne. That’s why the Hindus are still being beaten and saying that God is there, turning the faces towards the sky. Throughout India we allowed idiocy to rule and surrender ourselves to it. That kingdom of idiocy – the fatal lack of commonsense – was continuously invaded by the Pathans, sometimes by the Mughols and sometimes by the British. From outside we can only see the torture done by them, but they are only the tools of torture, not really the cause. The real reason of the torture is our lack of common sense and our idiocy, which is responsible for our sufferings. So we have to fight this idiocy that divided the Hindus and imposed slavery on us……..If we only think about the torture we will not find any solution. But if we can get rid of our idiocy, the tyrants will surrender to us.”"

"Wer die innerdeutschen Gespräche bereits als Ausverkauf der deutschen Interessen bezeichnet, ist in Wahrheit ein Feind der nationalen Interessen."

"Alle diejenigen, die innerhalb des Grundgesetzes Reformen wollen, sind Diskussionspartner. Wer das Grundgesetz beseitigen will, ist kein Diskussionspartner."

"Atatürk war aufs äußerste darauf bedacht, nicht mit irgendeiner Spielart einer faschistischen Bewegung in Verbindung gebracht zu werden. Als die faschistischen Regimes im Westen immer mehr Bedeutung gewannen, bemühte er sich, nicht mit ihnen in einen Topf geworfen zu werden."

"Die Sprache der Wissenschaften neigt dazu, um so unverständlicher zu werden, je leichter das jeweilige Thema in allgemeinverständlicher Sprache behandelt werden könnte. Dann erst nämlich muß um den wissenschaftlichen Ruf gerungen werden, der sich in Deutschland auf nichts so fest gründet wie auf Unverständlichkeit."