Page:Castes and Tribes of Southern India, Volume 4.djvu/530

MAPPILLA reader to the District Manual and Gazetteer. From these sources, and from the class handbook (Māppillas)for the Indian Army,* the following note relating to some of the more serious of the numerous outbreaks has been compiled.† Towards the end of the seventeenth century, the Māppillas massacred the chief of Anjengo, and all the English gentlemen belonging to the settlement, when on a public visit to the Queen of Altinga.‡ In 1841, seven or eight Māppillas killed two Hindus, and took post in a mosque, setting the police at defiance. They, and some of their co-religionists who had joined them, were shot down by a party of sepoys. In the same month, some two thousand Māppillas set at defiance a police guard posted over the spot where the above criminals had been buried, and forcibly carried off their bodies, to inter them with honours in a mosque. An outbreak, which occurred in 1843, was celebrated in a stirring ballad. § A series of Māppilla war-songs have been published by Mr. Fawcett.|| In October, 1843, a peon (orderly) was found with his head and hand all but cut off, and the perpetrators were supposed to have been Māppilla fanatics of the sect known as Hal Ilakkam (frenzy raising), concerning which the following account was given in an official report, 1843. "In the month of Mētam last year, one Alathamkuliyil Moidīn went out into the fields before daybreak to water the crops, and there he saw a certain person, who advised him to give up all his work, and devote his time to