Page:Castes and Tribes of Southern India, Volume 4.djvu/537

Rh through the heart of the Māppilla country. In the following year, when he was sitting in his verandah, a body of fanatics, who had recently escaped from the Calicut jail, rushed in, and hacked him to pieces in his wife's presence. He had quite recently received a letter from Lord Dalhousie, congratulating him on his appointment as a member of the Governor's Council at Madras. His widow was granted the net proceeds of the Māppilla fines, amounting to more than thirty thousand rupees. In an account of an outbreak in 1851, it is noted that one of the fanatics was a mere child. And it was noticed, in connection with a more recent outbreak, that there were "several boys who were barely fourteen years old. One was twelve; some were seventeen or eighteen. Some observers have said that the reason why boys turn fanatics is because they may thus avoid the discomfort, which the Ramzan entails. A dispensation from fasting is claimable when on the war-path. There are high hopes of feasts of cocoanuts and jaggery, beef and boiled rice. At the end of it all there is Paradise with its black-eyed girls." *

In 1859, Act No. XX for the suppression of outrages in the district of Malabar was passed.

In 1884, Government appointed Mr. Logan, the Head Magistrate of Malabar, to enquire into the general question of the tenure of land and tenant right, and the question of sites for mosques and burial-grounds in the district. Mr. Logan expressed his opinion that the Māppilla outrages were designed "to counteract the over-whelming influence, when backed by the British courts, of the janmis in the exercise of the novel powers of ouster, and of rent-raising conferred upon them. A