"Accept the Fourth Vēda Revealed in Makkah for Your Mōksha": Conflicting Temporalities and Historiographical Anxieties in the Writings of Religious Literati in Early Modern Malabar

Early modern Malabar, far from the Muslim political centers of power but connected to various religious ideologies and languages by the Indian Ocean and mainland South Asia, equips us with diverse textual traditions that complicate our understanding of historiography and time. I examine four such texts, Kēraḷamāhātmyaṃ, Kēralōlpatti, Qiṣṣat shakarwatī farmāḍ, and Tuḥfat al-mujāhidīn, written in Malayalam, Sanskrit, and Arabic in early modern Malabar, which are replete with reconstructions of the stories of the migration of Brahmins and Muslims to Malabar in the early medieval period. These texts—characterized by anachronistic conflation of historical and ahistorical events—narrated the accounts of the origin of Islam and Brahmanism, historicizing them in commensurate with the contemporary historiographical anxieties of those communities. This study delineates the socio-religio-political conjunction of early modern Malabar that impacted the production of such texts and asks why religious literati were occupied with the reconstruction of the origin stories of their communities. The study also analyzes the divergence and convergence of cosmological and cosmographical imagination of time and territory in such textual traditions of origin narratives. This paper argues that the emergence of Muslims and non-trivarṇa castes into the literary public sphere, and their relationship with the royal courts and political affairs in early modern Malabar, disturbed the historiographical sanctity of Brahmin literati who controlled the realm of knowledge of the past for centuries before.