The Khilafat Rising and the Wagon Tragedy

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

The Moplah Rebellion broke out in August 1921 among Mappila Muslim cultivators of the Ernad and Walluvanad taluks of Malabar, on India's southwestern coast, and was militarily suppressed by early 1922. It began within the structure of the Khilafat movement, the pan-Islamic campaign to preserve the Ottoman caliphate that had joined with Gandhi's Non-Cooperation movement across India, and its early leadership, including Ali Musaliar and Variyankunnath Kunjahammed Haji, organized local administration in captured areas under that banner.

British forces suppressed the rebellion after several months of fighting; both Ali Musaliar and Variyankunnath Kunjahammed Haji were captured and executed. More than 45,000 people were imprisoned, many transported to penal settlements outside Malabar, and on 20 November 1921 sixty four of roughly ninety Mappila prisoners suffocated to death while being transported in a sealed railway freight wagon from Tirur to the Bellary jail, an incident remembered as the Wagon Tragedy. The rebellion ended the Khilafat and Non-Cooperation movement's standing in Malabar.