Some Famous Mappilla Personalities

Justice M. Fatima Beevi – The First Woman Judge of Independent India

Fatima Beevi, a Mappilla Muslim, was born in 1927 in Pathanamthitta, in Southern Kerala to Meera Sahib and Khadeeja Bibi. She was awarded her Law degree by the Government Law College, Trivandrum and was enrolled as an advocate in 1950. Later she rose to the level of the District and Sessions Judge in Kerala in 1974. In 1989, she was the first woman judge appointed to the Supreme Court of India following the controversy over the Muslim Women's (Protection of Rights on Divorce) Act. She was not only the first Muslim woman to be appointed to any higher judiciary but also the first woman Judge of a Supreme Court of a nation in India and Asia. She has also served as the Chairman of Kerala Commission for Backward Classes (1993), member of National Human Rights Commission (1993) and the Governor of Tamilnadu (1997). She is a recipient of several awards such as the Honorary D. Litt Degree, the Mahila Shiromani Award and the Bharat Jyoti Award. She now resides at her ancestral home in Pathanamthitta.

Vaikkom Mohammad Basheer: A Freedom-Fighter and a Famous Writer

Vaikkom Mohammad Basheer was born in Travancore to a poor Muslim family. He was educated in an English-medium school in Vaikkom. While at school, he was inspired by Mahatma Gandhi and participated in the Vaikkom Satyagraha (1924). He joined the Indian National Congress, moved to Kozhikode and took part in the Salt Satyagraha in 1930.

DEFINITION AND BORDERS OF THE CENTRAL MESA VERDE REGION

The Mesa Verde region is part of a larger area called the North American Southwest (Fig. 1). Archaeologically, the North American Southwest covers the approximate area of what is today Utah, Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, southern California, southeastern Nevada, and western Texas in the U.S., and northern portions of the states of Sonora and Chihuahua in Mexico (Cordell 1997; Plog 1997). This area includes diverse geography and climatic conditions, though dry semi-desert plains prevail; these plains are interrupted by plateaus and mountain ranges with many pine and spruce woodlands.

Archaeologically, the Mesa Verde region includes adjacent parts of what are presently southeastern Utah, southwestern Colorado, northeastern Arizona, and northwestern New Mexico. These four states meet at what is known as the Four Corners, and that general area is referred to as the Four Corners area of the U.S. The Mesa Verde region is also known as the Northern San Juan region, and these two terms are often used interchangeably (Lipe 1995a: 143–144; Rohn 1989: 149–150; Varien 2000: 6). San Juan River begins in southern Colorado (in the San Juan Mountains), passes through the northwestern part of New Mexico, and feeds into Colorado River in Utah; this river might have been treated as a natural boundary in ancient times, and it roughly serves as a cultural boundary between the Mesa Verde region and areas to the south, including the Chaco region in northwestern New Mexico and the Kayenta region in northeastern Arizona.

Archaeology, as the study of a past rarely preserved in written form, faces a very difficult task. Having often only ‘mute’ artifacts at its disposal, archaeology can never reconstruct a particular culture in its entirety. Moreover, it is not always clear which artifacts are indicators of membership in a particular linguistic, religious, ethnic, or social group or how to select those artifacts from the full assemblage (Renfrew and Bahn 2002). Detailed analysis of the material culture left by humans, and accurate reconstruction of societies requires archaeologists to incorporate the work and research results of other disciplines. Thus, it may require cooperation and a multidisciplinary or interdisciplinary approach more than other fields of study.

Southwestern archaeology, including the archaeology of the Mesa Verde region, owes much of its successful progress to its collaboration with researchers in other scientific disciplines, for example, history, cultural anthropology, sociology, linguistics, environmental studies, and dendrochronology, as well as other sciences, and even mathematics and computer sciences (computer modeling of ancient societies) in recent times. Ethnohistoric and ethnographic data, as well as oral traditions of contemporary American Indians, are also very useful to the archaeology of the Southwest. Even though such records usually refer to historic and more recent times, they may help us understand what happened near the end of the thirteenth century A.D. in the Mesa Verde region. Using oral tradition and ethnographic and ethnohistoric records to supplement archaeological data can lead to more comprehensive archaeological views and theories (e.g., Brumfiel 2003).

On the basis of the analytic data contained in Chapter V, as well as comparison with other areas and cultures presented elsewhere in this book, I conclude that in the thirteenth century A.D. in the central Mesa Verde region, population aggregation, specific architectural characteristics, and choice of site location were determined to a great extent by a need for defense and protection for both the residents of the area and their food supplies. Archaeological data – primarily excavation and survey reports and my own observations in the central Mesa Verde region, particularly in the lower portion of the Sand Canyon locality – are supported by other sources of information that include ethnographic and ethnohistoric records and Native American oral traditions. I also use ethnographic analogy with indigenous cultures in other parts of the Southwest and North America as well as other areas of the world, mostly prehistoric non-state societies in central-eastern and southern Europe.

My conclusions consist of several aspects of site configuration and architecture at large sites, mostly community centers, across the central Mesa Verde region as well as at small sites in the Castle Rock community. The associated data are presented in Chapter V and include site location, layout, access, availability of water, and presence of defensive structures and features such as towers, protecting walls, loopholes, and tunnels.

This book is a shortened and updated version of the doctoral dissertation that was completed and defended by the author in 2009. The main objective of the book is to examine cultural situation in the thirteenth century A.D. in the central portion of the Mesa Verde region, located in southwestern Colorado and southeastern Utah, and analyze selected sites from the area in terms of location and architectural features that may suggest that these settlements were constructed for defensive purposes. The central Mesa Verde region is well known to archaeologists and many tourists because of the famous cliff dwellings in the alcoves of the sandstone canyons of Mesa Verde National Park. These ancient Puebloan villages were constructed and inhabited mostly during the late Pueblo III period (ca. 1225–1300 A.D.); however, Ancestral Puebloan occupation of the area began many centuries before, in the first millennium B.C. (Charles 2006; Cordell 1997; Lipe 1999b). The late Pueblo III period was a time of many changes and reorganization in the ancient Pueblo world that are apparent in both the remaining architecture and the artifact assemblages in the Mesa Verde region. Socio-cultural changes probably occurred as well. The late Pueblo III period was a time of peak population in the region and, near the end of the thirteenth century A.D., of final depopulation and emigrations from the area.

This book consists of six chapters. The first is an introductory chapter that presents the objectives and scope of the book.

This chapter presents an analysis of fifteen large sites from the central Mesa Verde region dated to the thirteen century A.D. that probably were community centers and forty one small sites located in Lower Sand Canyon area around one of community centers, Castle Rock Pueblo. Castle Rock Pueblo and nearby small sites probably created a community of allied sites (e.g., Ortman 2008: 129; Varien 1999). The analysis of particulars sites is focusing on defensive aspects of them. This includes analysis of site location, availability of water, access to the site, site layout, and presence or not architectural features and structures that may inform us of defensive character of particular structure or the whole site (this mainly includes investigations of towers, enclosing and protecting walls, loopholes, and underground tunnels). This is completed by presenting the chronology of these sites and conclusions.

ANALYSIS OF LARGE SITES AND COMMUNITY CENTERS IN THE CENTRAL MESA VERDE REGION

I use the term “community” to refer to “social organization that defines access to necessary natural resources, provides a level of social identity for its constituent households, and serves as a significant decision-making entity above the level of the primary household unit ‘that can play’ several roles, including the definition of both land use territories and associated resource access rights for local populations within the broader regional system” (Varien et al. 1996: 100; see also Adler 2002; Varien 1999: 19–23).

THEORY AND DIFFERENT VIEWS ON DEFENSIVE ARCHITECTURE IN NON-STATE SOCIETIES

Defensive architecture and defensive sites are commonly imagined as the medieval strongholds, castles, and fortifications built across Europe between the fifth or sixth century A.D. and the nineteenth century. The early medieval and later European fortifications exhibited traits characteristic of the architecture of both state and non-state societies; these traits were effective, especially until artillery was incorporated into warfare, but different types of fortifications continued to be used even later (Hacker 1994; Keeley et al. 2007). However, an enormous number of defensible site locations and defensive structures were utilized for defense and protection during different periods in non-state societies worldwide including some on the North American continent.

The simple definition of a “stronghold” or a defensive site is a site that is artificially defended by different kinds of fortifications or structures that protected its entrance (Hensel 1948: 16). However, it is worth mentioning that the presence of a structure that surrounds a site does not always indicate that the site or architectural feature was built for defense (Dulinicz 2000: 85). Also, although the terms “fortification” and “defensive site” are largely self-explanatory, interpreting the functions of particular ancient structures within archaeological sites, communities, or systems of related sites, is often difficult using only architectural remains and artifacts collected during archaeological investigations. The task is much easier with written records concerning specific sites or cultures.

Residents of authoritarian and democratizing countries do not necessarily become fully democratic citizens on gaining an accurate understanding of what is democracy, even when that understanding includes how democracy differs from its alternatives. They must also embrace democracy as the most preferred regime type and democratic practices as the most preferred means of governance. Thus the belief that democracy is preferable to all of its alternatives is widely regarded as the most fundamental of democratic political orientations (Diamond 2008a; Linz and Stepan 1996; Shin and Wells 2005).

The extent to which citizens hold this belief has a direct connection to the pace and possibilities for democratic development (Fails and Pierce 2010; Norris 2010; Qi and Shin 2011; Welzel 2007); because democracy is government by the people and for the people, changes in a democratizing country's laws, institutions, and other formal rules will matter little in the real world of politics if the citizens do not support their country's democratization. For this reason, there is a growing consensus in the literature on third-wave democracies that democratization is incomplete unless support of democracy is unqualified and unconditional among an overwhelming majority of the mass citizenry (Booth and Seligson 2009; Bratton, Mattes, and Gyimah-Boadi 2005; Norris 1999, 2011; Rose, Mishler, and Haerpfer 1998; Shin 2007, 2011).