In a situation where there is more than one religious community in any region, the question of ‘religious space’ always holds an important place in any society. In Malabar, the Mappilla settlements were found within a wider Hindu countryside, dominated by the Nambudiris and the Nayars. Like any Muslim settlement in the Islamic world, the Mappilla settlements grew around the centre of Muslim worship, the mosque. In the acquisition and construction of mosque lands for the purpose, the question of ‘religious space’ was often contested by the Hindu community from the nineteenth century. Particularly in south Malabar where the janmi-tenant relations were quite fragile, coincidentally, since the bulk of the tenants in the Ernad and Walluvanad taluks were Mappillas, the contestation of ‘religious space’ by the wider Hindu society became imminent in the wake of the peasant uprisings in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

As Stephen Dale has observed, the sense of economic insecurity and dependence among the Mappilla tenants of south Malabar was also reflected in their inability to acquire mosque lands. Therefore, when disputes over mosques arose, they resented their subordination in a corporate sense, as members of a religious community. One of the social consequences of the uprising, particularly that of the twentieth century episode, was the friction over places of worship, which sometimes took violent forms.

In the coastal Muslim settlements of north Malabar, the Hindu-Muslim friction over ‘religious space’ from the early twentieth century was not a consequence of the rebellion, but of economic rivalry.