Notwithstanding a recent resurgence of scholarly interest in what one may call “Mappila Studies”—the body of scholarship on the Muslims of Malabar in the Malayalam-speaking South Indian state of Kerala—research on this community still leaves too much to be desired. As for the fate of Mappila literary culture within this incipient field of study, scholars have either given short shrift to or painted in broad brushstrokes the impressive literary legacy of the Mappila Muslims of Malabar despite its enormous historic/al and socio-cultural value.2 That said, even the tiny array of scholarly works, mostly by Malayali scholars, that seeks to treat of Mappila literature has largely approached the subject, I argue, from a provincialised “literary” vantage point, thereby reducing the whole of Mappila narratives to mere aesthetic artifacts having no bearing upon the lives of Mappilas. I call this dominant paradigm of doing Mappila literature “literarisation”—that is, fetishising the “literariness” of text by privileging its formal, stylistic, and aesthetic features over its social tone and life. This view assumes text to be a domain of symbols separable from a domain of practice and disregards the social production of text which cannot be abstracted out from the materialities giving shape to it.3