Governing Mahallus : law, authority and Islam in post-colonial Malabar

Abstract

The study explores law, Islam, and its authority through the Mahallu(s) in postcolonial Malabar. Mahallu is commonly understood as a mosque-based social landscape of Muslim self-governance operating as a non-state legal institution alongside the state. The study does not treat Mahallu as a premodern Islamic remnant; rather, it approaches as a modern institution in which the notion of legal pluralism is actively negotiated, contested, internalized, and strategically employed within everyday governance. Drawing on official Mahallu guides, local histories, legal cases, interviews, and case-based ethnographic fieldwork, the study investigates how Muslim governance in Malabar has evolved through vernacular legal practices and community-based authority. Within the context of the Mahallu, the study particularly examines the distinctive authority of local leadership in the region. As communal safeguards within a minority context, the study conceptualizes these actors through the fiqhi term ahl al-hall wa al-'aqd. Such local leadership, and particularly its decisive role in qadi appointments, has maintained a degree of legal autonomy in contrast to state-backed qadi appointments in the region. However, the study argues that within the Mahallu context this authority extends beyond appointing qādīs and increasingly enters legal practice itself. Through examining a divorce dispute negotiated across the wider social radius of a Mahallu, the study identifies their authority shift as legal actors, as they increasingly engage directly in mediation, negotiation, reconciliation, and dispute governance despite lacking formal 'ulamā' authority or state legitimacy. Notably, the Islamic concept of commanding right and forbidding wrong legitimizes these actors without requiring formal ulama authority and provides a significant framework for their alternative mode of dispute governance. Through these actors, such a governing paradigm emerges as simultaneously related to Islam and law, yet neither fully confined to classical Islamic jurisprudence nor entirely absorbed into the secular legal order. By bringing attention to such legal actors through the context of the Mahallu, the study further contributes to an otherwise largely overlooked category within the broader terrain of South Asian legal history scholarship.