Novel Traditions: Vernacular Literary Modernities and the Heresy of the Arabi-Malayalam Novel

This paper examines the place of novels in Arabi-Malayalam, a relatively underexplored dimension of Mappila literature. While the Mappila literary tradition has a rich history of poetry and prose, novelistic writing in Arabi-Malayalam is often dismissed as lacking on account of its divergence from the conventions of realist novels in English and Malayalam. This study approaches the Arabi-Malayalam novel not merely as a mode of representation but as a performative intervention that served specific functions within the Mappila community in early 20th-century Kerala. Engaging with Mappila sources, I show how Arabi-Malayalam novels adapted the genre to engage with local concerns and practices, operating outside the framework of secular modernity often associated with the novel form. Reading the strategies and techniques employed by the Arabi-Malayalam novel Hiyalilakath Sainaba, I consider how the text challenges the irreducible secularity of the novel form and reshapes our understanding of what constitutes a novel in non-Western, non-secular contexts.