The cross heirs

Saudi Arabia is holding a fortune for the legal heirs of a 19th-century businessman from Malabar. And, two prominent families from Kerala have been fighting over it since 1971

- CITHARA PAUL

In 1870, Mayankutty Keyi, a shipping magnate from Kerala’s Malabar region, performed the hajj. The wealthy Mayankutty was not pleased with the facilities provided for Indian pilgrims in Mecca.

So, he bought 1.5 acres, barely 300m away from the Kaaba—the most sacred site for Muslims—and built a villa there with seven rooms and a huge hall. He named the villa Keyi Rubat, adding the Arabic word for rest house to his surname.

Buying the house was not a big deal for him, as he already had homes and warehouses across the globe—including in Amsterdam and Vienna. Keyi means ship owner in Persian. The Keyi family’s clients included traders of all sizes and even the biggest joint-stock company of those times, the English East India Company.

Mayankutty’s father, Abdul Qadir Keyi, was a renowned trader who had hired great scholars to tutor his son. Barely three years before performing his hajj, Mayankutty did something that irked orthodox Muslims in Malabar; he translated the Quran into Arabi Malayalam, the traditional language of the Mappila Muslims of Kerala. He took 15 years to complete the translation, which he thought would make the Quran more accessible to the common man. Enraged puritans tied stones to the translated copies and dumped them in the Arabian Sea. Mayankutty ignored the critics and printed more copies.