In the early decades of the twentieth century, Mappila Muslim women in Kerala were writing essays, opinion pieces, fiction, advice columns and reflections in Malayalam and Arabi-Malayalam periodicals. They were participating in debates on education, reform, faith, domestic life and social change at a time when print culture in Kerala was expanding rapidly. Many of these writings appeared in community magazines that circulated within limited networks and were rarely preserved in formal archives. Over time, the names of these writers and the publications that carried their work slipped out of mainstream literary histories. 'Around The Sufrah' began with a sustained attempt to locate these women in the printed record and to piece together the conditions in which they wrote, published and circulated ideas between roughly 1900 and the 1950s.

The collective takes its name from the sufrah, the woven mat placed on the floor for meals and gatherings in many Muslim households in Kerala. The image of people sitting around a shared surface guides the project’s structure. Founded by researcher Haneena PA, Around The Sufrah developed through fieldwork across towns and homes in Kerala, where the team searched for old magazines, private collections, letters, photographs and family-held documents. They describe encountering what they call 'bedroom archives' — bundles of periodicals tied up in cupboards, annotated copies of magazines, and fragile pages saved by descendants who understood their value even when institutions did not. The project grew through research grants and collaborations, including support from organisations such as the Sher-Gil Sundaram Arts Foundation, Asia Art Archive and the India Foundation for the Arts. Over time, this research was organised into a publicly accessible digital archive that includes digitised magazines, profiles of women writers, translated excerpts, oral narratives, field notes, photographs and documentation of the research journey itself.

The website is structured as an open resource. Visitors can browse scanned issues of magazines, read biographical notes on individual writers, and move through sections that document the process of tracking these materials down. The field diary entries are particularly important; they record conversations, uncertainties, leads that went nowhere, and the everyday labour of archival work. Around The Sufrah positions this process as part of the archive. The project also convened Sufrah Salon, a series of gatherings bringing together women researchers from different regions and disciplines to discuss methodologies, field experiences and the politics of documentation. These salons extended the project beyond recovery work and into a wider conversation about how research is conducted, who participates in it, and how knowledge circulates within communities.

In 2024, the collective presented Reading Rumours in Kerala, an exhibition that brought this research into a physical space. The exhibition took visitors through the history of Mappila women’s print culture, foregrounding names that had faded from public recognition. It assembled reproductions of magazine pages, translated excerpts, contextual material on the rise of reading rooms and literary associations, and documentation from the field. The title engaged with the idea of 'rumour' as a label often attached to women’s speech and knowledge, and it also referenced the vayanashaala, the traditional reading rooms where men gathered to read newspapers and debate politics. By centring women’s writing within this history of print, the exhibition asked audiences to reconsider how literary canons are formed and how easily certain contributors disappear from view.

The project’s current exhibition, part of the Library Circles series at the Jameel Arts Centre in Dubai, runs until 1 June 2026. Titled Library Circles: Haneena PA, the display presents Around The Sufrah as an evolving research platform. It includes reproductions of archival material, transcripts, field notes, photographs and translated writings by Mappila women, alongside documentation from Sufrah Salon. The exhibition situates the project within a broader conversation about alternative research methodologies and “thinking in public,” inviting visitors to engage with the materials and the process that produced them. By placing this work in an international arts space, Around The Sufrah extends the story of Mappila women’s print culture beyond Kerala and into a wider network of readers, researchers and artists. At its core, the collective continues to build an accessible archive that restores visibility to a generation of women who wrote, published, and shaped intellectual life in their community, and whose words are once again in circulation.

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