Lakshadweep readings
by Mahmood Kooria
With several new laws and regulations, the Indian government has been trying to alter the long-existing ways of life in the Lakshadweep islands. Since 1956 the islanders have been categorized as “Scheduled Tribe” and the archipelago has historically been protected by law in the colonial and postcolonial eras with strict directives aimed at preserving their lands and traditions against outside encroachments. It is one of the most literate places in the country (third only to Kerala and Mizoram) and a considerable part of the population finds jobs in government-service sectors even though diverse precarious situations have impeded larger developments in the archipelago. It is truly unfortunate and condemnable that the current regime is coming up with too many adverse dictates without taking people’s opinions into account. The highhandedness of the administrators should be avoided and prevented.
Even as the people of Lakshadweep continue to protest against what they perceive as draconian laws, here I would like to introduce some essential readings on the islands that would help us get a better understanding of their history and culture.
Two early attempts to write about Lakshadweep in English came from two British colonial officers: W. Robinson and R.H. Ellis. Their accounts, published in 1874 and 1924 respectively, are still very useful starting points for any student of history especially together with N.S. Mannadiar’s gazetteer. Although both officers embody a colonial gaze, their works provide what colonial officers heard and thought of the islands in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when the British government was planning to, and eventually succeeded, take a few islands from the Arakkal Ali Rajas of Kannur (Cannanore) who had ruled the islands for many centuries. Both Robinson and Ellis were sent to the islands from Malabar to survey the lands and to reform existing taxation systems. As an aside, the private papers of Madam Ellis, who accompanied her husband to the island and wrote letters to her mother in England on her experiences living in the islands, have been preserved at the Cambridge University South Asia collections.
What attracted me to Lakshadweep is the islanders’ combination of matriliny and Islam. It is one among several interesting features of their social systems and very much part of the wider Indian Ocean trends, as I try to demonstrate in my ongoing research. In the 1960s and 1970s, a couple of researchers under the supervision of Leela Dube, a trailblazer in Indian anthropology, worked on these aspects, and she herself wrote a book titled Matriliny and Islam (1969). Her supervisees A.R. Kutty’s Marriage and Kinship and K.P. Ittaman’s Amini Islanders are two other books that came out as part of their joint explorations.
Dube and Kutty focused on the Kalpeni Island, while Ittaman did a far more detailed study on the Amini Island. Despite their prediction in the 1970s that matriliny would fade away in the islands at the wake of reformist Wahhabi movement in the islands, the social system continues to flourish in various ways while Wahhabism continues to be marginal, not much different from what Dube and others had witnessed more than half a century ago during its initial presence in the archipelago.
If all these scholars approached matriliny ethnographically, V. Vijayakumar, a District Judge in the Kerala Higher Judiciary, analyzed it from a legal historical perspective in his Traditional Futures: Law and Custom in the Lakshadweep Islands. The book is important not only for studying the law of the islands but also for representing the broader struggles of customary traditions against colonial and postcolonial hegemonic cultures in the Indian subcontinent. Based on some fragmentary and some detailed evidence, he tells the long history of legal practices and ideas in the islands across several centuries in three chapters, before zooming onto the legal disputes and judgements on matrilineal system in colonial and postcolonial period in the following chapters.
Andrew Forbes wrote a few essays on the islands in the 1970s in a wider Indian Ocean perspective. Specifically, his explorations on caste, matriliny and Islam reflect contemporary scholarly trends on the islands. He also often compared the islands with the Maldives, another major area of his research. Relatedly, Roderich Ptak wrote an exceptional article on Lakshadweep (and Maldives) on the basis of Chinese sources of the Ming Empire, and it was published in Journal of the American Oriental Society in 1987. For those who do not read Chinese, his translations are highly useful, especially his excerpt from a Ming novel on the Maldives. Both Forbes and Ptak, along with many others, demonstrate that Lakshadweep’s history cannot be studied in isolation from the histories of the Maldives. One island in particular, Minicoy, is often credited for its shared cultures, language, scripts, etc. with the Maldives, but other islands also have more in common culturally and historically with this island country than possibly with the mainland country of India beyond peculiar histories of political and legal hegemonies.
The islanders have a rich written and oral tradition on the navigational technology, which combines Arabic, Sanskrit, Malayalam and Persian knowledge systems. M.P. Kunhikunhi Malmi’s Rahmani represents this tradition. Lotika Varadarajan has edited and published it in 2004 with a detailed introduction and annotations, together with its Malayalam facsimile and translation prepared by Dr. M. Mulla Koya. Much older and detailed navigational guides written in Arabic and Vatteluttu scripts have also survived from the island. Varadarajan has also written a book on the islanders’ unique techniques of building boats. Her Sewn Boats of Lakshadweep provides an overview of their local construction and navigational methods, especially that of their odams, a major means of inter-island transport and a marker of social and economic status until the 1970s. The islanders also had built rafts (called terrapam) for subsistence fishing across lagoons, while they had occasionally made ar velikonda to carry cargo (in Amini) and kondalam with double masts and six to seven pairs of rowers (in Kavaratti). Through detailed ethnographic and photographic documentation, Varadarajan informs us about the centrality of boats in the islanders’ everyday life.
There are several works written by the islanders themselves in Jazari (also spelled “Jeseri”) Malayalam, Arabic and Arabic-Malayalam. In Jazari, the most important linguistic stepping stone is a dictionary prepared by Pukkutti Muhammad Koya in 1988, for the independent status of the language vis-à-vis Malayalam and Tamil has been a controversial topic among specialists. In Malayalam, my favorites are S. Rahmat Beegam’s Avismaraṇīyam (Unforgettable), P.I. Pookkoya’s Dwīpōlpatti (Island’s Origin) & N. Koya Haji Kilttan’s Sāgaratīratte Paitr̥kaṃ Tēṭi (In Search of Heritage on the Coast).
In Arabic, Futūḥāt al-jazāʾir (Victories of the Islands) by an anonymous author is an important primary source if you can locate a copy. I got a manuscript copy from a mosque library in Calicut in Kerala but it is also typed and photocopied, although unpublished. I got a copy of the latter version first from Kunhi Usthad in the Amini Island who just passed away on 23 June 2021.
There are also of course several doctoral dissertations, travel accounts, administrative reports, memoirs, popular writings, etc. Three dissertations specifically stand out: M. Mullakkoya’s study on the literary and linguistic traditions of the archipelago and P.T. Abdul Azeez’s study on the evolution of its written cultures (both submitted at the University of Calicut in 1990 and 2004 respectively) as well as Brian J. Didier’s study on the intra-religious conflicts in the island of Androth in the 1990s between the Sufi group of Shamsiyya and the Sunni group led by the matrilineal Qadi (submitted at the University of Cambridge in 2000).
Despite all these studies in the past, the archipelago has comparatively been neglected in the recent surge of academic interest in the Indian Ocean littoral. As you can see most of these studies above were published before the Indian Ocean studies as a field gathered its momentum in the 1990s and 2000s, and we have only fleeting references to the islands in the works that came out in the field over the last two decades. A new generation of scholars, especially from within the archipelago, is trying to address this silence. I was fortunate to spend some quality time with a group of history buffs from the Kiltan island who have been documenting the rich historical tradition of the island varying from handwritten manuscripts and old printed books in Jazari, Arabic, Malayalam, English and Arabic-Malayalam to folksongs and plethora of inscriptions scattered across the graveyards and mosques, etc. Let’s hope that their efforts as well as the wider attempts at historical, cultural and ethnographic research would unravel many unexplored dimensions of the archipelago.
Abdul Azeez, P.T. 2004. “Lakṣadwīpile Likhitabhāṣā Pāramparyam.” PhD Dissertation, University of Calicut.
Anonymous. Futūḥāt al-jazāʾir. Arabic Ms. Mithqal Mosque Library, Kozhikode.
Beegam, S. Rahmat. 2018. Avismaraṇīyam. Kozhikode: Mathrubhumi Books.
Didier, Brian J. 2000. “The Scars of Piety: Islam and the Dynamics of Religious Dispute on Androth Island, South India.” PhD Dissertation, University of Cambridge.
Dube, Leela. 1969. Matriliny and Islam: Religion and Society in the Laccadives. Delhi: National Publishing House.
Ellis, R.H. 1924. A Short Account of the Laccadive Islands and Minicoy. Madras: Government Press.
Forbes, Andrew. 1978. “Studies in Indian Ocean Islam: Caste and Matriliny in the Laccadive Islands.” London: RoutledgeReligion 8, no. 1: 15–39.
Forbes, Andrew. 1981. “Southern Arabia and the Islamicisation of the Central Indian Ocean Archipelagoes.” Archipel 21: 55–92.
Ittaman, K. P. 1976. Amini Islanders. New Delhi: Abhinav Publications.
Kilttan, N. Koya Haji. 2007. Sāgaratīratte Paitr̥kaṃ Tēṭi: Lakṣadwīpinte Caritr̥avum Paitr̥kavum. Kottayam: Current Books.
Koya, Pukkutti Muhammad. 1988. Jazari: Lakṣadwīpubhāṣā Nighaṇṭu. Kavaratti.
Kutty, Abdul Rahman. 1972. Marriage and Kinship in an Island Society. Delhi: National Publishing House.
Mannadiar, N. S. ed., 1977. Gazetteer of India: Lakshadweep. Coimbatore: Government of India Press.
Mullakkoya, M. 1990. “Lakṣadwīpumalayāḷattinṯe Padāvaliparamāya Paṭhanam.” PhD Dissertation, University of Calicut.
Pookkoya, P.I. 1960. Dwīpōlpatti. Calicut: Saraswathi Printing Works.
Ptak, Roderich. “The Maldive and Laccadive Islands (liu-shan 溜 山) in Ming Records.” Journal of the American Oriental Society 107, no. 4 (1987): 675–694.
Robinson, W. 1874. Report on the Laccadive Islands. Madras: Government Press.
Vijayakumar, V. 2006. Traditional Futures: Law and Custom in the Lakshadweep Islands. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Mahmood Kooria holds research positions at Leiden University (the Netherlands) and University of Bergen (Norway) and is a Visiting Faculty at Ashoka University (India). He read his PhD at the Leiden University Institute for History in 2016, authored Islamic Law in Circulation: Shāfiʿī Texts across the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming), and co-edited Malabar in the Indian Ocean World: Cosmopolitanism in a Maritime Historical Region (Oxford University Press, 2018) and Islamic Law in the Indian Ocean: Texts, Ideas and Practices (Routledge, 2022). Earlier he was a research fellow at the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS) and African Studies Centre (ASC), Leiden; Dutch Institute in Morocco (NIMAR), Rabat.
Email: mahmoodpana@gmail.com
