Plural Islands of Lakshadweep: Insider-outsider narratives of Minicoy
by Abel Job Abraham and Aarthi Sridhar
Islands fire the imagination differently, for those that live on them and those that don’t. These spaces also appear and disappear from a mainland consciousness, and the picture painted of them is always partial. Against rising territorial insecurity in the Indian Ocean, there is renewed effort to fix certain ideas about island territories under Indian possession. Government records place these figures at around 1382 off-shore inhabited and uninhabited islands (setting aside those fluid landmasses in Indian rivers). Once these numbers are secured, little else figures in the national consciousness about life here. The hegemonic language of the “national scale”, especially in relation to “territory” and “sovereignty” has a loud way of overshadowing accounts of the diversity of people and their relations to territories and space on the margins. A way of invisibilizing complex intercultural identities of people is to describe them with the simplest of brush strokes. Words like ‘homogenous’ can inadvertently do that.
India’s Lakshadweep Islands in the Arabian Sea are often described by outsiders as a homogenous system. This is a term that we researchers have ourselves used on occasion to describe to yet other outsiders the similarities among community members of Lakshadweep, in contrast to socio-cultural formations and arrangements found on the mainland. However, this term can prove to be problematic depending on the broader context in which it is deployed, and can come to be associated with an image of cultural ossification. The people that reside on the Lakshadweep islands today follow the Sunni way of the Islamic faith and a matrilineal form of property inheritance. However, apart from these obvious features, there is much that makes for diversity in this archipelago. We illustrate this through a focus on the southernmost island on the Lakshadweep archipelago, Minicoy, which bears a history that would make it an anomaly to the easy image of ‘homogeneity’ often ascribed to less familiar maritime worlds.
Maliku in-the-making
Contemporary Minicoy is the product of every bit of cross-cultural interaction it has experienced since humans decided to stay on it. As anthropologist Frank Heidemann infers from various historical records on Minicoy, the island has functioned as a source for cowry shells, for dried fish and coir. He refers to the place as “a ship-building place, and as the home of seafarers, pilots, captains and traders, as a hideaway for political refugees, as an anchor place for ships in trouble and as a destination for Islamic preachers”. The historian and anthropologist Ellen Kattner remarks that Minicoy functioned as a ‘caravanserai’ in the Indian Ocean, a sort of stopping or resting space. In a different paper, she adds that ‘Minicoy’, the island’s name itself, is an outsider’s version of ‘Maliku’. This is a term that many Minicoyans still prefer to use to refer to their homeland. Outsiders, like ourselves, continue to use the term Minicoy, a clear marker of our status and relations to this space.
Like many other places, the entwining of historical facts with local fiction and mythology is also evident in Lakshadweep and the two are not easily disentangled. During a field trip in Minicoy this year, a few mainlanders Abel met during his stay at the Government Dak Bungalow maintained that there were anthropophagites on the island. Dominic, a school teacher from Kerala, told Abel that in school, he had to study a chapter on Minicoy Island and he vividly remembers his school mash (teacher) telling the class about the place and the practice of cannibalism. R.H. Ellis’s “Short account of the Laccadive Islands and Minicoy” which many consider to be a largely reliable account contains nothing about cannibalism. To complicate matters, the most recent Wikipedia entry refers to an instance of this region being referred to (albeit mistakenly) by colonial officials as “cannibal kingdom”. Wikipedia’s own nuances aside, the notion that this region has ‘primitive’ antecedents continues to be transmitted.
Inhabiting an island
The moments of ‘origin’ and ‘inhabitation’ of islands draw much curiosity, and Minicoy too has its share of theories on this. Kattner (2007) argues that although the current inhabitants of Minicoy originally came from the present-day Maldives, a group of skilled seafarers or traders must have first settled here. According to her, planned migration to the islands on the western coast of the Indian subcontinent is the most reasonable explanation for early inhabitation of Minicoy. While the exact period is not clear, long-distance trade on sailing vessels has a long history of plying these waters. Her assumption is that the monsoon winds led these vessels which were travelling from “Eastern Africa, Eastern Arabia and the Red Sea”, to present-day Sri Lanka and parts of Southeast Asia, and to Minicoy which is located along the “Maritime Silk Road” between the 9° channel in the north and the 8° channel in the south. Archeological studies suggest that the initial settlement in Minicoy could have been around 1500 BCE. Kattner surmises that the first settlers probably quickly ran into the problem of freshwater availability since rain is the only available source in Minicoy. Her own conclusion is that the first inhabitants had links to the Harappan civilization famous for its planned water management and skilled seafarers, if the recent archeological findings can be presumed to be accurate.
Oral narratives also contribute to origin stories. A popular account heard from many locals on Minicoy suggests that two princesses from Maldives — Kamborani and Kohoratukamana, who later came to Minicoy — are the ancestors of modern Minicoyans. It is believed that their descendants constitute the two higher status groups on the island, boduŋ and niamiŋ. Being princesses, they are said to have brought with them servants who constitute the lower status groups, raveriŋ and medukembiŋ (Kattner, 1996). Sometime around the 16th century, Minicoy is said to have become a tributary to the Arakkal dynasty of Cannanore (Heidemann, 2019), a kingdom on the southwest Indian shore. This is one of the earliest traces of the island being ruled by outsiders. Several explanations are offered for this and can be distilled into a broad recital. The Arakkal Kingdom was interested in obtaining control over Minicoy because of its strategic geographical position and the highly fertile land and coir produces, and by a sequence of fuzzily traced events managed to obtain this control. It is surmised that the Maliku people themselves enabled this. The reason proffered is that Minicoy experienced an externally imposed crisis — it was either ravaged by a large cyclone (qtd. in Heidemann, 2019) or the islanders were tired of being molested by the so-called Malabar ‘pirates’ (Basevi, 1872) active in this area since the time of European maritime expansion (although there are few details to bolster each account). Most oral narratives end with Maliku exercising a pragmatic political decision in the absence of any support from their ally, the Sultan of Maldives, in the face of these challenges. They deliberately turned their allegiance to the Arakkal kingdom. These accounts of shifting allegiance mark all political histories of marginalised or less powerful communities and, interestingly, they are reminiscent of contemporary shifts in political allegiance. Some historical sources (qtd. in Ahmad, 2020) claim that the ‘Ali Rajas’ of the Arakkal kingdom had marital agreements with the Sultans of Maldives resulting in strong maritime links between Maldives and Malabar. Minicoy’s island ‘origin’ story is one of continued habitation made possible through both affiliation and detachment between residents and ‘outsiders’.
Cross-cultural Interactions and Matriliny
The present-day Arakkal family follows a matrilineal system of descent and chooses the eldest member of the family as its head and matriarch. Adiraja Mariyumma, the eldest member of the family, is the titular head of the Arakkal family since May 2019. The rulers of the Arakkal Kingdom, said to be the only Muslim dynasty in the region of present-day Kerala (Sajan, 2020), termed their men rulers ‘Ali Raja’ while the women rulers held the title ‘Arakkal Beevi’. A recent newspaper article discusses how the women rulers of the Arakkal dynasty were as powerful as their male counterparts. It remarks that while the erstwhile Arakkal dynasty has had 11 women rulers out of their total 38 heads, the so-called progressive Kerala state is yet to have a woman Chief Minister!
The roots of matriliny are complex and the subject of many scholarships. Contrary to growing Islamophobic notions, Islam has allowed for women to occupy powerful social positions, especially within the unit of the family. The instance of Khadija Bint Khuwaylid, the first wife of Prophet Muhammed (Abbott, 1942), is a popular one; she is said to have financially supported the Prophet and his followers, also by extending political support through her power and influence in her capacity as a successful businesswoman and the daughter of Khuwaylid Bin Asad, a popular leader of the Quraysh tribe.
There were also strong sources of matriliny within Hindu practices. It is surmised that the Arakkal family might have adopted the matrilineal system from their Hindu lineage¹ (Kurup, 1970). Leela Dube in her paper, “Matriliny and Islam in Lakshadweep”, discusses how a matrilineal system is still preserved in Lakshadweep Islands while a similar visiting marriage system that was practiced among the Nairs of central Kerala has given way to other forms of marriage like neolocal residence with the influx of patriarchal ideologies.
Some authors state that Minicoy’s matrilineal system existed long before the islanders’ conversion to Islam (Ahmad, 2020). Ibn Batuta, for instance, notes that women had a profound influence on Maldivian governance (Reynolds, 1975). Given the long years of connection between these spaces, it is likely that they shared many cultural practices and approaches in relation to matriliny.
The matrilineal tradition of Minicoy might not be the only reason why Marco Polo termed the island a “female island”. Minicoyans are well-known for their seafaring and shipbuilding skills (Kattner, 2007). Most men spend a major part of their life away from their homes. In the absence of men, the women handle the responsibilities of both family and society. Being part of a joint family natolocal residence system, the men, in turn, are supposed to contribute to the expenses of both their mother’s and wife’s family houses. Concerns have been raised about shifts in matrilineal practices with greater exposure to ‘outsiders’ who call for narrow interpretations of Sharia in relation to inheritance. The particular evolving forms of matriliny and the specific practices, roles and status of women in Minicoy could owe their shape and form to the island’s ongoing cross-cultural currents.
Island Islam
Minicoy islanders are supposed to have converted to Islam in the twelfth century. Falling on the sailing routes of the Arabs, Minicoy and other Maldivian Islands are said to have adopted or converted to Islam as a result of being exposed to it through interactions with Muslim traders from the Arab regions (Ahmad, 2020). Dhovemi Kalaminja, the Sultan of Maldives, who was Buddhist, accepted Islam in the year 1153 CE. Several scholars (qtd. in Ahmad, 2020) suggest that the inhabitants of Minicoy either followed Hinduism or Buddhism prior to their conversion to Islam. Mohammed Kolugege, our friend from Minicoy and an expert on the island’s culture, had preserved Buddhist stupas excavated from the eastern hilly side of Minicoy. They are estimated to be of the Burmese-Singhalese type from the 5th and 6th centuries CE (qtd. in Kattner, 2007) and are now displayed at the Maliku Development Society’s (MDS) Museum in Minicoy.
Photo from Haneef Fythilagothi.
It is in the 1940s, that the conservative tenets of Wahhabism were introduced on the island by Moulavi Hussain Didi, a religious preacher and an exile from the Maldives (Kattner, 1996). Even so, Wahhabism has not made its exacting practices visible on the island. Islanders continue to observe their customary practices. But neither is Prophet Muhammed’s birthday celebrated nor is the Maqbara (mausoleum) worshipped in Minicoy. The other islanders in Minicoy who follow orthodox Sunnism offer their daily prayers at a separate Badr Masjid and visit the Juma Masjid in Minicoy only for the Friday prayer or Jumu’ah. Looking across all the islands of Lakshadweep, the practice of Islam is as diverse as it can get within such a short distance. Barring Minicoy, other islands have some followers of the Ahmadiyya movement, Quadiriyya and Rifai sects. Tangals are one such group of Sunni Muslims but claim to be direct descendants of Prophet Muhammed and as an exception in Lakshadweep, they follow a patrilineal inheritance mode (Vijayakumar, 1999).
Dynamics of Language
If words and language make worlds come true (see Lakshmi Pradeep’s article on the Sea Lexicon), the language on Minicoy further complicates any image of island homogeneity. The Mahal language makes life on Minicoy diverse and dynamic. The name of the language itself has its own legend. The popular account is that an islander answered ‘Mahaldibu bas’ (the language of the Maldives) when asked for the name of his language by a British officer (Kattner, 1996). Through what seems an unfortunate practice of shorthand, the officer noted this name down as ‘Mahl’! Mahal, as it is referred to today, is a dialect of Dhivehi which is now spoken in the Maldives. Sinhala, a language spoken in the Indian Ocean island of Sri Lanka, and Dhivehi both have roots in Prakrit, a language that was spoken in ancient and medieval India (qtd. in Kattner, 2007).
The rest of Lakshadweep speak Jeseri, also known as Dweep Bhasha which is a dialect of Malayalam. A conversation between Abel with local intellectuals from Minicoy led to a discussion on language. They shared, albeit with some despondency, that although the Government of India had granted minority linguistic status to Mahal, Minicoy islanders had to learn Malayalam after Minicoy joined the Indian Union through the plebiscite of 1956. The educational curriculum adopted in Lakshadweep Islands since then was the same syllabus as in Kerala with no exception made for Minicoy. The bureaucrats in Minicoy were either from other Lakshadweep islands or from Kerala, using Malayalam for official government businesses. Despite the slow creep of the relatively speaking dominant language like Malayalam, Maldivian and Hindi television channels remain the main local cable networks available and demanded on Minicoy. Ironically, Hindi, the majoritarian favourite on the mainland, is favoured by most men in Minicoy over the other outside languages, having been acclimated to the culture of the merchant navy and its nationalistic registers of communication.
Islands are such complex spaces that the temptation is to reduce them to single simple ideas and labels. The recent controversies and conflict surrounding the introduction of a new law to govern land use of the island has brought these uni-dimensional descriptors back into play — “homogenous”, “isolated” and “underdeveloped”. However, as the account above shows, the islands have never been any of these things by themselves, for longer than a moment. Importantly, the Lakshadweep islands have been, and continue to be an amalgamation of its insider-outsider versions. Over the four themes discussed here, we wished to complicate the notion of homogeneity as it applies to islands that are in constant exchange with multiple worlds. Pushing ourselves to question easy labels and first appearances by digging deeper into their sources helps us understand not just the perceptions but also its implications for life on the islands.
Notes
[1] The Arakkal dynasty is supposed to have come into existence either by the conversion of Cheraman Perumal’s (the last ruler of Chera Kingdom) nephew into Islam or by the marriage of Chirakkal Raja’s (the most senior king of the Chirakkal branch of the Kolathiri dynasty) daughter to a Muslim youth.
References
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Ahmad, M. N. (2020). Expressing the Unexpressed: The Minicoy Islanders of Lakshadweep. In Tribal Studies in India (pp. 279–292). Springer. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9026-6_16
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Kurup, K.K.N. (1970). Ali Rajas of Cannanore, English East India Company and Lakkadive Islands (Vol. 32) [Proceedings of the Indian History Congress]. https://www.jstor.org/stable/44138504
Reynolds, C.H.B. (1975). The Maldive Islands. Asian Affairs, 6(1), 37–43. https://doi.org/10.1080/03068377508729740
Sajan, R. (2020). Pre-Colonial Traditional Justice in Malabar. Mukt Shabd Journal, 9(4), 2461.
Vijayakumar, V. (1999). Customary Laws of Lakshadweep Islands [Unpublished PhD Thesis]. School of Legal Studies Cochin University of Science and Technology.
Abel Job Abraham is a researcher with the Sustainable Fisheries programme at Dakshin Foundation. His work looks at documenting the Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) and the legally pluralistic systems of resource governance on Minicoy Island. Views are personal.
Email: abel.job@dakshin.org
Aarthi Sridhar is a social scientist and practitioner at Dakshin Foundation and works on maritime governance processes in India. Views are personal.
Email: aarthi77@gmail.com
