THE MALDIVE ISLANDERS A Study of the Popular Culture of an Ancient Ocean Kingdom Introduction to 'Villages in the Ocean'
Xavier Romero-Frias
Nova Ethnographia Indica. Barcelona 1999
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Photo:
Ismail Abdulla
When I visited Maldives for
the first time, in June 1979, I used to spend a lot of time
in the Majeedi Library. It was the main one in the capital,
Male', and it has since been renamed as the National Library.
Back then, it was a very quiet place where there was a pleasant
atmosphere and the employees were friendly and helpful.
As I wanted to know about the land, which incidentally is,
like Siam, one of the few Asian countries which was spared
foreign colonization, I read all that I could find there,
which was not very much. I remember very clearly that what
struck me most at the time was how few books of substance
had been published about the Maldives, and the fact that
most of them had been written long ago.
Those few old books dwelt at
length on royal genealogies and life in the Sultan's court,
where the few foreign travelers visiting the country (Ibn
Batuta, Pyrard de Laval) had been entertained. Modern publications
were little more than shallow statistical reports or glossy
tourist guides. I felt that the country had been described
but not understood. The Maldivian people, their way of life
and their feelings had never been given a voice. They seemed
to have been dismissed as 'just a silent presence in the
background,' like servants in a palace. Thus, vast areas
of knowledge about this island country had still not come
to the light.
As years went by, I became
fluent in the language and also developed a sense of perspective
concerning the Maldivian cultural heritage. However, I was
puzzled by the inconsistent Maldivian attitude towards history.
A few gentlemen belonging to the educated elite were aware
of an obscure and distant Buddhist past which, they would
insist, has definitely faded into oblivion. They claimed
that the present country had nothing to do with it. Recently,
a few Maldivians acknowledge a form of what they call 'mysticism'
within the autochtonous culture. However, they treat it
as an isolated, purely local phenomenon of 'mysterious'
origins. At a popular level things were even more clouded:
most islanders didn't want to have anything to do with their
Buddhist ancestors. They preferred to say that other folks
had been Buddhist in their country, not them. It sounded
as if the people of the Maldives had always been Muslim
and could not have possibly been anything else. In what
looks like a blind form of destructiveness, Maldivians,
instead of acknowledging and giving due honor to their ancestral
Buddhist heritage in which most of their culture is still
rooted, spared no effort to dissociate themselves as much
as possible from their own past.
Cosmic
diagram 'These fish illustrations found in local astrology books are among the few zoomorphic representations made by Maldivians since their conversion to Islam.'
The Maldivian past is like
a misty region, where even events of recent history seem
to be far away in time. To the outsider, this gives the
impression that the actual character of the Maldives is
concealed behind a mask. At the same time, I could not avoid
realizing that the visible face of the country was changing
rapidly around me. During the 1980's the Maldive Islands
underwent a profound transformation. I witnessed how the
new aggressive Islamization and modernization of the country,
paradoxically happening simultaneously, upset the traditional
Island society, stifling most forms of popular expression.
In a scenario where the forces of Islamization and technological
consumerism were poised for a combined onslaught on the
Islands, the stresses for the concealed ancestral cultural
heritage were so huge that I wondered whether any traces
of it would survive at all.
The awareness about a whole
country losing its true personality, gradually translated
itself into concern. In the face of the general passivity,
I felt responsible for keeping the fragile legacy of the
ancestral Maldivian expressions alive, which led me to collect
clues about the country's past. This book is the fruit of
many years of observing and collecting samples not only
of tales, but also of the iconography, popular beliefs,
festivals, rituals and customs of the Maldive Islanders.
In the end I gathered such a vast amount of data, that it
took me almost as many years to analyze them, categorize
them and evaluate them in the context of the art and traditions
of the Indian Subcontinent. This comparison was necessary
since the Maldivian folkways didn't just pop 'mysteriously'
out of the blue and, certainly, it is not merely an 'Islamic
Country' as the local authorities would like us to believe:
The present work, by comparing myths and way of life, tries
to establish that the first people settling the Maldives
were fisherfolk from the nearest maritime regions, the coastlines
of South India and Ceylon. Besides the racial affinity,
we will see how below the Islamic veneer the folk culture
of the whole area is still very similar.
There are clear indications
that sometime in Maldivian antiquity (probably about two
millenia ago), a kingly dynasty from the northern regions
of the Subcontinent established their power in the Maldive
Islands without much local opposition. It is likely that
those first 'noble rulers' brought the Buddhist Dharma in
their wake, although there are legends that hint at a later
conversion to Buddhism. In clear divergence from Sri Lankan
myths, in the Maldives those northern kings perhaps became
Buddhist centuries after beginning their rule over the Maldivian
atolls. Then follows an analysis of the traces of Goddess-worship
and the fear of spirits of the dead which are still present
in Maldivian popular traditions. The Dravidian Devi cult
and a form of tutelary spirit and ancestor-worship, are
prevalent among the coastal peoples from the Tulu region
of Karnataka to the southern shores of Ceylon.
Maldivian archaeological remains
and some inscriptions found therein, point at influences
from 8th or 9th century Bengal, in the form of Vajrayana
Buddhist iconography and writing. This work describes the
island world of esoterism and demonstrates how nowadays,
to a certain extent, the Vajrayana Tantric teachings have
endured in the Maldives in a syncretistic form of occult
magical practices, known locally as fanditaverikan. Thus, the traditions described in this study are not
yet a thing of the past. Many aspects of the ancient Divehi
folkways remain alive and form a part of the present-day
culture of most Maldivian individuals. This survival has
not been easy, and towards the end of this book I describe
how, since the thirteenth century, there have been quite
a number of kings and 'holy men' who tried to make the Maldives
more Islamized disregarding local cultural needs and values
in the process.
I am aware that quite a few
aspects of this study may offend some readers. Folklore
is close to the more immediate realities of life, the worries
of the common man or woman, young or old. Thus, in the text
there are many explicit references to blood, sex, defecation,
disease and death. To make matters worse, this is a field
where nothing seems to be holy. Folkways consistently display
a casual lack of respect towards established religions and
government authority. However, instead of being ingenuous
and condemn, one must keep in mind that folklore is rooted
in emotions and deviations that all human beings manifest
and reality doesn't leave much room for idealization. Those
who may be dismayed by Maldivian popular culture should
remember William Graham Sumner's testy dictum that anybody
likely to be shocked by reading about folkways, of whatever
sort, had better not read about folkways at all.2
Since Maldivians were reluctant
to talk about their popular beliefs, it was initially not
easy for me to get to the core of their culture. It took
years of patient work and living among the average folk,
sharing one roof, their meals, their preoccupations, their
joy and their pain, to finally be able to understand their
ancestral soul. I have spent a great part of my life among
the Maldivians and I admire the way in which they have adapted
to their environment. My hope is that this book will help
them to recover their pride in their heritage.
Early Maldives - up to 19th century 
