Maloney, C. (1980). People of the Maldive Islands. Bombay: Orient Longman.
The twentieth century was but a faint breeze blowing over the Maldive Islands until the 1970s; now it is coming in rush…
It was only in the 1970s that Māle, the capital, was linked by regular air service to Colombo and
Trivandrum. Now, nine islands have modern tourist hotels, and specialists from United Nations agencies and Colombo Plan countries are descending on the country.
All these foreign contacts, the tourists, and the new sources of money, are drawing the Maldives into the matrix of world-wide communication. And the old culture is being stirred to its depths.
But that culture has rarely been described because these islands have been virtually ignored by travellers, journalists and scholars alike. How different from the tropical coral islands of the South Pacific and the Caribbean, which have been romanticised and anthropologised for decades! This book is the first substantial scholarly work published on the Maldives since H.C.P. Bell prepared his book on Maldivian antiquities fifty years ago. It is time to catch up on our negligence of this southern extremity of South Asia…
There are three book-length old sources on the Maldives which provide the main points for tracing the evolution of its culture. First, is the account of Francois Pyrard, a Frenchman wrecked there in 1602 and detained for five and a half years. He learned the language (called Divehi) well, and his work, perceptive and accurate, is rather like an ethnography written before the concept of ‘ethnography’ was invented. It is cited frequently in this book. Second, is the account of two Englishmen, Young and Christopher, deputed to the Maldives in the 1930s as part of a marine survey team, and they recorded information of interest to the British in India. The third work is that of H.C.P. Bell, who made a brief stay in 1879, when shipwrecked, and visited again in 1920 and 1922, deputed by the Government of Ceylon to study Maldivian
Buddhist antiquities. Bell had long experience in the historical archaeology of Śrī Lankā. In his later years, as a labour of love, he devoted much scholarship to the Maldives. His book, prepared in the 1920s, but published posthumously, has a wealth of data on the language, Buddhist remnants, Sinahala affinities and history of the Islamic period of the Maldives. He also published twelve articles, Excerpta Maldiviana, on diverse antiquarian subjects. None of these
three works, however, describe or analyse the cultural system, and almost all the old works are based on data obtained in Māle.
The main new findings of this book are as follows:
- The sub-stratum of population, before the arrival of Divehi-speakers from Śrī Lankā, was Dravidian-speaking; the islands were settled originally from Kērala, which is evident in the language, place names, poetry forms, dance forms, relics of Hinduism underlying Buddhism, local political organisation ant the like.
- The kinship system was formerly matrilineal and kinship terms are mostly derived from Malayālam. The kinship system has been modified by Divehi (from Sinhala) influence and has slowly crumbled under eight centuries of Islamic social ideals.
- The myths regarding origin are related to those of Sinhalas.
- The islands are referred to in early Buddhist literature.
- Traditional counting was with 12 as base number, which has interesting historical implications.
- Islam provides the teleological component for both the highly organised political system and the social rules of behaviour.
- Parallel with Islam is a magico-religious system, fanditha, having great importance to individual perception of the world and to psychological adjustment with the environment.
- The former caste system evolved into a highly politicised traditional class system, now using modern mechanisms to maintain itself.
- In every hundred marriages, there are eighty-five divorces; this is an adaptation to psychological needs arising from the settlement pattern and political and social system.
- Behaviour has been adaptive to the constraints and needs of people living a lifetime a lifetime on tiny islands with inter-action limited to a few score or a few hundred
co-islanders.- Population growth and density is the most serious problem.
- The new foreign money, the new elite symbols, and the new tourism, plus population growth, are straining the values of the old cultural system.
... Since 1974-75 when the author was in the Maldives there has been a change of government, and the country has been increasingly affected by political and economic currents from abroad...
The Maldives are experiencing intensified contact with the wide world… Now jet planes unload tourists to Hulule airport, which was extended by dirt and stones shipped from India… Māle had about 20,000 people when I was here, now I hear it has newly 40,000 and the consumer tendency is increasing…There are few places in the world that have experience outside influence as rapidly as the Maldives did in one decade during the
1970s.
Clarence Maloney
