Thor Heyerdahl and the Maldives a blessing or a curse? By Xavier Romero-Frias

Since Heyerdahl published his 'Maldive Mystery', many books, articles and guides about the Maldives mention sun worship, pyramids, waves of immigrants, attacks by lionpeople and other such fallacies in their historical outline of the Maldive archipelago.

These distortions of truth are common in all of Heyerdahl’s books, which are less about serious research than about displaying himself and his improbable theories as loudly as a film star would. It is understandable that the writers of tourist guidebooks, for instance, would like to quote from as many sources as they can.

Tour guides try to give as much information as possible while keeping the book compact, and if the historical and archaeological information in those guides comes mainly out of Thor Heyerdahl’s ‘The Maldive Mystery,’ it is not a coincidence or a preference of the author.

 Considering that those guides are printed in great numbers, being distributed throughout the world and taken as reference by a wide public, we are dealing with a serious anomaly concerning how Maldivian history, archaeology and ethnology are being reflected and propagated by the world media. Regrettably, not all the books that give serious information about the Maldives are readily available. H.C.P. Bell’s monograph ‘The Maldive Islands’, A. Agassiz’s ‘The Coral Reefs of the Maldives,’ C. Maloney’s ‘People of the Maldive Islands’ and ‘The Voyage of F. Pyrard de Laval to the East Indies, The Maldives, the Moluccas, and Brazil’ translated and edited by A. Gray, are books which give excellent and well-researched information on the Maldives. These books are, however, rare and difficult to obtain and they are nowhere near to being as ubiquitous as T. Heyerdahl’s ‘The Maldive Mystery’ in bookstores and libraries throughout the world.

 This aberration becomes especially acute when it comes to translations into other tongues. There are many languages in the world where the only book whose theme is the Maldives is Thor Heyerdahl’s book. Tara figure etched on a cubic coral block.

 The distressing fact is that serious scholarly books about Maldives don’t sell, and thus are not known, while Thor Heyerdahl’s books, beginning with his Kon-Tiki expedition, are the kind of highly commercial writing that finds a market. Therefore, although hardly more than a caricature of history and archaeology, the book published by Heyerdahl about the ‘Maldive Mystery’ has filled the void left by the lack of better quality books on this ancient island state. Was it a blessing for Maldives that Thor Heyerdahl came to write the last book of his series on this coral atoll nation? It certainly has made the country a bit more well-known than it was before.

But in the light of the misrepresentations of reality inflicted on the Maldive history that have been, and keep being popularized by tourist guidebooks, and are staying there in print, it would have been better that Heyerdahl would not have come at all. It is an undeniable fact that Heyerdahl is a celebrity. He rubs his fame to every place he has written a book about. Therefore, the Easter Island and the Marquesas would certainly not be as well-known if he would not have been there. Like the Maldives, these are small faroff archipelagoes and their only chance to increase their prominence in the world scene has been through being patronized by Thor Heyerdahl. But it would be wiser to be sceptical about his methods, especially considering the fact that Heyerdahl has misused the real anthropological and historical facts of those island countries in order to enlarge his own image.

This mishandling is tantamount to abuse, for Heyerdahl was not straightforward as an archaeologist and one sure outcome of his meddling is that he has made the job more difficult for future researchers that will visit those places where he has left his deep traces. In the Maldives Heyerdahl thought he saw sun-temples and pyramids in the mounds or low hills that exist in certain islands, such as Gan in Southern Huvadu Atoll. In all of his later publications he refers to former books he wrote where he mentioned sun-worship, in order to promote their sales. But in fact the hills of all the Maldivian archaeological sites he visited were ancient Buddhist Stupas.

Since islanders took away stones from those Stupas for building their homes, when the round structure on top collapsed on the quadrangular base, it left shapes that could be said to be roughly conical or pyramidal. The fact is that, as HCP Bell proved with his careful and learned research work, all ancient archaeological remains on the Maldives unearthed to date are distinctly Buddhist. The Hindu Maldivian Buddhist statue from Toddu Island elements that are present in those sites are not part of a former substratum, but part of Buddhist Vajrayana iconography itself. Buddhism may be regarded, in a sense, as a branch of Hinduism and both influenced each other mutually in their architecture and iconography along their history because their geographical and cultural origins are mostly overlapping. Concerning archaeology in the Maldives, I wish more people would read and refer to HCP Bell's monograph 'The Maldive Islands', a book has been reprinted recently and which despite being old is still the best work on the subject, instead of Heyerdahl's book ‘The Maldive Mystery’.

 "Thor Heyerdahl is shrill but mistaken in many of his assumptions. Far from solving the Easter Island mystery, he has succeeded in making the solution more difficult for qualified scientists and made something of a fool of himself in the process. He is an amateur, a popularizer, an impresario, with a zoology degree from the University of Oslo. And his efforts in the Pacific greatly resemble the muddling attentions of, say, the hack writer of detective stories when faced with an actual crime scene --someone who ignores the minutiae of evidence, hair analysis, or electrophoresis (for typing bloodstains)-- and in blundering around a crime scene, muttering "The butler did it!", makes a complete hash of it for forensic scientists. The mention of Heyerdahl's name in academic circles frequently produces embarrassment or anger..." Paul Theroux

 A further blunder of Heyerdahl concerns his insistence that large groups of people bringing with them the sun-worship had travelled across the seas of the world in rafts or crude boats, settling here and there and building up new societies that built pyramids and decorated them with sun symbols. He badly wanted to believe that Asehkara, the way Maldivians call the land of Aceh in northern Sumatra, was the land of the Aztecs, at the other end of the world.

 But it is unlikely that people would have arrived to the Maldives in masses, and since a large fleet would have been needed, not even in sizeable communities. The Maldivian legends talk about some rulers or kingly people who arrived to the islands, probably about 2,000 years ago. But those may have only been a handful of people who took power, or were given the right to rule, and later intermarried. Mass migration of people from different ethnic groups would have created an enduring trauma that would necessary have been reflected in the oral tradition.

 After 24 years of gathering and studying the oral tradition of the Maldive Atolls I can only say that Thor Heyerdahl’s inflated speculations are completely misplaced.

Source: https://independent.academia.edu/XavierRomeroFrias

The Island Queens

The first, Sultana Khadija, daughter of Sultan Salah al-Din Salih Albendjaly, reigned from 1347 to 1379. Luckily for us, Ibn Battuta travelled in the Maldives during her reign, and fell completely under her spell: One of the wonders of these islands is that its ruler (sultana) is a woman named Khadija . . . . Sovereignty was exercised first by her grandfather, and then by her father.

When the latter died her brother Shihab-ud-din became king. He was still young and the vezir 'Abdallah son of Muhammad al-Hazrami married the mother of Shihab-uddin and overpowered him. And it was he who married also this Sultana Khadija after the death of her husband, the vezir Jamal-uddin.69 After describing the power struggles which resulted in her brother being deposed and then put to death, Ibn Battuta describes the circumstances of Khadija's enthronement:

The only survivors from the ruling house were his three sisters . . . .

The inhabitants of the Maldive islands preferred for sovereign Khadija and she was the wife of their orator (khatib) Jamal-ud-din who became vezir. He took over the reins of power . . . but orders were
issued in the name of Khadija only. The orders were written on palm leaves with a bent piece of iron similar to a knife, while paper was not used except for writing the Qur'an and books of learning.70
Was the khutba proclaimed in the name of Sultana Khadija? We can count on Ibn Battuta to record the formula meticulously:

The orator (khatib) mentioned the queen (sultana) in the Fridayprayer and also on other occasions. 'O my God!' says he, 'help Thy female slave whom Thou in Thy wisdom hast chosen from all creatures and made an instrument of Thy grace for all Muslims- verily,that is, Sultana Khadija, the daughter of Sultan Jalal-ud-din, bin Sultan Salah-ud-din.

After the death of Sultana Khadija, who reigned for 33 years, her sister Myriam succeeded to the throne.

She remained there until 785/1383, her husband also occupying the post of vizier. After Sultana Myriam, her daughter, Sultana Fatima, ascended the throne and ruled until her death in 790/1388. So, for forty years the Muslims of the Maldive Islands were governed by women. Ibn Battuta, who held the office of qadi, did not long resist the charm of the women of the islands. He described his marriage to the stepmother of the sultana:

The qazi and witnesses were summoned, and the marriage was solemnized, and the grand vezir paid the dower. After a few days she was brought to me. She was one of the best women and her society was delightful to such an extent that whenever I married another woman she showed the sweetness of her disposition still by anointing me with perfumed ointment and scenting my clothes, smiling all the time and betraying no sign of ill humor.72

Ibn Battuta was so enchanted with the royal treatment given him by his wife that he did not hesitate to have four. He married often during his journeys through the Muslim world, which lasted practically his whole life, but the memory of his domestic happiness with the Maldive women was particularly sweet. One detects some regret that he could not bring one back with him to Tangier:

The women of these islands never leave their country, and I have seen nowhere in the world women whose society was more pleasant. A woman in these islands would never entrust to anybody else the serving of her husband; she herself brings him food and takes away the plates, washes his hands and brings him water for ablutions and massages his feet when he goes to bed.73 However, there was one thing that intrigued him: One of the customs of the country is for the women not to dine with their husbands and the husband does not know what his wife eats.
In these islands I married several women; some of them dined with me after I had tackled them, but others did not. And I was not able to see them eat and no device on my part was of any avail.

The only fault he found in the Maldive women - especially in his role as qadi - was that they went about half-naked:

The women of these islands do not cover their heads, nor does their queen and they comb their hair and gather it together in one direction. Most of them wear only a waist-wrapper which covers them from their waist to the lowest part, but the remainder of their body remains uncovered. Thus they walk about in the bazaars and elsewhere. When I was appointed qazi there, I strove to put an end to this practice and commanded the women to wear clothes; but I
could not get it done.75

Ibn Battuta was too intelligent not to see the link between the sensuality of the women believers and their walking around half naked. In his capacity as qadi he insisted on a compromise.

The women believers could walk about half-nude, but in the audience hall of the tribunal where he administered the shari'a they would have to show a minimum respect for appearances: 'I would not let a woman enter my court to make a plaint unless her body were covered; beyond this, however, I was unable to do anything.' With the archness so typical of a native of Tangier, Ibn Battuta notes later on that their half-nude state suited the Maldive women much better: 

'I had slave girls whose clothing was like that of the women of Delhi and who covered their heads. But far from being an ornament it looked like a disfigurement since they were not used to putting it on.'76 All things considered, the qadi was ready to make concessions about the pertinence of the shari'a regarding the veil for women when it interfered with something as serious as aesthetics, especially in such a sensual environment as that of the islands. But not all the islands resembled each other, nor did their women.

EXCERPT FROM

The forgotten queens of Islam

Book by Fatema Mernissi

The Giraavaru People

Of the Maldivian population there is a small minority called the “Giraavaru people” who is often considered to be the descendants of one of the earliest, if not the earliest stream of immigrants to the atolls who would have arrived long before the Legendary King Koimalaa Kalo.

According to research done by Xavier Romero Frias, The Giraavaru origins are descendant of ancient Tamils from southwestern coast of India and northwestern shores of Sri Lanka, who probably settled on the island around the Sangam period (300BC-300AD)

Until the twentieth century the Giraavaru people displayed recognizable physical, linguistic and cultural differences to the nearby islands. Their culture and language were of clear Tamil-Malayalam substractum.

I wouldn’t go so far as to classify them as the aborigines of Maldives, cause they speak the same language as the rest of Maldivians with only slight phonetic variations which is totally possible in any community and it is well known that there are more differences between the southern atolls and Male’ dialectically.

Giraavaru people always have claimed that they are the ancient owners and rulers of Maldives. And they granted permission to a foreign prince who visited Male’ to reside there.

Giraavaru island is thought to be much bigger, housing magnificent buildings and temples in earlier days, as the surrounding lagoon still testifies.

Giraavaru island is on the western side of the lagoon of North Male' Atoll.

Giraa literally means 'eroding' in Dhivehi. It is thought that the island was called Giraavaru because it was gradually being eroded away into the sea. It is quite possible that the name preceded the word.

It is quite possible that the word 'giraa' may have been stuck as a result of the natural erosion that was claiming the island.

The second half of the word ‘Varu’, is very popular in the Sinhala language where It is used to signify a certain group of people. The considerable relationship between Sinhala language and Dhivehi pose whether Giraavaru means community of the people called ‘Giraa’. However the first explanation seems more probable.

H.C.P Bell in 1922 records that there were 150 Giraavaru people who were strictly controlled by the Ravveri (Island Chief), that they were monogamous (without the widows marrying again), and that their only connection to other people were to visit Male’ to sell fish.

The Giraavaru dialect was very unusual for a community that lived only a few kilometres from Male'. They had a slightly different vocabulary and some consonants were different from the standard Maldive language. For instance, they used the sound r instead of the sound lh.

Dr Abdullah Waheed MD offered the following genetic evidence:

The Maldivian population has an 18% thalassemia carrier rate. But the Giraavaru population has a rate of almost 0. This shows that they are not only a separate group, but also that they have managed to preserve their racial characteristics intact throughout the ages against all odds. (Information is from 2005).

They were very different from other Maldivians. They never travelled to any other islands apart from Malé. They never married people from other islands. They never divorced, and a widowed woman would not remarry again. Any help received from Malé was shared by everyone.

While other Maldivian women wore their hair-bun on the right side of the head, Giraavaru women wore theirs on the left. They wore unusual jewellery.

The most distinct items were necklaces of tiny blue beads which no other Maldive islanders wore. They also wore a number of silver bangles on both wrists. These were made of strips of metal about 8 millimetres in width bent into circular bangles with the ends left without being soldered together. They wore four to five per wrist.

The Giraavaru people were a community headed always by a woman. It was the only island in the Maldives where the sultan's civil authority was deputized always to a woman.

Language Status

Ordinary Maldivians were required to address the Male' nobility in a different level of speech. The Giraavaru people did not observe this custom and addressed the Male' nobility as they would address themselves. The nobility did not challenge this attitude and always chose to ignore it. Any other lesser Maldivian who displayed this type of self-assured confidence would have found him or herself in deep trouble.

Common citizens of Male', who regarded the Giraavaru people as an inferior race, seemed to resent the apparent privileges enjoyed by them under the sultans, and mocked them mercilessly. It was believed that the Giraavaru people were mortally scared of frogs. In order to tease and victimize them, Male' folk would throw frogs at them.

The change to Male’

The changes began in 1968 when they were shifted to Hulhulé from Giraavaru. The government made the decision to shift people from islands with a population less than a congregation for Friday prayers - 40 males over the age of 16 - onto larger islands.

The Giraavaru people were not as cooperative as the others. Houses were built for them in Hulhulé and each family was given Rf100 to start their new life.

On Hulhulé were people from Viligili, Kaaf atoll, and people from Huvadhu atoll. The Giraavaruans lived separately from everyone else, and the most significant changes to their culture took place after they were moved to Malé in the late 1970s.

From that time on. the most ancient family in the Maldives mixed with the dense population of Malé. The lives of young Giraavaruans were shaped by modern life, and only a few kept their old customs.

Giraavaru people are very special. When they moved to Malé only 15 families remained. Though the population at the time of their resettlement from Giraavaru was officially not enough for the Friday prayer, the former island chief Adam Mohamed says that for as long as he could remember Friday prayers were held on Giraavaru.

He know why the population decreased. 'I think it was due to the Great Depression [1930s-1940s in Maldives],' says Adam who even now is known as the Katheeb (Chief).

'I think people starved to death in the depression, and the real reason for the disappearance of the old customs was this decline in population.

When we look at history, the Giraavaru people need to be treated as special. It is claimed that before people settled in Malé it was a small island in the care of the Giraavaruans. Malé was known among them as 'blood island'. The first people who settled in Malé are said to have received permission for the Giraavaru people.

Because of this the Malé kings gave the Giraavaruans special attention, and helped provide them with their needs.

Sometimes the Malé aristocracy used to say 'no' to the Giraavaruans as a practical joke just to see what they would say in reply. Apparently this would provoke the Giraavaruans to insist that, 'This island is ours, and you stay here if we allow you. You must give us whatever you can.'

Special aspects of Giraavaru culture include tambourine playing and trance during dancing. Trance is achieved by bleeding on both sides of the head after stabbing with a chopping knife. The young men of Giraavaru look forward to the trance state. During the playing of the tambourine for the trance ceremony the knife that is kept by the leaders is used to make stab cuts on either side of the head. Even as they bleed the men are high on trance.

'I also attained trance. No pain at all. It was an important custom among us in those days,' said the Giraavaru chief.

Now there is no tambourine playing, and the Giraavaru girls don't wear the distinctive dress. When they get married they don't look for someone descended from their island. It is no problem for them to marry any Maldivian now.

Real Giraavaru people are those born on the island of the same name, near Malé. They lived in Hulhulé for about ten years after being moved from Giraavaru. Then they were shifted to Malé and settled on land reclaimed from the western side of the island.

The dress of the Giraavaru women, with a skirt and frock with white stripes around the neckline, is unique. Nobody else wears that fashion. They also wear their hair tied in a bun on the left side. This is a trademark of the Giraavaru people.

This style of dress is very simple. The specialty is the eight white stripes around the neckline. This part of the fabric is very carefully sewn. A white strip is also sewn at the end of the long sleeves.

Due to their strong family ties, they walk around Malé holding each others hands. This is not a usual practice in Maldives.

In the past it was common to see Giraavaru women on the streets of Malé. These days there are many more families, far more than in the past, yet the people obviously from Giraavaru are rarely seen.

Traditional dress is complete when worn with a necklace made of beads, and a set of bangles atound the wrists. Hawwa Dhaitha says that people have sold almost all their necklaces and bangles. Some still have their bangles.

The previous government [under Ibrahim Nasir] disapproved of their habit of wearing their hair bun on the left side.

Giraavaru people have no longing for a wealthy material lifestyle. Their eating and drinking habits are simple. Fish soup, rice and roasted chillies was the lunch of one person sitting and eating on a mat in the dining room.

Giraavaru people still keep some of their customs, despite the onslaught of modern culture. One thing is their attitude to shampoo, soap and toothpaste.

Though they don't use these items, Giraavaru people are always showered, clean and dressed respectably.

Unlike other Maldivian women, Giraavaru women become bald with age, and they aren't embarrassed about it.

Giraavaru people use the word 'fori' for 'folhi', 'gura' for 'gulha', and 'karusai' for 'kalhusai', says Hawwa Dhaitha, and it's not because they cannot pronounce the sound lhaviyani [ lh ]. She proved it with a perfect pronounciation of the word 'hulhulé'.

The proud Giraavaru elders tried very hard to preserve their culture, but their youth very quickly lost their sense of identity and were soon assimilated into the Male' culture.

The former headwoman (Fooruma-dhaita) of Giraavaru lamented to me when I was visiting Male' in 1977, that the first ever Giraavaru divorce was registered recently. She was appalled. An ancient and proud culture was thus wiped from the face of the earth in the latter years of the twentieth century.

Sources:

The Maldive Islanders, A Study of the Popular Culture of an Ancient Ocean Kingdom by Xavier Romero-Frias

Countries and Territories of the World. PediaPress.

Srilanka-Maldives Cultural Affinities by V.Vitharana (1997)

Translated texts from Huvaas Magazine (12 may 2001)

www.maldivesroyalfamily.com

Dhivehi: The Language of the Maldives by Amalia E. Gnanadesikan

The Maldive Islands; Monograph on the History, Archaeology and Epigraphy. Reprint Colombo 1940. Council for Linguistic and Historical Research. Male’ 1989 by H. C. P. Bell

A poem by Abdul Rasheed on the Giraavaru people

Abdul Rasheed, M.D. Ph.D.
Composed on 17 January 1989

In my childhood days
They were already a vanishing breed,
Like their "giraa" island,
Slowly dissolving into the sea.

The folks of Giraavaru stood apart from the rest,
Numbering some sixty or so,
In a nation of eighty thousand then,
Telling us a story of a distant past.

Why they were different,
As a child, I wondered,
Speaking with an accent
Unknown in the neighboring isles.

Their men and women
Often burst into song and dance,
Recounting the ancient lore
Of discovering Malé, the capital of this age.

Some other yarns of the fishing folks
Told of a "bodu-Baburu"
In the middle of the sea,
And of their adventures in Andaman, the Cannibal Isle.

Shrill voices and a dialect of their own,
Costumes of women, bright and gay,
With circles of beaded necklaces,
Distinguished them from us all.

Of their customs, little do I remember,
Though the fear of the frog, and ban on the isle
Of nightly sojourns of strangers,
Stick well in my mind.

Giraavaru is no longer inhabited, I'm told.
Thus the island and its people
are like a lost book of history -
A link broken between the present and the past.