Maliku is a magical place like the village ‘Macondo’ Gabriel Garcia Marques talked about in his book One Hundred Years of Solitude.
Today it is called ‘Minicoy’, a name which Britishers came up with for their comfort. If one zooms into the Indian Ocean on Google Maps, one can see a dot which is almost equally distant from both Lakshadweep and the Maldivian islands, outcast by the Maldives and never fully acknowledged by the Indian government, hence equally torn apart.
Just like ‘Macondo’, Maliku was an almost-utopia that thrived secluded with complete autonomy until the British came for the islands. It is rumoured that after one unfortunate cyclone which devastated both Lakshadweep and Maldives alike, the Maldivian king denied them any aid. On the other hand, the Indian government helped us and, therefore, we are Indians today.
Our language ‘Mahl’ is a dialect of the Maldivian language ‘Dhivehi’, which is not amongst the ‘scheduled languages’ of the Indian Constitution. As a result, the language is not taught after Class 4 in schools, which is why second and third generation natives are rarely able to read or write in their own mother tongue. There is a significant dip in readers and writers in the population who have developed a language and a unique script of their own. Margaret Atwood once said, “Literature is not only a mirror; it is a map, a geography of the mind”, and today, it’s not just global warming or climatic change that’s eroding Maliku.
We are a population of Scheduled Tribe people. Caste discrimination prevailed until very recently.
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Historically, the Laccadivian Archipelago that comprises the Lakshadweep islands was populated by Buddhist settlers who migrated from Sri Lanka and Southern India after the dissolution of the Chola empire. This Buddhist population underwent another radical conversion, adopting Islam after the 10th Century due to Arab influence. Even after these two major cultural influences which prohibit caste-based discrimination, we still had deep-rooted caste segregation in post-Independence Maliku. The hierarchical segregation has Manifkans (royals), Thakrufans (sailors who made voyages to the mainland for trade), and then us, the ‘Raveries’. The term means people who brew coconut wine. They considered the lowest castes — labourers who worked for the upper class.
Raveries are called by names such as ‘Kalu’, which means ‘black’. They had dark skin colour because of the tanning from long exposure to the scorching tropical sun while they worked on coconut derivatives such as coconut wine and ‘coir’.
My ‘kudakaka’ or maternal uncle (we have matrilineal families) used to tell us about the extreme poverty they experienced. He was the youngest member of my grandma’s family. My mom grew up thinking of her elder sister as mother and brother as father. Grandma and grandpa died a premature death, so it was the uncle who narrated the stories of my roots. Their mother was a servant at a Manikfan’s house, and would bring leftover food from their home to feed her children.
Such extreme poverty prevailed in post-Independence Minicoy. This was the condition of the majority of the population, and they were forced to look for jobs in ships which paid them well. Even a single person in a family getting a job on a ship meant that they could feed the entire joint family.
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Most people of their generation went to Kolkata — one of the major ports in India between the 1950s and 1970s — and got employed in the maritime industry. This resulted in the birth of a new class who earned more than the Manikfans, and that is how today one’s caste has shrunk to just their last names.
Until recent years, Lakshadweep was neglected by the Indian government. In fact, the internet revolution hasn’t reached there yet. An entire generation of young people faces serious issues with their self-esteem compared to their mainland peers. One of the main reasons is the lack of exposure. While the world is swayed by the influence of the internet and the Gen-Zs, ours is a crippled generation of Gen-Zs.
Our voice never reaches the mainstream media except for the time when Praful Khoda Patel assumed office and started passing anti-democratic laws. The speciality about Lakshadweep is we aren’t exactly democratic as we are a Union Territory, and the executive and legislative powers rest in the hands of the administrator, who is an appointee of the President of India.
Patel is a politician disguised as an administrator. Never in Lakshadweep’s history has a politician held a designation that used to be handled by responsible and qualified officers and retired government officials who understood and respected the democratic values of the Indian Constitution and Lakshadweep culture. Patel passed the Goonda Act in a place where there is hardly any crime. He put in place a beef ban on a population which depends on meat for their primary source of diet and transferred the powers of panchayats to the administrator. One might wonder why all this happened.
These are just the tools which will serve the more important agenda — the ‘Land Reform Act 2021’ (Lakshadweep Development Authority Regulation), which gives immense power to the administrator to take over land with no assurance of any proper compensation. Moreover, this Act bars citizens from approaching the judiciary for their land rights. This was when Lakshadweep protested, and we made sure our voices reached the mainland. #SaveLakshadweep was trending on social media platforms such as Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. We got immense support from Kerala and its media, and our voices were raised in international media such as Al-Jazeera. As the first step in winning against such bullies, we filed a case in the Kerala High Court, and currently, the LDAR Act is on halt.