Folklore of the Maldives
Even though some of the Maldivian myths were already mentioned briefly by British commissioner in Ceylon HCP Bell towards the end of the 19th century,[1] their study and publication were carried out only quite recently by Spanish writer and artist Xavier Romero-Frias, at a time when that ancestral worldview was quickly disappearing.
Evidence of cultural influence from North India can be deduced from the methods of boat building and silver punch-marked coins[3] It is said that Giraavaru fishermen used to go regularly to a certain large sandbank (finolhu) at the southern end of their atoll to clean tuna fish after a good catch.
One day a prince from the Subcontinent called Koimala arrived to Malé Atoll sailing from the north on a big ship.
These patterns of behaviour, like the importance of keeping a secret, as well as the avoidance of certain areas of the island and of inauspicious times, were an essential component of the ancient popular spirituality.
[2] Hassan Thakuru, a skilled boatsman, once left his beloved wife, Aiminabi, to travel to a distant island for work.
After collecting all that she needed, she turned around to head back home with a full bucket of water, only to be met with a grizzly, frightening sight.
What her eyes lay upon can only be described as ghastly and terrifying; a monster wrapped in its own umbilical cord, shoveling sand and mud over its body with a human skull.
Aiminabi finished the job by smearing chili paste over the wound, and Foolhudhigu took off into the night, screaming in agony, never to be seen again.
[5] Folktales where fishes, crabs and seabirds are the heroes, like the tales about Mākana, Findana, Kalhubondage Diye, Fandiyaaru Kakuni, or Don Mohonaai Miyaru, introduce us to the world of the local fauna of the Maldive Atolls, where land animals are very few.
Although most of the stories of this type are original, a few are foreign tales or fables which have been adapted to the island context through local storytellers or by Maldivian learned men, like the late Muhammad Jamil.
[2] In the ancestral oral literature of Maldivians, the sorcerer, or learned man of the island who knew the magic arts.
Some recent stories tend to cast the sorcerer in the role of a villain, but these are totally disconnected from the ancestral Maldive lore.
[4] According to the well-known Moroccan traveler Ibn Batuta, the person responsible for converting the Maldivians to Islam as a Sunni Muslim visitor named Abu al Barakat ul Barbari.
[6] However, the more reliable local historical chronicles, Raadavalhi and Taarikh, mention that this saint was actually a Persian from the city of Tabriz, called Yusuf Shamsud-din.
[7] The much venerated tomb of this saint now stands opposite the grounds of Hukuru Miski, in the centre of Malé, the capital.
In those stories we learn much about the life in the court in Malé and about the mutual interaction between the Radun (the king of Maldives) and his subjects.
In recent times some stories have been abridged by contemporary Maldivian writers, like Abdulla Sadiq or Ahumadu Sharīfu (Maradū) because of their extreme length.
[4] Other stories (Karukuru, Telabagudi and the Māmeli tales) have been sanitized, because there was much casual reference to defecation and bodily fluids, particularly in ancient folk-stories from the outer atolls, where local values found this acceptable.
Some versions of the Koimala myth claim that it refers to the first ruler of the Maldives after the conversion to Islam, also known as Dharumavantha rasgefaanu, who ruled from 1117 to 1141.
