Part three: The Cannanore covenant

The French traveller François Pyrard de Laval, who spent five years in the Maldives after being shipwrecked there in 1602, also tells the story of the brothers’ revolt against the Portuguese, in The Voyage of François Pyrard of Laval to the East Indies, the Maldives, the Moluccas and Brazil (translated by Albert Gray for the Hakluyt Society, 1887). He never once uses the name Holhīn – he simply calls them “Malabar corsairs” – and his details differ from Buraara’s. But the episode he describes points to the same rupture that Buraara’s account and the word Holhīn both hint at. After eight years of harassing the Portuguese garrison at Malé, the two brothers struck a deal with a passing Malabar raiding fleet:

Learning that the Portuguese captain was away at Cochin with most of his garrison, the allied force struck:

“One night they surprised it by escalade, and made themselves masters of the place, putting to death upwards of 300 men that were within, and taking prisoner the native governor [ie Thuffaashana] who was set there by the Portuguese.”

It is what happened immediately afterwards that Pyrard flags as treachery, and that bears directly on the Holhīn’s later grievance against Mohamed. Once the fort was taken and sacked, the Malabars collected the share of the spoils they had been promised and prepared to sail home – at which point the brothers turned on their own allies:

Pyrard’s own summary judgment could not be plainer: the brothers “repaid with treachery” the Malabars who had just helped them take Malé. The men who had fought and bled alongside Mohamed were stripped of their agreed share, lost their galleys and were sent home empty-handed and humiliated – not killed, but plundered by the very ally they had just helped install in power.

A third version of the attack on Malé survives in Hasan Tāj al-Dīn’s dynastic Arabic chronicle, Tarikh Islam Diba Mahal, compiled around 1705 and continued after his death by Muhammad Muhibb al-Din and then Ibrahim Siraj al-Din (critical edition by Hikoichi Yajima, Tokyo, 1984, vol. 2). Its telling of the night attack, checked here against a 2020 Dhivehi translation by the late historian Nadwi, is worth quoting at length:

“(It is said that the Malabari force did not actually reach Malé until after the fighting was already over.)” [Qīla anna ahla Malībār mā waṣalū Maḥal illā baʿda inqiḍāʾ al-ḥarb]

The islanders then gathered to resolve how they would meet the Portuguese ultimatum:

Their prayers, the chronicle says, were answered that very night:

That aside about the Malabaris’ late arrival marks exactly where Tāj al-Dīn’s version diverges from Pyrard’s and aligns instead with Buraara’s: in both, the Malabar ship reaches Malé only after the fighting is over. Pyrard has the Malabar corsairs fighting alongside the two brothers, sharing fully in the assault and the plunder, before being robbed of their share and sent home – the falling-out part two traced in the word Holhīn. Tāj al-Dīn, by contrast, credits Mohamed and the Maldivian defenders alone with the victory, relegating the Malabari contingent to a reinforcement that, by the report he records, arrived too late to fight at all. There is no battle shared with the Malabars here, and so no betrayal to report – the entire episode Pyrard flags as treachery is simply absent.

Fast forward more than 250 years, to the reign of Sultan Mohamed Mueenudeen of the Huraa dynasty. This king’s rule began as a regency. When his father, King Hassan Noorudeen, departed for haj in January 1799, he put his son in charge of royal affairs under the name Sultan Mohamed Mueenudeen. The regency became a full kingship when Hassan Noorudeen, having quarrelled with Sharif Ghalib of Mecca and been stripped of his wealth, died of smallpox at Jeddah in June 1799; of the roughly 300 pilgrims who had travelled with him, only 70 survived to return to Malé in December 1799.

Sultan Mohamed Mueenudeen was a man of peace: not quarrelsome like his father, nor a warrior like our hero Mohamed Thakurufaan. His biggest feat was a voyage in 1804 to Ari Atoll, only about 60km west of Malé, which his great friend Bandeyri Hassan Manikfan set down in raivaru verse. When Hassan Manikfan presented the poem, the king challenged him: it was easy enough, he remarked, for a poet to versify something that actually happened, but far harder to invent a story that never occurred and make it convincing. He then set Hassan Manikfan the task of composing a beautiful raivaru about events that never took place: the “Dhiyo’s Raivaru”.

But back to our story. Picture this same king – an introverted, withdrawn man with a fondness for raivaru, both fiction and non-fiction – and imagine the look on his face when, on 25 January 1828, a war letter arrived from the Ali Raja of Cannanore:

Reading this letter, the people of Malé would have had plenty to be astonished about – but two details in particular must have stopped them cold.

The first was almost too much to take in. The Ali Raja’s letter names the minister Cannanore installed alongside Mohamed Thakurufaan as Al-Hajj Ali – and Maldivian memory has long cherished this very figure as Ali Haji of Thimarafushi, the local hero who fought shoulder to shoulder with Thakurufaan against the Portuguese, received his title, Doshimeynaa, from Thakurufaan’s own hand and lies buried at Malé’s Faaru Reethi Miskiy. If the Ali Raja is to be believed, the man generations of Maldivians have honoured as one of their own was, in fact, Cannanore’s man all along – installed, in effect, as a Malabar agent at the very moment of Maldivian “liberation”. It is hard to imagine a more unsettling thing for Mueenudeen’s court to read.

The second surprise concerned the nadhr, or vow, itself – the very vow Tāj al-Dīn’s chronicle describes the defenders of Malé making on the eve of the attack. As quoted earlier, Maldivian memory of that vow was precise and modest: if Mohamed Thakurufaan brought victory before dawn, the grateful islanders would, every year thereafter, recite a mawlid at the Medhu Ziyaaraiy, the shrine of Shaykh Yūsuf in Malé – nothing more. If the religious shares in the Ali Raja’s letter are an echo of that vow, Cannanore remembered it very differently: a three-way division of Malé’s entire revenue, one share to Mecca and Medina, one to Cannanore and the last to the Maldivians themselves merely so that they could pay their own jizya – with Cannanore’s own share earmarked, further still, partly for the saint ʿAbd al-Qadir al-Jilani. No Maldivian account I know of records any such arrangement. Two and a half centuries on, Mueenudeen’s Malé was being asked to accept not a story about a mawlid, but a treaty disposing of the entire wealth of the kingdom – on the strength of a letter alone.

The chronicle’s continuation records that the king ordered every man of seven years or older to speak his mind about the Ali Raja’s letter, with no fear of consequence – and that, for seven full days, no one said a word. Then, on Thursday, 13 Rajab 1243 AH (31 January 1828), a reply was finally written:

One line in Mueenudeen’s reply deserves closer attention than its place in a routine legal rebuttal might suggest. Addressing the claim that a binding agreement existed between the Maldives and Cannanore, the Arabic text reads:

The 1901 Dhivehi translation by the History Committee, headed by Naibu Tuttu, renders the same passage as:

“Those who went to you” can only mean one person and his circle: Mohamed Thakurufaan himself, and whichever of his Utheemu kinsmen and allies dealt with Cannanore back in 1573. Mueenudeen’s chosen rebuttal is not that the old agreement never happened, or that its terms were misreported – it is that the people who struck it were never in a position to bind the whole kingdom in the first place: they were “people who possessed almost nothing”, and they “did not own all the islands”.

If the Utheemus held little property of their own, as Mueenudeen’s letter insists, the natural question is where their real ties lay instead – and the answer runs through the very waters this series has been tracing all along.

Buraara records a night’s conversation between Mohamed, already an exile, and his teacher in Beypore in the 1560s, who finally presses him to say who he is. In Michael O’Shea and Fareesha Abdulla’s translation:

What is telling is not only what Mohamed says, but what the teacher already seems to know. He catches the decoy name Mohamed gives for his Baarah wife – “Is that the real name of that woman?” – and his questions about Mohamed’s father and grandfather read as confirming names he already holds, not hearing them for the first time. This reads like a teacher in Beypore already familiar with the older generation of the Utheemu family, and with Baarah besides.

The Cholas left the Maldives a word, and also a sea-road that outlasted the memory of who had opened it. The evidence is a working seaman’s handbook compiled in Addu, in the far south of the archipelago, barely a century ago: the Addu Hulhudhoo Arāiragē Mūsā Mālimī ge Niyamināmā, put together around 1920 by the pilot Mūsā Mālimī, giving sailing directions and star-based navigation and, from its twenty-eighth page, a gazetteer running from the Maldives through the Laccadives, Ceylon, the Coromandel Coast and the Bay of Bengal to the Straits of Malacca.

What matters here is not the astronomy but the names. Along Ceylon’s northern, eastern and north-western coasts and the Coromandel opposite, the book ignores both the Sinhala names in daily use and the European names current for centuries, and gives the Tamil instead: Nīrkoḻumbu, not Mīgamuwa, for Negombo; Tharangambāḍi, not the Danish “Tranquebar”; Mayilāppūr and Chennappaṭṭinam, not “Madras” – a name the book never uses, even though Fort St George had stood there since the 1640s. The Tamil forms carry their own grammar across intact, suffixes like -paṭṭinam and -kōṭṭai still recognisable in the Dhivehi spellings.

The pattern stops exactly where Tamil stops being spoken – round Ceylon’s Sinhala south-west the book’s names turn Sinhala again – which suggests a pilot’s working vocabulary, learned from the Tamil-speaking Muslim shipowners of those coasts, not a scholar’s borrowing. It even knows small places such as Kunimēdu, a village on the Coromandel Coast north of Pondicherry.

Some of the place names in the gazetteer:

The Chola inscriptions of Rājarāja I record the taking of “the old islands of the sea numbering twelve thousand”, read since as the Maldives and the Laccadives. The dynasty itself had collapsed by the late 13th century; the sea-road it opened did not. Nine centuries later, a pilot in Addu who had never seen a Chola inscription was still steering by Tamil landfalls and calling the ports what Tamil-speaking Muslim sailors called them – evidence that the entanglement this series has traced was never one family’s alone, but the ordinary, centuries-deep condition of Maldivian seafaring. Against that background, a sixteenth-century Utheemu family with a teacher in Beypore who seems already to have known their fathers’ names is not an anomaly. It is exactly what nine hundred years of that same sea-road would produce.

There is a wider pattern behind this, visible even in the formal language the Maldivian court itself used towards Ceylon for centuries. The missives sent from Malé to Colombo open, again and again, with the same preamble: “WHEREAS it has been customary for a long time with the Sultans of the Maldive Islands to pay tribute to the Government of Ceylon; and whereas the Government of the former has been under the protection of the Governor of Ceylon, we too are paying tribute annually to the Government of Ceylon.” Read against that formula, it has always been natural to assume the relationship was essentially a fraternal one – the Dhivehin and the Sinhalese, two island peoples whose languages both descend from Prakrit, bound by that shared inheritance. But the Niyamināmā’s gazetteer, and this series as a whole, point the other way. The working, lived contact was never with the Sinhalese court or the Sinhalese hill country; it was with the Muslim Tamils of Ceylon and the Malabar shore opposite – the Tamil-speaking shipowners who taught Maldivian pilots their landfalls, the Dhon Sōlhiyā Kaleyge who sheltered a Maldivian exile, the teacher of Beypore who seems to have known the Utheemu lineage by heart. Sinhalese and Dhivehi share a mother tongue; but the Dhivehin’s practical, everyday kinship ran to the Tamil-speaking Muslims across the water instead – a case of being divided by language, yet united by being people of the sea.

In Oscar Wilde’s A Woman of No Importance, one character remarks that “when good Americans die they go to Paris”. And when bad Americans die? “Oh, they go to America.” Something of the same joke seems to fit Sōlhiyā and Holhīn: when good Maldivians died, they went to Sōlhiyā-land, Ceylon; and when bad Maldivians died, they went to Holhi-land, the Malabar coast.

Two threads tie this series together, one philological and one biographical. Sōlhiyā and Holhīn are the same word, caught at two points along the sound shift part two traced through Fritz’s work – the initial Dhivehi/Sinhala s that softens to h (Sinhala sanda/handa, “moon”, against Dhivehi handu). Sōlhi – “Chola” – becomes Holhi, and then, with the ordinary Dhivehi human plural -n, Holhīn. But the split is not just phonetic. As part two suggested, Sōlhiyā stayed the plain, unshifted, respectable word for a Chola – the word fit to survive as a personal name, Dhon Sōlhiyā Kaleyge, for Mohamed’s own Ceylonese host and protector. Holhīn, on this reading, is the same word gone the other way: worn down in the mouth, and worn down in standing along with it, into the ordinary Dhivehi word for a man of the Malabar coast – the Chola a Maldivian would rather not claim kinship with. That, and not mere sound change, is the Wilde joke above: Sōlhiyā is where the good Chola went in Maldivian eyes; Holhīn is where the bad one went.

The second thread is Mohamed Thakurufaan himself. Whether the Utheemu family was Chola by blood as well as by name remains a question this series has raised, not closed. But the deeper kinship it traces was never confined to one family. It was the ordinary condition of these islands’ life at sea – and it ran, as it always had, towards the Tamil shore rather than the Sinhala one.

In my own opinion, for what it is worth, Mohamed Thakurufaan was a second-generation Maldivian, born to a family not long settled on Utheemu, whose own roots lay among the Tamil Muslims – the Sōlhiyā – of the Coromandel and Ceylon rather than among the old indigenous Maldivians. No single piece of evidence gathered here proves it outright. But taken together – Pyrard’s account of a family with no grand estate (see part one), Mueenudeen’s own chancery conceding the same point two and a half centuries later, a teacher in Beypore who seems to have known the Utheemu elders by name before Mohamed spoke, and a Maldivian seafaring tradition that for nine centuries looked towards the Tamil shore rather than the Sinhala one – it is enough, to my mind, to call Mohamed Thakurufaan a son of that Sōlhiyā world: not a Chola king, but a second-generation Maldivian of Tamil Muslim stock.