Part two: The Holhin

Early in the campaign, Mohamed sought outside help, sailing to Cannanore aboard his ship Kalhuohfummi – rendered in the translation as the Jumping Baitfish. Michael O’Shea and Fareesha Abdulla’s English translation of Buraara’s account tells the episode this way:

“Near the beginning of this part of the campaign, Mohamed Takurufan realised it wasn’t possible for him and his brother alone to take Male’. So they went to Cannanore in the Jumping Baitfish and Mohamed asked the Ali Raja to provide him with help to capture Maldives. Mohamed didn’t expect it for free. He offered a ship full of coconuts, and another full of fish. The Cannanore Ali Raja agreed to this, so the brothers sailed off and continued their campaign to make the islands Islamic.” (pp. 187–188)

Mohamed and Hassan finally attacked Malé in 1573 – on 2 July by the official reckoning, although Buraara’s account has the brothers slipping into the atoll after dark on the fourth of Rajab, a date that does not match. They tacked back and forth off Malé until its people had gone to sleep, then moored Kalhuohfummi at Mui Vilu.

They made their way inland on foot, moving east (and then west) through Malé’s back lanes and past several of its named streets and palaces, until they reached the cleared ground surrounding the fort of Andhiri-Andhirin, the Portuguese commander in Malé – a perimeter kept open on all sides to the range of his blunderbuss. Andhirin himself was awake on his throne, sword, shield and loaded gun at hand, as he had reportedly been every night.

Unable to find a position from which to fire on him directly, Mohamed prayed, then improvised a rest for his gun by driving his fiyohi penknife into a nearby lhos tree. He sent Hassan to fetch fire to light the fuse; Hassan, moving too fast to be seen, killed the sentry outside the fort and returned with the man’s half-smoked cigar. Mohamed fired, striking Andhirin through the throat. As he lay dying, Andhirin got off one final shot of his own, which only destroyed the handle of the knife on which Mohamed’s gun had been resting. The brothers then entered the fort and killed everyone inside as they slept.

By the time the ship from Cannanore reached Malé, the fighting was over, and its crew found themselves put to a very different kind of work. The translation continues (the Dhivehi terms in square brackets are from Buraara’s original):

“Next day as the light appeared, a Malabar warship [Holhīn-ge guraabeh] came through Bodu Kalhi channel. It headed straight for Dhoonidhoo and stopped in the harbour there. Islanders cruised out to the ship and learnt it had been sent by the Ali Raja of Cannanore to help Mohamed Takurufan capture the Maldives. ‘In that case,’ Mohamed told the people aboard, ‘you can dispose of all these dead bodies and blood. Remove the bloodstained soil and clean it up.’ But the men from the ship protested that it wasn’t the sort of work they expected. ‘Hey,’ said Mohamed, ‘you won’t be doing it for free. I’ll give you a boat full of coconuts and another full of fish.’ ‘We’re still not interested.’ ‘You don’t have to do it all by yourself. The Muslims from this island will help you.’ ‘The answer is still no.’ ‘All right then, if you do the work I’ll give you an island of your choice in Maldives,’ promised Mohamed. On that condition, the Malabar men [Holhīn-ge meehun] and the Muslims from Male’ cleared a small place in the middle of the island. By then the sun had set. They worked all night and into the daybreak, when Mohamed asked the Malabaris [Holhīn-ge meehun] which island they wanted. ‘The fushigandu island of Neykurendhoo in Thiladhunmathi atoll, would that do?’ Mohamed asked. ‘What can we do with a fushigan’du named Neykurendhoo?’ they protested. ‘Give us the island called Kattalafushi.’ Mohamed gave them that island, and put the grant in writing. He had not taken the crown yet, and because of this he signed the document with an alif. He handed the paper to them and told Hassan take them to their new island and return. When Hassan left with the Malabaris, Mohamed put up his hands and prayed to the Almighty that there would be no water on Kattalafushi. The Almighty accepted this prayer and to this day, the island is devoid of water.” (pp. 190–191)

Buraara’s account gives us the first clue: it tells us that Mohamed visited the court of Cannanore around the 1570s seeking help to capture Malé, and that Maldivians of that time called the people of that kingdom “Holhīn.”

Once we notice this, the Dhivehi word Sōlhiyā becomes hard to read as mere coincidence. Holhīn and Sōlhiyā are two branches of the very same word. That raises an obvious question, though: why would Maldivians use one name, Holhīn, for the Muslim Malabaris of Cannanore, and a different-looking one, Sōlhiyā, for the Muslims of Ceylon?

The answer begins with the ending of Holhīn. The “-n” is the ordinary Dhivehi plural suffix for people, and it attaches here the same way it does when dhari (“child”) becomes dharīn (“children”) – a word that also appears in the table below – with the short “-i” of the stem lengthening to “-ī” before the “-n”. Take that plural ending off Holhīn and what is left is Holhi, which is simply Sōlhi with its “s” shifted to “h”.

Now, the “-yā” at the end of Sōlhiyā is simply the Dhivehi definite article – roughly equivalent to the English “the”. It works the same way in these nouns:

Strip the “-yā” off Sōlhiyā and what remains is Sōlhi – “Chola”, without the “the”. And once we are looking at the bare word Sōlhi rather than Sōlhiyā, its relationship to Holhi becomes obvious: the same word has simply lost its “s” sound and gained an “h” in its place – exactly the kind of change that is already well documented in the history of Dhivehi.

The linguist Sonja Fritz has studied this very sound change in her book The Dhivehi Language: A Descriptive and Historical Grammar of Maldivian and Its Dialects (2002). She explains that Dhivehi, like colloquial Sinhalese, regularly turns an original “s” sound into an “h” sound, both at the start of words and in the middle of them. Dhivehi, she says, has lost the initial “s” sound entirely from its native vocabulary, while Sinhalese kept both versions side by side – an “s” form used in writing and formal speech, and an “h” form used in everyday spoken language.

She notes that the oldest Dhivehi manuscripts often still show the letter “s” written exactly where a word’s history would lead us to expect it. Her example is the word for “border”, which appears as simu (ސިމު) in the earliest copperplate documents, but later turns up as hin (ހިން) and eventually just in (އިން) – the same pattern of change found in Sinhalese and its older relatives, Pali, Prakrit and Sanskrit, which all used forms of sīmā for “border”.

She lists several further everyday words that show the same s-to-h shift when set against Sinhalese:

Fritz’s broader point is that this s-to-h shift is a real, well-documented feature of both Dhivehi and spoken Sinhalese, and that the old Dhivehi manuscripts catch the change happening in real time – some words still spelt the old way, others already showing the new “h” pronunciation. Sōlhi and Holhi belong to exactly this pattern: the same word for “Chola”, one form keeping something closer to its original “s”, the other showing the shift to “h” that Dhivehi underwent more broadly. Read this way, Holhi is not a separate word borrowed independently for the Malabaris of Cannanore. It is the very same name the Maldivians already used for the Cholas, worn down by the ordinary sound changes of their own language.

There is a catch, though. Fritz says Dhivehi lost the initial “s” from its native vocabulary entirely, keeping only the “h” form, unlike Sinhalese, which kept both side by side. Yet here Dhivehi appears to do precisely what she says only Sinhalese does: it has kept both the “s” word, Sōlhiyā, and its “h” counterpart, Holhīn, as two live, separately used words. So why did Sōlhiyā survive at all?

Perhaps Sōlhiyā was originally the singular form for a Chola person, and Holhīn the plural – “the Chola” as against “the Cholas”. That would fit neatly with the “-n” ending on Holhīn already marking it as a human plural, while Sōlhiyā carries only the singular definite article “-yā”.

But there may be a more important distinction hiding behind these two forms, and it will be the subject of the next part of this series: perhaps Sōlhiyā was simply the neutral Dhivehi word for a Chola, while Holhīn came to carry a derogatory sense. If so, that split appears to trace back to 1573, in the immediate aftermath of the capture of Malé, when the Holhīn fell out with Mohamed Thakurufaan and accused him of violating the very treaty he had struck with the Ali Raja of Cannanore. That dispute, as we shall see, did not end there – it ran on for more than two and a half centuries, into the 1830s.