Minicoy, locally called “Maliku”, is the southernmost island of Lakshadweep, an Indian Union Territory, app. 400 km west of South India, in between the eight and nine degree channel, and old shipping routes from west to east. It is located app. 200 km south of Kalpeni, the nearest island of the U.T. of Lakshadweep, and app. 125 km north of the nearest atoll of the Maldives. The crescent shaped island, about 10 km long and with a maximal width of less than one kilometre, is the home of 10,444 people (Census of India 2011). Once, it was the northernmost part of the Sultanate of the Maldives, but it became a tributary of the South Indian Ali Rajas some time around 1500 AD and has been part of the Indian Union since 1956. It is an island “inbetween”. The people of Maliku speak Mahal, a dialect of Divehi, the national language of the Maldives, and have kinship-relations to “the south”. Their political affiliation and all economic links are to “the north”, to the Laccadive and Amindivi islands and to India. Their religion, Islam, came (via the Maldives’ capital Male’) from “the west”. All people of Maliku follow the Sunni way of Islamic faith and have a matrilineal kinship system and matrilocal residence. The Indian state classified them as “scheduled tribes”, an administrative category with a fixed quota for educational institutions and government jobs. In short: Maliku occupies a special place in the cultural landscape, in history and in the plurality of Indian social systems.

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