Presented by Garrett Field

In 1804, an elder courtier named Ban’deyri Hasan Manikufaanu (1745–1807) chronicled the sea voyage of the sovereign of the Maldives, Sultan Muhammad Mueenuddeen I (r. 1799–1835). The purpose of the voyage was to visit the islands of Ari Atoll. Manikufaanu crafted 171 verses according to the rules of a Maldivian genre of poetry called  raivaru . The work is known as  Dhivehi Arumaadhu Raivaru  (‘Raivaru that Chronicled the Journey of the Maldivian Royal Fleet’). In this presentation, I demonstrate how the verses provide a lens into early-nineteenth-century Maldivian boat construction, court music, navigational routes, regnal travel, royal ensigns, sailing, and seamanship, all of which have not been sufficiently explored in Indian Ocean studies. In contrast to scholarship on travelogues that emphasizes Muslim men’s experiences of heterotopia when they travelled across the Indian Ocean on steamships to maritime ports, this paper centers attention on a provincial journey of a royal fleet of sailboats taken by the Sultan of the Maldives and other noblemen to visit Maldivian commonfolk who lived on islands that formed part of an atoll in the middle of the Indian Ocean.

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