Minicoy
| Minicoy (Maliku) |
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| Waters | Lakkadive Sea (Indian Ocean) | |
| Geographical location | 8 ° 17 ' N , 73 ° 3' E | |
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| Number of islands | 2 | |
| Main island | Minicoy Island (Maliku) | |
| length | 9.1 km | |
| width | 5.7 km | |
| Land area | 4.39 km² | |
| Lagoon area | 30.6 km² | |
| total area | 35 km² | |
| Residents | 10,200 (2007) | |
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Minicoy ( Dhivehi މަލިކުlocal name Maliku ) is an atoll with the second largest and southernmost island of the Indian Union Territory Lakshadweep in the Lakkadive Sea , a marginal sea of the Indian Ocean . The 10.6 km long, but only a maximum of 820 meters wide island of the same name Minicoy (Maliku) comprises the eastern and southern part of the atoll with a 30.6 km² lagoon, as well as over 99 percent of the land area of the atoll (437 of 439 hectares ) . There is also another 1.5 hectare island Viringili in the atoll , which is 650 meters west of the southwest tip of the main island. The Atoll Minicoy is through the over 200 km wide nine-level channel of the group of islands Laccadives separated while the distance to the northernmost island of the Maldives is only about 130 km away. The population is around 10,200 (calculation; as of January 1, 2007).
The landmark of Minicoy is a lighthouse over 90 meters high, built by the British in 1885 .
Population and culture
Minicoy has strong cultural ties to the Maldives and therefore differs from the rest of the Lakshadweeps islands, whose cultural affinities are in the Indian state of Kerala. This can be seen, for example, in the form of settlement: the Malikun, the native inhabitants of the atoll, live in ten neighboring villages, while the inhabitants of the Laccadives and the Amindives spread their homesteads over the entire area of the respective island.
The island's exclusively Muslim indigenous population speaks Mahl , a dialect of Dhivehi spoken in the southern Maldives , an Indo-Aryan language that is written in the Thaana script. The name of the dialect came about through a mistake, as an anecdote tells: When a British official asked a resident for the name of his language, he replied "Mahaldibu ge bas" (literally: "Language of the Maldives"), which the official mistakenly called " Mahal is the language of the island ”understood and noted.
Villages
Minicoy is administratively divided into 10 villages ( Avah , also Athiri ), each of which is headed by a Moopan . The Baemedu village assembly is held in the village house . The villages occupy roughly the northeast third of the island and appear on the satellite image as a coalesced settlement without borders or open spaces between the villages. The built-up area lies along the west coast, which faces the lagoon , although each village area also extends a maximum of 760 meters across the island to the east coast, where the open Indian Ocean burns. The larger southern and southwestern part of the island, South Bandaram , which is occasionally listed as the eleventh village, is permanently populated by only 15 residents or two families, and is dominated by coconut palm plantations . The approximately 3.6 km long and only 50 to 100 meters wide northern uninhabited foothills of the island, Kodi Point , is not delimited from the area of the northernmost village Kendiparty. It is nevertheless listed separately elsewhere, also with the name variant north Pandaram . It used to be home to a leper colony .
The villages and South Bandaram from north to south:
Map with all coordinates: OSM | WikiMap
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Originally there were only eight villages on Minicoy. In 1920 the ninth village of Bada was established by spinning off from Aoumagu . The tenth village of Kendiparty was established in 1965, by spinning off from Fallessery . Since 1977 there is an eleventh village New Boduathiri , created by outsourcing from Boduathiri , which is not yet included in the table above.
history
Until around 1500 the island belonged to the kingdom of the Maldives, whose king converted to Islam in 1153 . In the following years the until then Buddhist archipelago, including Minicoy, was Islamized. When the Arab explorer Ibn Battuta visited the Maldives in 1346, he discovered that all of the residents were already Muslim.
Around 1500 Minicoy came under the rule of the also Muslim Ali Rajas of Cannanore . The circumstances and the exact date of the change of ruler are unknown. In the middle of the 16th century, the Maldivian national hero Muhammad Thakurufaanu Al-Azam used the island as a base for his fight against the Sultan of the Maldives, who converted to Christianity under Portuguese influence .
Officially, the island remained with Cannanore until 1905, when the Bibi handed it over to the British. In fact, it had been under British sovereignty since the middle of the 19th century.
In 1956, nine years after the end of British colonial rule, Minicoy decided in a referendum to remain with India and, together with the Laccadives and Amindives, became part of a union territory that has officially been called Lakshadweep since 1973 .
In 1983 diplomatic entanglements between India and the Maldives over Minicoy emerged after the brother of Maldivian President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom publicly emphasized Maldivian claims to Minicoy.
Climate table
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Average monthly temperatures and rainfall for Minicoy
Source: imd.gov.in ; wetterkontor.de
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literature
- RH Ellis: A Short Account ot the Laccadive Islands and Minicoy . Government Press, Madras 1924.
- Ellen Kattner: Union Territory of Lakshadweep: the social structure of Maliku (Minicoy). In: International Institute of Asian Studies (IIAS) Newsletter . No. 10, 1996, pp. 19-20.
- Ellen Kattner: Bodu Valu - Big Ponds: Traditional Water Management and its socio-cosmic Implications in Minicoy / Maliku, on Indian Ocean island . In: Christoph Ohlig (Ed.) Antike Zisternen . Publications of the German Water History Society , 9. Books on Demand GmbH, Norderstedt 2007, pp. 145–172.
- Ellen Kattner: Seven Men, Six Women: Names and the Socio-cosmic Order of Maliku (Minicoy Island) . In: Peter Berger, Roland Hardenberg, Ellen Kattner, Michael Prager (Eds.): The Anthropology of Values: Essays in Honor of Georg Pfeffer . Dorling Kindersley, Delhi (India), pp. 163-179.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Census 2011
- ↑ Minicoy Official Website ( Memento of October 24, 2017 in the Internet Archive )
- ↑ Minicoy Island Map ( Memento from June 8, 2016 in the Internet Archive )
- ^ National Marine Fisheries Census 2005 . (PDF; 2.8 MB) Union Territories of Andaman & Nicobar and Lakshadweep Islands
- ↑ Sasmita S. Akhtar and Shamim Akhtar: Floating Pearls in the Arabian Sea. Lakshadweep , p. 114
- ↑ Lakshadweep Students Association (LSA), August 17, 2017 (Facebook).