In the first few chapters of Descent into Paradise, it becomes evident that author Daniel Bosley is up to something. After narrating the story of his job hunt that landed him an internship at the Maldivian mission in the U.K., Bosley wastes no time in laying bare a fundamental disparity in how the Indian Ocean tourists’ paradise is seen.
In a thoughtful epilogue, added just before the book went to print, Bosley has sought to prepare the reader for possible political change that the country, in fact, witnessed in September, with Maldivians electing a new President.
Today’s Maldives is a product of both, its vibrant economic growth and a turbulent political landscape that adopted a multi-party system only in the last decade. The turbulence has cost many Maldivians dearly.
‘Jarring contrast’
To illustrate how the country’s resorts were reaching new heights of luxury and comfort, while its correctional system was plumbing new depths of “dehumanising depravity”, he juxtaposes tourist reviews of soothing spa treatments and immaculate hospitality at Maldivian resorts with graphic testimonies of torture victims. Sample this: “The spa is amazing, with glass floors so you can watch the fish swimming right underneath — if you don’t fall asleep, lulled by the therapist’s gentle hands and the soothing music and aromas.” — Tripadvisor review, August 2005
“They put a baton standing up, and then they told me to take off my jeans and sit on the baton directly on my piles... It felt as though it would break open the anus... that was [done] every day at least one time.” — ‘This is What I Wanted to Tell You’.
A tourist at a hotel in the Maldives. | Photo Credit: Getty Images
The shock value of this device apart, it establishes clearly that the Maldives as seen by the rest of the world may hardly be what the country is for a citizen. However, Bosley doesn’t stop with this “jarring contrast”, as he terms it. He journeys across the island nation, with a rearview mirror to its past as he points to the many pressing questions about the young democracy’s future, ranging from its bumpy political course to its ever-growing climate risks to religious fundamentalism.
From his useful outsider-insider vantage point — the author lived and worked as a journalist in the Maldives for a decade and is married to a Maldivian photographer — Bosley gives us a grounded and well-researched account of the archipelago and its people. He loves the country and its people enough to show us complexity without condescension, while being distant enough to afford a sceptical eye. This highly readable book will be valuable to anyone who wishes to see the Maldives beyond its stunning turquoise waters.
A woman with a child walks on a wall of sandbags, placed to prevent erosion, in the Maldives. One of the world’s lowest-lying countries, more than 80% of the Maldives is less than one metre above sea level, making it extremely vulnerable to climate change. | Photo Credit: Getty Images
Bosley skilfully unpacks the country’s political architecture, at times with a pinch of wit, like when he writes on how any unknown person in the Maldives is at the most two connections away. “If you’re looking for a specific Maldivian, just ask another one; the person you’re after is almost guaranteed to be a friend of a friend, a brother, cousin or maybe an ex-wife,” he writes.
However, this makes the scene more complicated than predictable, he goes to illustrate, as he examines each political leader who has helmed the country, and the implication of their leadership to Maldivian society.
A person points to a portrait of Maldivian blogger Yameen Rasheed, on his blog ‘The Daily Panic’. Rasheed was found with multiple stab wounds at his house in Maldivian capital Malé, in 2017. He died at a hospital. | Photo Credit: AP
Denial of justice
‘For Riz and Yameen: brothers in disobedience’ reads the book’s dedication. In a moving reminder of crucial, unresolved questions of justice and accountability that linger in the Maldives, Bosley invokes the dissenting voices of his colleagues Ahmed Rilwan and Yameen Rasheed throughout the book by way of their quotes at the beginning of every chapter, or an anecdote recalling their work or position. He has a chapter dedicated to each of them, detailing their public-spirited journalism and uncompromising political stance, for which they paid with their lives.
On the Maldives’s international relations, Bosley adopts a measured approach, underplaying the usual tropes of completing geopolitical interests and big power rivalry in a small island state. Instead, he lays out each leader’s foreign policy choices, in the context of their domestic political and economic compulsions. After a season of international media reportage that reduced the Maldives presidential elections to a contest between India and China, it is refreshing to read Bosley’s in-depth story, where the Maldives and its people are the protagonists.
Descent into Paradise: A Journalist’s Memoir of the Untold Maldives; Daniel Bosley, Pan Macmillan, ₹699.
meera.srinivasan@thehindu.co.in
