ABSTRACT
In 1982 I attended a scholarly conference in the city of Madurai where historians delivered professional papers on the study of early South India. One of the papers concerned Lemuria, described as a continent that once existed south of Kanyakumari, the southernmost point in India, but which sank beneath the sea in prehistoric times. Although this concept seemed a bit far-fetched to me, there was no difference between the audience’s public reception of this paper and that accorded to the other presentations at this conference; everyone treated it as just another problem in the ‘normal science’ of the historical discipline. Subsequent exposures to Lemuria revealed that the idea surfaced among nineteenth-century geologists attempting to explain global distribution of paleospecies through hypothetical land bridges, then enjoyed a brief currency among early ethnographers interested in the original homeland of homo sapiens, and finally became transformed during the twentieth century into a primordial land whose inhabitants could be accessed through spiritualist channeling. In Tamil Nadu, however, the existence of this lost world has achieved the status of official history. As the continent of Kumarikantam, it has appeared in the curriculums of state-run Tamil-language schools, served as the subject matter of comments in the state legislature and a film funded by the state government, and generated a substantial body of literature that has described and mapped it in great detail. Sumati Ramaswami, in her study entitled The Lost Land of Lemuria (2004), contextualizes the survival of this fabulous land, inaccessible now because of oceanic catastrophe, as an exercise in the modern productivity of loss, a reenchantment of a disenchanted reality, an attempt by subaltern groups to reclaim center stage within an altered construction of the past.
