ABSTRACT
This book seeks to ask how the cultural, geological, ecological, and other identities of the ‘bridge’ have been seen and represented since about the 1690s; how those perceptions reconfigure past and present societies (especially given how South Asian societies are seen by themselves and others); and whether the Ramayan legacy is ultimately adequate to historicize, discursivize, memorialize, and heritagize Adam’s Bridge and its islandness. Nestling longitudinally between the Gulf of Mannar and Palk Strait and latitudinally between Dhanushkodi in Tamil Nadu’s Pamban Island and Talaimannar in Sri Lanka’s Mannar Island, Adam’s Bridge wriggles as an isthmus or submarine chain of limestone shoals of an Indian Ocean tombolo or a string of atolls. While a part of the British colonial scientific imagination saw it as a precipitate of uninterrupted deposition of littoral detritus, some colonial cultural historiographers were prepared to reconcile themselves to the idea that the tombolo may have been built by members of an ancient human civilization. In the cultural mnemonics of millions of Indians, Adam’s Bridge educes Valmiki’s epic Ramayan and its legendary bridge built by Lord Ram’s hominoid allies, connecting Bharatvarsh and Lanka in eight days. This chapter introduces the reader to the physical, geological, historiographical, and cultural landscape of Adam’s Bridge. It also alerts one to the ramifications of the now halted Sethusamudram canal project which envisages a navigable maritime passage across the Palk Strait and to the possible effects of the Anthropocene in the Palk Bay and Gulf of Mannar. At the heart of the Adam’s Bridge saga (and its many culture wars) also lies an interspecies battle between sea-fronted human societies and islandic ecosystems of non-human denizens. With over 4,200 species of plant and animal societies, throbbing from a history of over 60 cyclones recorded since 1890, an endangered terra aqua with its threatened specimens of corals and dugongs, parrotfishes and seaweeds, crustaceans, and conches also demands an epic of their own.
