ABSTRACT
This chapter charts the history of Dutch colonial and later British cultural and administrative responses to Adam’s Bridge, beginning with differing cartographic representations of the structure. While the colonial regime toyed with the idea of canalizing the Palk Strait, repeated surveys since 1820 rejected plans of dredging Adam’s Bridge. Alongside commercial and strategic surveys of Adam’s Bridge and the Sethusamudram region, the colonial phase was also densely characterized by palaeogeographical, zoological, and ethnobotanical surveys that have become history’s others, despite the wide-ranging questions they raised on the puzzling geology of the littoral region from the vantage of their disciplines, which, in turn, fostered a culture of colonial compatibilism towards its Hindu sacred geography. Eventually, the colonial period bolstered the ostensibly paradoxical node between colonial and nationalist imaginings of Adam’s Bridge, which was forged by the British administration to signal the victory of the colonial railways over the Indian Ocean precisely as a historical recapitulation of the legend of Ram Setu. The epistemic arrogation of the legend of Ram Setu by the South Indian Railway and the Madras government was not unidirectional, for it was met with an opposite, even if unequal reaction in South Asian imagination. This episode offers a fascinating paradox wherein, eventually, a technocratic colonial state apparatus not only cohabited and thrived alongside, and upon, a Hindu spiritual geography but also seeded or revived a militaristic imagination of that sacred geography. It is also rendered more visible how colonial science and technology were not, eventually, incompatible with Indian nationalism or what would come to be identified since the late twentieth century as Hindu nationalism.
