ABSTRACT
This chapter frames Adam’s Bridge’s historiography in a history of Sethu project proposals in independent India that, while generally chasing the same navigational pursuits of the colonial regime, reperformed almost the same geological surveys without producing any different results as to the feasibility of dredging Adam’s Bridge. Beginning as a Nehruvian legacy, the Sethu canal project would ironically come to be approved under the Vajpayee-led NDA administration, which, even until the end of the twentieth century, had not associated Adam’s bridge with Ram Setu on an electoral scale. Contrary to the perceived face of India’s majoritarian Hindu-leaning outlook until about the 1990s, Adam’s Bridge’s association with Ramayan was scarcely even foregrounded in Indian public life, even as successive Sethu project plans were delayed by economic constraints. With the outbreak of the Lankan civil war and Indian involvement, the Sethu canal became an electioneering agenda in Tamil Nadu elections. The first species of criticism against canalizing Palk Strait did not come from the Sangh Parivar (that, until 2002, was seemingly unmoved by the tombolo’s colonial historiography) but from environmentalists who had sounded the alarm as early as the 1980s. As also outlined in the previous chapter, this one emboldens the fact that while the Sethusamudram project was a concern since Victorian times, Adam’s Bridge was and remains only one of several alignments suggested for canalizing Palk Strait, and almost every expert committee that surveyed the tombolo until 2002, and even afterwards, has advised against dredging the structure on geological grounds.
