ABSTRACT
The epilogue argues for a four-tiered hermeneutical approach to understanding the Adam’s Bridge saga. First, the historicity of Adam’s Bridge needs to be framed within a hybrid scheme without compelling scientific and empiricist disciplines like archaeology, geology, or zoology to address binarizing questions of whether the structure was constructed by the human, humanoid, or human-like agency or whether it was an outcome of geological phenomena. Arguably, such a question is born of the anxiety of defining the autonomy of being human and of the ultimate recognition that the possibility of such an autonomy cannot be exclusively defined or ascertained in purely humanist and historicist terms. Second, the Adam’s Bridge saga requires the revival of the right to enchantment or freedom from disenchantment, whether in soteriological or scientific senses, transcending anthropocentric interests, though not at the cost of socio-economic freedoms; the tale seeks to challenge our alienation from its core environmentalist narrative. Third, Adam’s Bridge’s sacrality points to not merely anthropocentric sacred interests but a multispecies sacralization. This leads us to the urgency for a radical acceptance of non-anthropocentric otherness rather than simply colonizing it in anthropomorphized legends. Where this study asserts its independence from critics of rationalism and nationalism is in suggesting that sacred conceptions of Adam’s Bridge/Ram Setu are not sacred enough if its criticality to imagining an environmentalist utopia is marginalized by civilizational interests. Besides, the tombolo is well poised to become the nucleus of collaborative environmental conservation and awareness campaigns between India and Sri Lanka, and collaborative civilizational tales the two nations intend to tell their posterity that stands to gain from a cross-cultural epistemic community committed to environmental diplomacy. Finally, Adam’s Bridge guides us into the politics of the Anthropocene, reorienting humanism and identity politics towards a post-human ecocentrism invested with a new politics of animism and nature not as metaphysics but as a moral attitude. Granting a consensual social dignity of recognition to Adam’s Bridge’s Ramayan legacy is, perhaps, long overdue, but that cannot come at the cost of forgetting the special dignity of the interspecies battle at the Gulf of Mannar and Palk Strait, especially in the age of the Gaia hypothesis.
