In a 1993  book titled ” Peaks of Limuria” Richard Edlis who had been Commissioner for the British Indian Ocean Territory, casually noted that the islands under his stewardship "comprise all that remains above sea-level of huge underwater mountains of volcanic origin which rear dramatically from the ocean bed 10,000 feet or more below” (p.ix). Similarly in Theosophical books, with which many Tamil place-makers were undoubtedly familiar because of the visibility of these occultists in the Madras Presidency, the name had come to be associated with a continent inhabited by proto-human beings, and re-interpreted as the Kumarinâtu of Tamil literature.

From the 1870’s, several European ethnologists, especially those with a con­nection to British India, favored India as the cradle of mankind. And even Ernst Haeckel in 1876 considered this a possibility which came to the attention of Tamil's devotees. The principal term used to designate the catastrophic and destructive agency of the ocean in Tamil devotion's labors of loss initially however was  katalkôl, a word that has attained the same status among its place-makers that was accorded to "the Deluge" or "the Flood" in the discourses of the Judeo-Christian West well into the early decades of the nineteenth century." Literally, "seizure by the sea," katalkôl is frequently glossed in English as "flood," "ocean swell," and, significantly, as "deluge," or even "Deluge." All of Tamil devotion's ocean fears and fantasies turn around this word, which is used, over and again, to describe the actions of the "cruel sea" in its labors of loss. It is because of katalkôl that Tamil speakers irrevocably lost their patrimony as embodied in their antediluvian words and works as these had been nurtured in their ancestral homeland. Instead of sustaining Tamil homes and hearths today, their patrimony lies consigned to a "watery grave" at the bottom of the Indian Ocean.

Then from the closing years of the nineteenth century, similar lamentations about the "countless" and "numerous" precious Tamil books and "literary treasures" that met "a watery grave" are a constant refrain of Tamil literature. These works were the creations, devotees insist, of the 4,449 poets who had graced the first literary academy (cankam) in the antediluvial city of Tenmaturai, and of the 3,700 bards of the second academy in the drowned city of Kapâtapuram. When these cities and their learned academies were washed away by the ocean, they took with them-forever-these poets and their works. While most do not venture to enumerate the books that are believed to have been destroyed, settling instead for generic invocations of "innumerable" and "many," some more daringly name names and even discuss their contents. As early as 1887 C. W. Damodaram Pillai (1832-1901) published many a forgotten Tamil literary work-wrote poignantly of the lost texts of which he had heard when he was young and that were no longer available in his time. These had been primarily lost to the flood that had seized the second cadkam at Kapatapuram, but other forces, including gross negli­gence, had been at work as well. And in 1903, drawing upon a Tamil commentarial tradition that over the centuries had kept alive some memory of lost treatises, a book titled the  Suryanarayana Sastri recounted that works such as Mutunârai, Mutukuruku, Mâpuran am, and Putupurânam had been seized by the ocean (p. 94-102).

Soon after, in 1917, Abraham Pandither, in his massive history of Tamil music, insisted that several of these lost works, such as Naratiyam, Perunârai, and Perunkuruku, had been the world's first treaties on music, all of which had disappeared into the ocean along with several rare musical instruments like the thousand-stringed lute.  Thudisaikizhar Chidambaranar (1883-1954), a retired petty bureaucrat, pointed to the loss of rare grammatical works, the first in the world.

There are many reasons that make Lemuria's candidacy as the ancestral Tamil homeland so attractive to Tamil devotion's place-making. It had been identified by metropolitan scientists as a vast ancient continent and as the birthplace of mankind: if Tamil speakers were the original inhabitants of Lemuria, this made them, ipso facto, the most ancient peoples of the world and the ancestors of all of humanity. As many insisted, with the sinking of the ancestral homeland, Tamilians fanned out to the rest of the world, setding and planting the seeds of civilization in the Indus Valley, Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, the Americas, even Europe. Consequently, Lemuria allows Tamil labors of loss to fashion a diaspora for Tamil and its speakers that was as widespread as it was ancient, stretching back to the very beginning of time, in fact. It allows modern Tamilians to assume the status of global peoples, if only vicariously, in an age of global empires and the exercise of global power.

Furthermore, the appropriation of Lemuria for the Tamil cause also enables the recasting of modern Tamil speakers as descendants of an antediluvian people. This allows Tamil writers to tap into all the symbolic potency-innocence, purity, and singularity-associated with prelapsarian virtue and bliss. Lemuria thus provides a context for summoning into existence a Tamil prelapsarium, further deepening the antiquity of the language and its speakers, the first in the subcontinent as well as in the entire inhabited world.

Even within the community of Tamil devotees, which  has been radically divided over the meaning of Tamil and its relationship to the other languages, cultures, and speakers of the subcontinent, most unite around the contention that Tamil is an antediluvian language whose origins can be traced to the lost homeland of Lemuria. Loss, therefore, is powerfully enabling in southern India, and is a sentiment, therefore, that has to be continually fed and stoked. As Marilyn Ivy has noted in another context, "the loss of nostalgia-that is, the loss of the desire to long for what is lost because one has found the lost object-can be more unwelcome than the original loss itself. Modernist nostalgia must preserve the sense of absence and lack that motivates its desire.(Ivy, Discourses of the Vanishing, University of Chicago Press, 1995.)

Tamil devotion's complex and variegated ‘labors of loss’ cannot actually afford to find the lost homeland, or to close the gap, to present the absent. To do so would mean the end of its project, its own logic for existence. Thus the nostalgic is enamored of distance, not of the referent itself. Nostalgia cannot be sustained without loss. For the nostalgic to reach his or her goal of closing the gap between resemblance and identity, lived experience would have to take place, an erasure of the gap between sign and signified, an experience which would cancel out the desire that is nostalgia's reason for existence  Yearning for-and mourning-the lost homeland becomes an end in itself, therefore, for a people who imagine themselves in perpetual exile.

From the start, the relationship of Lemuria to the lived homeland of Tamilnadu, itself a small part of "India," is plagued by a strategic ambiguity in Tamil place-making. Some suggest that all of what we know of as India today had been part of Lemuria, spatially reiterating the claim that Dravidians (and hence Tamilians) had been the original peoples of the subcontinent before they had been driven south by "the Aryan invasion."170 Others are content to include only peninsular India-that region of the subcontinent that colonial ethnology proposed was populated by Dravidian speakers-in Lemuria. Still others insist that only that part of India extending from Mount Venkatam to Kanyakumari had ever been Part of Kumarinâtu, the historic Tamilakam.

And yet the fact remains, as I have already noted, that loyalty and attachment to the lived homeland of Tamilnadu, itself a part of India, has also to be generated, especially if Tamil's devotees want their fellow speakers to rally together to protect and nurture their language and land-or what was left of these after the ravages of time and after the onslaughts made on them by rival languages and their patrons.

By the time the speculations  around Lemuria commenced in the later half of the nineteenth century in Europe, the Flood as a global geological event had become questionable in professional scientific circles, and from the 1840s credible geologists or natural historians were disinclined to draw upon it to theorize the earth's deep past. Not surprisingly, the paleo-scientist never invokes the universal Flood to account for submergence and subsidence in his labors of loss around Lemuria. It is another measure of occultism's contentious relationship with metropolitan science that leads its practitioners to turn to diluvial events in their own catastrophic theories around Lemuria, but even occult place making does not accord them the centrality that is given them in Tamil devotion.

As an explanatory device for global change as well, the Flood had fallen on bad times among scientists in the metropole by the late nineteenth century. In contrast, it had been, from the Renaissance into the Enlightenment, the central moment in the drama of human history, to whose unveiling some of the best intellectual minds of Europe had dedicated themselves. But the professionalization of the various sciences in the nineteenth century had pushed the Deluge to the margins of serious thought, where, dismissed as myth, legend, or fable, it languished as yet another example of the magical and miracle-mongering mentality of the pre-moderns.

The Flood, therefore, as a geological or historical event, or even as an explanatory device, had little credibility in disenchanted knowledge-practices, history included, by the end of the nineteenth century. Yet, katalkôl remained the principle engine that sustained the labors of loss that are so important to Tamil devotion's place-making which commenced around this time. For the Tamil place-maker, it is crucial to establish its historicity, as it is to demonstrate that it had actually happened, at least once upon a time, if not more than once. The very crux of the Tamil project around Lemuria is to demonstrate that a Tamil antediluvium had really existed, and more importantly, had mattered. But how can the place-maker go about the business of reconstructing an ante-diluvial past in a post-Enlightenment age that is so vigorously anti-diluvial? How can he use the protocols and procedures of history to pursue an antediluvial project, especially in the face of that dis­cipline's very' hostility to such an enterprise? What are some of the gains of doing so, aid what are some of the losses incurred in allowing himself to be commandeered by history?

Given the conflicted intimacy between Tamil devotion and the modern disciplinary formation of history, it goes without saying that the degree to which Tamil place-makers are historicist varies enormously, from the few who are completely in history to some who are utterly outside it, with a majority falling somewhere in between. The spread of historicist assumptions among modern Tamil intellectuals has yet to be systematically documented by scholars, but for a suggestive essay that links Brahmanical approaches to the past with (imperial) historicism, see V. Geetha ,  Re-writing History in the Brahmin's Shadow: Caste and the Modern, Historical Imagination. Journal of Arts and Ideas 25-26: 127-37.1993.

Pure fantasy generates an imaginative and imaginary world through faithfully observing rules of logic and inner consistency which, although they may differ from those operating in our own world, must nevertheless be as true to themselves as their parallel operations in the normal world. The world created by pure fantasy has to necessarily be complete, self-consistent, and uncompromised by the demands of prosaic realism.

Metropolitan place-makers of Lemuria, with the exception of some American occultists and fantasists, are not concerned with today's nation-states. Tamil labors of loss are strikingly different in this regard as well, as its place-making repeatedly questions the delineated borders of the emergent nation-state of "India." The reasons for this are not far to seek, for from the 193os, more and more of Tamil's devotees came increasingly under the influence of the Dravidian movement and its radical imagination of a nation outside the spatial confines of India. Indeed, from the vantage point of an emergent Indian nationalism, Tamil labors of loss are clearly extraterritorial, preoccupied as they are with an ancestral homeland most of which falls outside the delineated borders of India. So, the desire to imagine an alternative to India leads many to spatially dissociate themselves from a territory that is deemed to be contaminated by Aryanism, Brahmanism, Sanskrit, and Hindi, propelling them in turn to locate their Utopia of perfection and plenitude elsewhere.

But because India is also deemed to be originally and fundamentally Dravidian and Tamil, before the Aryan hordes took it over, and because it is after all the ground for the conduct of practi­cal politics, Tamil place-makers cannot give up on it entirely. Hence, spatially as well, Tamil labors of loss compromise, by locating their imagined elsewhere partly within the borders of contemporary India (whose own political contours changed dramatically over the course of the twentieth century), and partly outside.

But a separatist Dravidian nationalism is not the only force compelling Tamil devotion's extraterritorial place-making. Working sometimes in opposition to Dravidianism's separatist agenda prior to the 1940s, and then increasingly contrary to it from the 1950s, is the pressure of Tamil nationalism, which found progressive accommodation with Indian nationalism and with the latter's territorial imperatives. In fact, for a decade and more from the late 1940’s Tamil nationalism's most important territorial concern was to ensure that all those areas of the newly formed Indian nation-state which were deemed to be Tamil-speaking should come under the rule of a Tamil polity, and should become part of the newly formed Tamil state of Madras. In these years, the anxiety is palpable that these regions would be "lost" to Tamil-speakers in the process of accommodating the territorial demands of their neighbors.

From the start, the relationship of Lemuria to the lived homeland of Tamilnadu, itself a small part of "India," is plagued by a strategic ambiguity in Tamil place-making. Some suggest that all of what we know of as India today had been part of Lemuria, spatially reiterating the claim that Dravidians (and hence Tamilians) had been the original peoples of the subcontinent before they had been driven south by "the Aryan invasion."170 Others are content to include only peninsular India-that region of the subcontinent that colonial ethnology proposed was populated by Dravidian speakers-in Lemuria. Still others insist that only that part of India extending from Mount Venkatam to Kanyakumari had ever been Part of Kumarinâtu, the historic Tamilakam.

And yet the fact remains, as I have already noted, that loyalty and attach­ment to the lived homeland of Tamilnadu, itself a part of India, has also to be generated, especially if Tamil's devotees want their fellow speakers to rally together to protect and nurture their language and land-or what was left of these after the ravages of time and after the onslaughts made on them by rival languages and their patrons.

As the litterateur (and Tamil devotee) P. Sundaram Pillai (1855-97) observed in 1895 on the very eve of the commencement of the Tamil labors of loss around Lemuria, "We have not, in fact, as yet, a single important date in the ancient history of the Dravidians, ascertained and placed beyond the pale of controversy. It is no wonder then that in the absence of such a sheet anchor, individual opinions drift, at pleasure, from the 14th c. B.c. to the 14th c. A.D.( Sundaram Pillai, Some Milestones in the History of Tamil Literature Found In an Inquiry into the Age of Tiru Gnana Sambanda. Madras,  1895,p.9-10.)

Nothing more clearly demonstrates the Tamil place-maker's contention that his lost homeland really did exist, if only in some long vanished prelapsarian past, than his effort to introduce Kumarikkantam into the curriculum of schools and colleges. Indeed, this also distinguishes Lemuria's presence in the Tamil country from its appearance elsewhere, for nowhere else does Sclater's lost continent become a part of pedagogical processes, and indi­rectly, therefore, of the technologies of modern citizenship. Not surprisingly, there are no attempts to fantasize outside the usual range of facts, as the place-maker works to convince his young audience of the reality of Kumarikkantam, whose existence is presented until this day as an indu­bitable "fact" of the (antediluvial) history and geography of Tamilnadu, of India, and of the world. In these textbook labors of loss, Kumarikkantam is too important to be taken lightly-or fantastically.

From the early years of the twentieth century history schoolbooks which circulated in Madras in English and Tamil occasionally ponder over its status as a Dravidian homeland. But none of these identify Lemuria as a singularly Tamil place, nor are they freighted down with the sense of loss that so distinguishes the spatial preoccupations of Tamil devotion. To encounter these, we have turn to textbooks meant for Tamil-language instruction, in which, from the 1930’s, discussions of Lemuria as a lost Tamil homeland begin to proliferate. Indeed, both in schools and colleges in the colonial and postcolonial period, instruction in Tamil and its literature has been the primary site for the institutionalization of Tamil labors of loss around Lemuria. This is mostly because until 1967, when a Tamil nationalist government was voted into power in the state, Tamil pedagogy, beleaguered thought it might have been (especially in the early decades of the twentieth century), was the principal institutional means through which Tamil devotional ideas were disseminated outside a narrow circle of scholars. Thus instructors in Tamil  schools and colleges also frequently wrote textbooks in which their labors of loss around the drowned Kumarinâtu both found expression and were passed on to the young students.

Thus a map of 1992, published in Tamil, is named "The Lemuria Continent which was destroyed by the ocean" by K. Thanikachalam in  Tamilar Varalârum Ilafckai Itappeyer Ayvum [History of Tamils and research on Sri Lanka as a place]. Madras: Saravana Patippakam.

While a map, in English, of 1993 is called "Lemuria or The Lost Kumari-Continent or Navalam Island (David J.Manuel Raj, History of Silamban Fencing: An Indian Martial Art. Madras) its allencompassing title revealing the three principal sources;European science, Tamil literature, and the Sanskritic Purânas.

These Tamil cartographies  are forthright in their announcement of the principal place-making claim of Tamil devotion: that there was an ancient Tamil land that was lost in floods caused by the ocean's fury.

They are also explicit in drawing attention to the fact that Lemuria was no impersonal or homogenous paleo or occult place-world, but a Tamil homeland, by the naming operations they perform on the land illustrated in their maps.

The map below titled by  R. Mathivanan, Marainta Lemüriak Kantam [Vanished Lemuria Continent], in Tamil, it shows the reconstructed Indian peninsula to the north, with a landbridge connecting to the large landmass of Lemuria in the south, terminating in Antarctica. The shaded portions represent the oceans surrounding Lemuria.  From Ramachandran and Mathivanan, The Spring o/ the Indus Civilizatio, Madras, 1991):

None have been so famous in popular archeology than the myth of lost continents like Lemuria and Atlantis, so this is where our case-study starts, click to enter:

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