The mixing of myth and history is not the prerogative of the Hindu Right. For Dravidians, the Ram Setu has far less resonance than the myth of Lemuria known as Kumari Kandam in Tamil literature. On the lines of the Aryan theory, a section of Tamils has believed and sustained a Dravidian theory about ‘Lemuria’

If Ram Setu is Aryan theory, Dravidian ideologues posit the undivided lost continent of Lemuria. S. ANAND surveys the two myths

That an army of ‘monkeys’ constructed the Ram Setu aeons ago under the supervision of Ram is as true as the possibility of finding the fossil of the ten-headed Ravan amidst the sandbars that constitute Adam’s Bridge. That Ram Setu is the “earliest and largest carbon-fibre reinforced civil engineering structure known to man” passes for Hindu wisdom. If we are to account for the early 20th century Periyarist reading of the rather Orientalist Aryan-Dravidian race theory, the Vanar Sena is a gross Aryan misrepresentation of Dravidian ‘sudras’. In The Ramayana: A True Reading, first published in 1959, Periyar EV Ramasamy had anticipated what the ASI, in a rare deference to scientific temper, recently submitted before the Supreme Court. “The Ramayana is not based on any historical truth. It is a fiction. There’s not an iota of Tamil culture in Rama. His wife was likewise a Northener, devoid of Tamil characteristics. The men of Tamil Nadu are described as monkeys and monsters, so also the women.” TN Chief Minister M. Karunanidhi, a Periyarist when it suits him, endorsed the position: “There is no historical proof of the existence of Lord Ram or of the bridge.”

Parodies of the Ramayan, known as Keemayana, were staged at the height of the Dravidian movement. At the behest of Periyar, Pulavar Kuzhanthai wrote a counter-epic, Ravana Kaviyam, in 1946. The then Madras government banned it in 1948. About this time, CN Annadurai wrote Arya Mayai (Aryan Deception). Anna went on to become the first DMK chief minister in 1967. Just as the ‘nationalist’ anticolonial leaders of north India took pride in the ‘science’ of the Aryan Invasion Theory, leaders of the Dravidian movement, often dubbed separatist, deployed the same theory to argue that stories like the Ramayan were designed “to deny the Dravidas their sense of self-respect and destroy their humanity”.

The mixing of myth and history is not the prerogative of the Hindu Right. For Dravidians, the Ram Setu has far less resonance than the myth of Lemuria known as Kumari Kandam in Tamil literature. On the lines of the Aryan theory, a section of Tamils has believed and sustained a Dravidian theory about ‘Lemuria’ — a land mass connecting the Deccan plateau and the island of Ceylon, with intervening straits connecting it with Madagascar, Australia and Antarctica — which is believed to have sunk into the Indian Ocean in stages over 3,500 years ago. They believe that the Sangam period of Tamil history originated in this Lemuria continent some 12,000 years ago, and that the first human beings were ‘Black Lemurian Tamils’ (originating 40,000 years ago) who shared ancestry with the aborigines of Australia.

The concept of Lemuria was born in the 1860s when British geologists noted the striking similarity between fossils found in India and Africa. Ironically, the existence of Lemuria was backed by European theosophists like Helena Blavatsky in the 1880s to suggest that it was the home of ‘European Aryans’. Lemuria, fed by Victorian science, suited the Dravidian politics of nostalgia and the loss of a golden past, sustaining the fervour of Tamil pride. In 2004, geologist SC Jayakaran debunked Lemuria as a flight of fancy. Jayakaran (who has published in Nature) used cartographic and satellite imaging to disprove the very idea of Lemuria.

The geophysical reality of Adam’s Bridge gets sandwiched between these contesting myths. For over a 100 years, the idea of the Sethusamudram canal — first envisaged not by a Tamil but by AD Taylor, a British commander of Indian Marines in 1860 — has animated the Dravidian imagination. The Raj cold-shouldered it. Till 2004, various committees sat on it and seven feasibility studies were undertaken along different routes. It was considered economically unsound and geologically unfeasible. But Dravidian parties have always projected Sethusamudram as “the dream of Tamils”. For Dravidianists, the construction of the Sethusamudram Canal comes closest to a modern realisation of the Lemuria myth. For the BJP and its cohorts, it is the demolition of the Aryan myth of conquest. The scientific, economic and environmentalist viewpoints have been rendered invisible by the turbid debate triggered by these myths.

Tehelkha