KAMALIKA PIERIS

In the novel ‘Song of the Sun God,’ at the end of the story, almost at the last page, there is a reference to an ancient   Indian kingdom called Lemuria. (p 394).   The novel said that there was a great Tamil civilization in Lemuria from as early as 50,000 BC .The South Asian civilization began from there. If not for the great flood that took place in Lemuria, the entire subcontinent would have been ruled by Tamils, said the novel. The novel also   quickly added that Lemuria predates any other ethnic group in the area. That was to stop the Sinhalese from also trying to   attach themselves to the Lemuria story.

‘Song of the Sun God” confirms that Lemuria and Kumari Kandam (which I discuss later)   had been accepted by the Tamil Separatist Movement in Sri Lanka, as a part of the greatness of the Tamil  civilization from which they came. It would have helped to boost the Tamil Separatist ego and encourage Tamil superiority.

This belief in Lemuria could be   dismissed as delusions of grandeur or the lunatic fringe but it is worth finding out about Lemuria. Wikipedia gives the following account. In 1864, an English zoologist, Philip Sclater suggested that there may be a submerged land between India, Madagascar and Africa. He named this submerged land Lemuria.  The discovery of plate tectonics and continental drift in the 20^th century put an end to this idea and   scientists forgot about Lemuria.

In 1885, Charles D. Maclean of the Indian Civil Service published The Manual of the Administration of the Madras Presidency, in which he suggested that Lemuria was the homeland of the proto-Dravidians. He suggested that Dravidian civilization started at Lemuria. This was mentioned in the Census reports of 1891 and 1901 and the matter was forgotten.

However, Tamil intellectuals liked the idea of a submerged pre-historic Tamil civilization. In 1898, J. Nallasami Pillai published an article in the journal Siddhanta Deepika about the theory of a lost continent in the Indian Ocean (i.e. Lemuria). But he said that this theory had “no serious historical or scientific footing”.

In 1912, Somasundara Bharati used the word “Tamilakam”   for the  first time, for  Lemuria  ,in his Tamil Classics and Tamilakam. Thereafter, Tamil revivalist writers claimed that Lemuria was the original Tamil homeland and birthplace of Tamil civilization. They maintained that an ancient Tamil civilization existed on Lemuria, before it was lost to the sea in a flood. Maclean’s Manual came to be cited as an authoritative work by these Tamil writers.

 In 1917, Abraham Pandithar wrote that Lemuria was the cradle of human race, and Tamil was the first language spoken by the humans. These claims were repeated in the school and college textbooks of Tamil Nadu throughout the 20th century.^[37]

 In 1953, R. Nedunceliyan, who later became the education minister of Tamil Nadu, insisted that the civilization spread from South India to the Indus Valley and   Sumer and subsequently, to “Arabia, Egypt, Greece, Italy, Spain and other places”.^[42] 

Ancient Tamil literature provided additional support for Lemuria. Ancient Tamil literature spoke of Kumari Kandam, a legendary sunken landmass that was supposedly located south of present-day India in the Indian Ocean.

Ancient Tamil literature said that Kumari Kandam was an ancient, but highly advanced civilization located in the Indian Ocean. It was the cradle of civilization, inhabited solely by the speakers of Tamil language.  The fact that the land had disappeared into the ocean helped to explain the lack of any present day evidence of this ancient civilization

The Tamil writers said that the culture of Kumari Kandam survived in Tamil Nadu. This meant that Tamil culture was the source of all civilized culture in the world, and Tamil is the mother language of all other languages in the world. Kumari Kandam proved the antiquity of the Tamil language and culture, they said.

Kumari Kandam, these writers said, was the place where the first two Tamil literary academies (sangams) were organized during the Pandean reign. the first Sangam flourished for 4,400 years in a city called Tenmadurai (South Madurai) attended by 549 poets (including Agastya) and presided over by gods like Shiva, Kubera and Murugan.

The second Sangam lasted for 3,700 years in a city called Kapatapuram, attended by 59 poets (including Agastya, again). Both the cities were “seized by the ocean”, resulting in loss of all the works created during the first two Sangams.

The third Sangam was established in Uttara (North) Madurai, where it is said to have lasted for 1,850 years. However, critics noted that the earliest extant Tamil writings, which are attributed to the third Sangam, contain Sanskrit vocabulary, and thus could not have been the creation of a purely Tamil civilization.

The Tamil revivalists insisted that the first two Tamil sangams  were not mythical, and happened in the Kumari Kandam era. While most Tamil revivalists did not enumerate or list the lost Sangam works, some came up with their names, and even listed their contents. In 1903, Suryanarayana Sastri named some of these works as Mutunarai, Mutukuruku, Mapuranam and Putupuranam.

In 1917, Abraham Pandithar listed three of these works as the world’s first treatises of music: Naratiyam, Perunarai and Perunkuruku. He also listed several rare musical instruments such as the thousand-stringed lute, which had been lost to the sea. 

Devaneya Pavanar printed an entire list of the submerged books. Others listed books on a wide range of topics, including medicine, martial arts, logic, painting, sculpture, yoga, philosophy, music, mathematics, alchemy, magic, architecture, poetry, and wealth. Since these works had been lost to the sea, the Kumari Kandam proponents insisted that no empirical proof could be provided for their claims.

The Tamil revivalists did not consider Kumari Kandam as a primitive society or a rural civilization. They described it as a utopia which had reached the zenith of human achievement. Suryanarayan Sastri, in 1903, described the population as expert cultivators, fine poets and far-traveling merchants, who lived in an egalitarian and democratic society. Modern Tamil was a pale remnant of the glorious ancient Tamil language spoken in Kumari Kandam.

In 1903, Suryanarayana Sastri, in his Tamilmoliyin Varalaru, insisted that all the humans were descendants of the ancient Tamils from Kumari Kandam. Such claims were repeated by several others, including M. S. Purnalingam Pillai and Maraimalai Adigal.^[39]

M. S. Purnalingam Pillai, writing in 1927, stated that Indus Valley civilization was established by the Tamil survivors from the flood-hit Kumari Nadu. In the 1940s, N. S. Kandiah Pillai published maps showing migration of the Kumari Kandam residents to other parts of the world.^[

 Books discussing the Kumari Kandam theory were first included in the college curriculum of the present-day Tamil Nadu in 1908. Suryanarayana Sastri’s book was prescribed for use in Madras University‘s Master’s degree courses in 1908-09. Over the next few decades, other such works were also included in the curriculum of Madras University and Annamalai University. These include Purnalingam Pillai’s A Primer of Tamil Literature (1904) and Tamil literature (1929), Kandiah Pillai’s Tamilakam (1934), and Srinivasa Pillai’s Tamil Varalaru (1927).^[26] In a 1940 Tamil language textbook for ninth-grade students, T. V. Kalyanasundaram wrote that Lemuria of the European scholars was Kumarinatu of the Tamil literature.^[27]

After the Dravidian parties came to power in  1967, the Kumari Kandam theory was disseminated more widely through school and college textbooks. In 1971, the Government of Tamil Nadu established a formal committee to write the history of Tamilakam (ancient Tamil territory). One of the objectives of the committee was to highlight “the great antiquity” of the Tamils, “from the time of Lemuria” .A 1975 textbook written by this committee detailed the Kumari Kandam theory. As late as 1981, the Tamil Nadu government’s history textbooks mentioned the Kumari Kandam theory.^[

In 1981, the Government of Tamil Nadu funded a documentary film on Kumari Kandam. The film, personally backed by the Chief Minister M. G. Ramachandran and directed by P. Neelakantan, was screened at the Fifth International Conference of Tamil Studies in Madurai. It combined the continental drift theory with the submerged continent theory to present Lemuria as a scientifically valid concept. It depicted Kumari Kandam cities resplendent with mansions, gardens, arts, crafts, music and dance.

Kumari Kandam is a mythical continent, not a real one. Therefore, the attempts to mix this myth with Tamil history met with criticism. M Seshagiri Sastri (1897),  described the claims of  ancient sangams as  fiction from the prolific imagination of Tamil poets.” In 1956, K. A. Nilakanta Sastri described the Kumari Kandam theory as “all bosh”, stating that geological theories about events happening millions of years ago should not be connected to the human history of a few thousand years back.  This concludes the review of ‘Song of the Sun God. ( Continued)