KUMARI KANDAM (Tamil : குமரிக்கண்டம்) refers to a mythical lost continent with an ancient Tamil civilization, located south of present-day India, in the Indian Ocean . Alternative name and spellings include Kumarikkantam and Kumari Nadu.
In the 19th century, a section of the European and American scholars
speculated the existence of a submerged continent called Lemuria , to
explain geological and other similarities between
* 1 Etymology and names * 2 Submerged lands in ancient Indian literature
* 3 Lemuria hypothesis in India
* 3.1 Popularization in
* 3.1.1 In curriculum
* 4 Characteristics
* 5 Extent
* 5.1 Maps
* 6 Criticism of the concept * 7 In popular culture * 8 See also * 9 References
ETYMOLOGY AND NAMES
After the Tamil writers were introduced to the concept of Lemuria in
the 1890s, they came up with the Tamilized versions of the continent's
name (e.g. "Ilemuria"). By the early 1900s, they started using Tamil
names for the continent, to support their depiction of Lemuria as an
ancient Tamil civilization. In 1903, V.G. Suryanarayana Sastri first
used the term "Kumarinatu" (or "Kumari Nadu", meaning "Kumari
territory") in his work Tamil Mozhiyin Varalaru (History of the Tamil
language). The term
The words "Kumari Kandam" first appear in Kanda Puranam, a
15th-century Tamil version of the
Skanda Purana , written by Kachiappa
Sivacharyara (1350-1420). Although the Tamil revivalists insist that
it is a pure Tamil name, it is actually a derivative of the Sanskrit
word "Kumārika Khaṇḍa". The Andakosappadalam section of Kanda
Puranam describes the following cosmological model of the universe:
There are many worlds, each having several continents, which in turn,
have several kingdoms. Paratan, the ruler of one such kingdom, had
eight sons and one daughter. He further divided his kingdom into nine
parts, and the part ruled by his daughter Kumari came to be known as
The 20th century Tamil writers came up with various theories to explain the etymology of "Kumari Kandam" or "Kumari Nadu". One set of claims was centered on the purported gender egalitarianism in the prelapsarian Tamil homeland. For example, M. Arunachalam (1944) claimed that the land was ruled by female rulers (Kumaris). D. Savariroyan Pillai stated that the women of the land had the right to choose their husbands and owned all the property, because of which the land came to be known as "Kumari Nadu" ("the land of the maiden"). Yet another set of claims was centered on the Hindu goddess Kanya Kumari . Kandiah Pillai, in a book for children, fashioned a new history for the goddess, stating that the land was named after her. He claimed that the temple at Kanyakumari was established by those who survived the flood that submerged Kumari Kandam. According to cultural historian Sumathi Ramaswamy, the emphasis of the Tamil writers on the word "Kumari" (meaning virgin or maiden) symbolizes the purity of Tamil language and culture, before their contacts with the other ethnic groups such as the Indo-Aryans .
The Tamil writers also came up with several other names for the lost continent. In 1912, Somasundara Bharati first used the word "Tamilakam" (a name for the ancient Tamil country ) to cover the concept of Lemuria, presenting it as the cradle of civilization , in his Tamil Classics and Tamilakam. Another name used was "Pantiya natu", after the Pandyas , regarded as the oldest of the Tamil dynasties. Some writers used "Navalan Tivu" (or Navalam Island), the Tamil name of Jambudvipa , to describe the submerged land.
SUBMERGED LANDS IN ANCIENT INDIAN LITERATURE
Multiple ancient and medieval Tamil and
Sanskrit works contain
legendary accounts of lands in
Nakkeerar's commentary does not mention the size of the territory lost to the sea. The size is first mentioned in a 15th-century commentary on Silappatikaram . The commentator Adiyarkunallar mentions that the lost land extended from Pahruli river in the north to the Kumari river in the South. It was located to the south of Kanyakumari , and covered an area of 700 kavatam (a unit of unknown measurement). It was divided into 49 territories (natu), classified in the following seven categories:
* Elu teñku natu ("Seven coconut lands") * Elu Maturai natu ("Seven mango lands") * Elu munpalai natu ("Seven front sandy lands") * Elu pinpalai natu ("Seven back sandy lands") * Elu kunra natu ("Seven hilly lands") * Elu kunakarai natu ("Seven coastal lands") * Elu kurumpanai natu ("Seven dwarf-palm lands")
Other medieval writers, such as Ilampuranar and Perasiriyar, also make stray references to the loss of antediluvian lands to the south of Kanyakumari, in their commentaries on ancient texts like Tolkappiyam . Another legend about the loss of Pandyan territory to the sea is found in scattered verses of Purananuru (dated between 1st century BCE and 5th century CE) and Kaliththokai (6th-7th century CE). According to this account, the Pandyan king compensated the loss of his land by seizing an equivalent amount of land from the neighboring kingdoms of Cheras and Cholas .
There are also several other ancient accounts of non-Pandyan land
lost to the sea. Many Tamil Hindu shrines have legendary accounts of
surviving the floods mentioned in Hindu mythology. These include the
prominent temples of
None of these ancient texts or their medieval commentaries use the name "Kumari Kandam" or "Kumari Nadu" for the land purportedly lost to the sea. They do not state that the land lost by the sea was a whole continent located to the south of Kanyakumari. Nor do they link the loss of this land to the history of Tamil people as a community.
LEMURIA HYPOTHESIS IN INDIA
In 1864, the English zoologist
Philip Sclater hypothesized the
existence of a submerged land connection between India,
Most European and American geologists dated Lemuria's disappearance
to a period before the emergence of modern humans . Thus, according to
them, Lemuria could not have hosted an ancient civilization. However,
in 1885, the Indian Civil Service officer Charles D. Maclean published
The Manual of the Administration of the Madras Presidency, in which he
theorized Lemuria as the proto-Dravidian urheimat . In a footnote in
this work, he mentioned
The native Tamil intellectuals first started discussing the concept of a submerged Tamil homeland in the late 1890s. In 1898, J. Nallasami Pillai published an article in the philosophical-literary journal Siddhanta Deepika (aka The Truth of Light). He wrote about the theory of a lost continent in the Indian Ocean (i.e. Lemuria), mentioning that the Tamil legends speak of floods which destroyed the literary works produced during the ancient sangams. However, he also added that this theory had "no serious historical or scientific footing".
POPULARIZATION IN TAMIL NADU
In the 1920s, the Lemuria concept was popularized by the Tamil revivalists to counter the dominance of Indo-Aryans and Sanskrit . Tamil revivalist writers claimed that Lemuria, prior to its deluge, was the original Tamil homeland and birthplace of Tamil civilization. They often misquoted or miscited the words of Western scholars to grant credibility to their assertions. During the British era, the loss of small patches of lands to cyclones was catalogued in several district reports, gazetteers and other documents. The Tamil writers of the period cited these as evidence supporting the theory about an ancient land lost to the sea.
The books discussing the
Dravidian parties came to power in the 1967 Madras State
elections , the
In 1971, the Government of
The Tamil writers characterized
The isolation resulted in the possibility of describing Kumari Kandam
as a utopian society insulated from external influences and foreign
corruption. Unlike its description in the Kanda Puranam, the Tamil
A land lost to the ocean also helped the Tamil revivalists provide an explanation for the lack of historically verifiable or scientifically acceptable material evidence about this ancient civilization. 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. Connecting the concept of Lemuria to an ancient Tamil civilization allowed the Tamil revivalists to portray a society completely free of Indo-Aryan influence. They could claim that the various signs of the ancient Tamil civilization had been lost in the deep ocean. The later dominance of Sanskrit was offered as another explanation for the deliberate destruction of ancient Tamil works. In the 1950s, R. Nedunceliyan, who later became Tamil Nadu's education minister, published a pamphlet called Marainta Tiravitam ("Lost Dravidian land"). He insisted that the Brahmin historians, being biased towards Sanskrit, had deliberately kept the knowledge of the Tamil's greatness hidden from the public.
CONNECTED WITH SOUTH INDIA
British Raj ,
Kanyakumari was a part of the
most of which was merged to the newly-formed
CRADLE OF CIVILIZATION
According to the
As early as 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,
M. S. Purnalingam Pillai and
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
Some Tamil writers also claimed that the
Indo-Aryans were also
descendants of proto-Dravidians of Kumari Kandam. According to this
Indo-Aryans belonged to a branch which migrated to
PRIMORDIAL BUT NOT PRIMITIVE
The Tamil revivalists did not consider
Suryanarayan Sastri , in 1903, described the antediluvian
expert cultivators, fine poets and far-traveling merchants, who lived
in an egalitarian and democratic society. Savariroyan Pillai, writing
a few years later, described
The Tamil revivalists insisted that the first two Tamil sangams
(literary academies) 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.
In 1902, Chidambaranar published a book called Cenkonraraiccelavu,
claiming that he had 'discovered' the manuscript from "some old cudgan
leaves". The book was presented as a lost-and-found work of the first
Sangam at Tenmadurai. The author of the poem was styled as Mutaluli
Centan Taniyur ("Chentan who lived in Taniyur before the first
deluge"). The work talked about the exploits of an antediluvian Tamil
king Sengon, who ruled the now-submerged kingdom of Peruvalanatu, the
region between the rivers Kumari and Pahruli. According to
Chidambaranar, Sengon was a native of Olinadu, which was located south
Equator ; the king maintained several battleships and conquered
lands as far as
The medieval commentator Adiyarkunallar stated that the size of the
land south of Kanyakumari, lost to the sea was 700 kavatam. The modern
equivalent of kavatam is not known. In 1905, Arasan Shanmugham Pillai
wrote that this land amounted to thousands of miles. According to
Purnalingam Pillai and Suryanarayana Sastri, the number was equivalent
to 7000 miles. Others, such as Abraham Pandither, Aiyan Aarithan,
Devaneyan and Raghava Aiyangar offered estimates ranging from 1,400 to
3,000 miles. According to
U. V. Swaminatha Iyer
The first map to visualize Lemuria as an ancient Tamil territory was published by S. Subramania Sastri in 1916, in the journal Centamil. This map was actually part of an article that criticized the pseudohistorical claims about a lost continent. Sastri insisted that the lost land mentioned in Adiyarkunallar's records was barely equivalent to a taluka (not larger than a few hundred square miles). The map depicted two different versions of Kumari Kandam: that of Sastri, and that of A. Shanmugam Pillai (see above). The lost land was depicted as a peninsula, similar to the present-day Indian peninsula.
In 1927, Purnalingam Pillai published a map titled "Puranic India
before the Deluges", in which he labeled the various places of Kumari
Kandam with names drawn from ancient Tamil and
works. Pulavar Kulanthai, in his 1946 map, was first to depict cities
like Tenmaturai and Kapatapuram on the maps of Kumari Kandam. Several
maps also depicted the various mountain ranges and rivers of Kumari
Kandam. The most elaborate cartographic visualization appeared in a
1977 map by R. Mathivanan. This map showed the 49 nadus mentioned by
Adiyarkunallar, and appears in the
A 1981 map published by N. Mahalingam depicted the lost land as
"Submerged Tamil Nadu" in 30,000 B.C. A 1991 map, created by R.
Mathivanan, showed a land bridge connecting
Indian peninsula to
CRITICISM OF THE CONCEPT
Concept of Lemuria continues to be found in pseudo-scientific literature. The attempts to mix the Lemuria myth with Tamil history have attracted criticism since the late 19th century. One of the earliest criticisms came from M Seshagiri Sastri (1897), who described the claims of ante-diluvial sangams as "a mere fiction originated by the prolific imagination of Tamil poets." CH Monahan wrote a scathing review of Suryanarayana Sastri's Tamilmoliyin Varalaru (1903), shortly after its publication, accusing the author of "abandoning scientific research for mythology". K. N. Sivaraja Pillai (1932) similarly stressed on the need to closely examine the historical authenticity of Sangam works and their commentaries.
K. A. Nilakanta Sastri described the
The same view is also shared by historian K. K. Pillay . He writes
... to accept this is not to accept the view that the entire Lemuria
or Gondvana continent existed in the age of the Tamil Sangam, as is
sometimes believed. Some of the writers on the
Tamil Sangam might have
held that the first Tamil Academy flourished in South
IN POPULAR CULTURE
Kandam (2016), is a Tamil
* ^ Theresa Bane (4 March 2014). Encyclopedia of Imaginary and
Mythical Places. McFarland. pp. 91–. ISBN 978-1-4766-1565-3 .
* ^ Ramaswamy 2004 , pp. 104–108
* ^ A B C D E Richard S. Weiss (22 January 2009). Recipes for
Immortality : Healing, Religion, and Community in South India:
Healing, Religion, and Community in South India. Oxford University
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* ^ Ramaswamy 2004 , p. 268
* ^ C. Brito (1884). "Curiosities of Tamil Literature".
Orientalist: A Journal of Oriental Literature, Arts, and Sciences
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* ^ Ramaswamy 2004 , pp. 105–106
* ^ A B Ramaswamy 2004 , pp. 204–211
* ^ William P. Harman (1992). The Sacred Marriage of a Hindu
Motilal Banarsidass . p. 39. ISBN 978-81-208-0810-2 .
* ^ Shulman 1980 , pp. 55-56.
* ^ A B C D Ramaswamy 2004 , pp. 143–145
* ^ Kalittokai 104:1–4
Purananuru 6:1–2, 17:1, 67:6.
* ^ Shulman 1980 , pp. 57-69.
* ^ Shulman 1980 , p. 57.
* ^ Shulman 1980 , p. 62.
* ^ Ramaswamy 2004 , p. 99
Henry Francis Blanford (1874) . The Rudiments of Physical
Geography. Thacker, Spink. pp. 119–20.
* ^ Ramaswamy 2004 , p. 55
* ^ Ramaswamy 2004 , pp. 101–102
* ^ Ramaswamy 2004 , p. 266
* ^ Nallasami Pillai, J. 1898. Ancient Tamil Civilization. The
Light of Truth or Siddhanta Deepika 2, no. 5: 109–13.
* ^ Ramaswamy 2004 , p. 103
* ^ A B S. Christopher Jayakaran (9–22 April 2011). "The Lemuria
myth". Frontline. 28 (8).
* ^ Ramaswamy 2004 , pp. 98–100
* ^ Ramaswamy 2004 , pp. 178–179
* ^ Ramaswamy 2004 , p. 105
* ^ Ramaswamy 2004 , p. 174
* ^ A B Ramaswamy 2004 , p. 151
* Ramaswamy, Sumathi (2004). The Lost Land of Lemuria: Fabulous Geographies, Catastrophic Histories. University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-24032-2 . * Shulman, David Dean (1980). Tamil Temple Myths: Sacrifice and Divine Marriage in the South Indian Saiva Tradition. Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-1-4008-5692-3 . * Jayakaran, S. C. (2004). "Lost Land and the Myth of Kumari Kandam". Indian Folklore Research Journal. 1(4): 94-109.
* v * t * e
Continents of the world
* HISTORICAL CONTINENTS
* See also Regions of the world * Continental fragment
* BOOK *