To those of us who grew up reading a whole slew of dubious books about lost continents and fabled civilisations, Lemuria was on a par with Mu and Atlantis. However, where Mu was largely a creation of James Churchward, the less familiar Lemuria was at least equal in mystery and heritage to Atlantis. As Atlantis was one of the stars of the Western occult tradition, so Lemuria had been adopted and adapted by Theosophists from the mythology of Southern India. During the 19th century, Lemuria was thought to be a land-bridge between India and Africa, or possibly extending south from India towards Antarctica, but it disappeared like its Atlantic counterpart beneath the waves (some tens of thousands of years BC).
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| The idea that Tamil ancestors migrated from a land that sank beneath the waves was taught in Tamil schools until quite recently |
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The author - a professor of history at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor - explains that her main thesis is about cultural loss and disenchantment: as modern scientific and intellectual rationalisation of the sciences "disavows truths that once mattered and discards wonders that had once captivated, the world is leached of magic, mystery and marvel." She proposes that preoccupation with such loss "manifests itself in the fascination with vanished homelands, hidden civilisations and forgotten peoples" and that this has shown up in poetics, politics, ideologies and even sciences.
In this remarkable and fascinating study, Ramaswamy follows the fortunes of this lost world, its champions and those who sought to disenchant its believers, in what she calls their "labors of loss".
Lemuria was, Ramaswamy argues, many things to many people at different times, but all agree that it was a palaso-world, "a land before our time, where forests loomed large and dinosaurs roamed" - a place that Michel Meurger would call a "mythological landscape" - shaped by the very human imaginative need for such a place. Its modern reinvention occurred almost coincidentally at the point the 'palaeodisciplines' - the 'deep time' aspects of natural history, geology, zoology and anthropology-were emerging as the most prestigious sciences of the 19th century. Indeed, the popular appeal of'lost continents', she writes, was an inevitable antidote to the deliberate dryness of these emerging sciences, just as they were a reaction in turn to earlier traditions of romance and imagination. Yet unlike Atlantis (whose origins lay in Plato's musings), Lemuria seems to have had a scientific birth.
Up until 1774, educated opinion followed Bishop Ussher in considering the world to be about 6,000 years old; but in this year the French count and scientist Buf fon realised this was not enough time to allow for natural geological processes - so he recalculated it as 75,000 years.
Rapid and regular revisions followed as geologists reasoned from their remarkable observations of this planet's structure and how it had to be formed. But it was James Hutton's revolutionary Theory oj'theEarth in 1788 that finally severed the science from its narrow-minded religious past, in which he wrote of a "succession of worlds" with no discernable beginning or end as mountains were worn down, seabeds rose and strata folded.
Lemuria was a 'mythological landscape' shaped by the very human need for such a place With descriptions of constant change and a greater depth of time came the image of catastrophe - to be precise, of lands sinking beneath the waves - almost a scientific echo of the Biblical myth of Noah's flood, and new discoveries in palaeontology and archaeology were adding that living creatures too - animals and even man - arose, flourished and died away. Soon, catastrophism gave way to the theories of the great rationalisers like Lyell and Darwin that geological and evolutionary processes were long and gradual. Into this mix came Philip Sclater, an English zoologist who puzzled about why there were many more types of lemurs in Madagascar than in India and Africa and - yes, you guessed it - in a paper in 1864, proposed that there must have been a land-bridge between the two continents of which Madagascar is the only part remaining above the waves. "I propose the name Lemuria," he wrote.
Actually, Sclater supposed that Africa, too, was a remnant and the lost continent extended all the way to the Americas, explaining some similarities between New World simians and Old World lemurs. Among many more obscure examples (Prof Ramaswamy's research throughout the book is engagingly thorough) she mentions that Darwin's rival Alfred Wallace - who later became a critic of the idea of the role of'lost continents' in the distribution of animals - himself used the device in 1859 to explain anomalies of the fauna of far eastern islands, as did Edward Forbes in 1846 to explain the similarities of the mid-Atlantic island fauna.
Astonishing as it may seem now, the great biologist Ernst Haeckel suggested in 1870, that the lost Lemurian land-bridge was "the probable cradle of the human race". Indeed, the usefulness of the idea was so popular that Darwin himself complained to Lyell about the proliferation of rising and sinking lands. Although it did fall out of favour due to greater understanding of geology and oceanography, it also paved the way for another revolutionary theory-Wegener's drifting continents.
The clashing of the great crustal plates provided just the kind of continent-sinking quakes and tsunamis that would satisfy the catastrophists. Sclater would have been startled to learn that, just over a century later, his ancient supercontinent that spanned two oceans would be renamed Gondwanaland and its correspondence "with the Lemuria of zoologists" acknowledged. Chapter 2 discusses these hypothetical homelands of the 'missing link' - they were usually called 'Indo-Oceania' or the 'Indo-African' continent, or similar, rarely Lemuria - in considerable detail, including their supposed extent. Even the islands of Mauritius and the Seychelles were widely claimed to be the peaks of this sunken W Scott-Elliott's map of Lemuria land. Such ideas persisted within the establishment until 1939, when an Anglo-Egyptian expedition crisscrossed the ocean making echo-soundings and concluding there was no evidence for any "hypothetical continent of Gondwanaland or the isthmus of Lemuria" in the area.
During the late 1800s, when this planet's geology was being radically revised, the idea of Lemuria appealed strongly to Western occultists who quickly peopled it with the near-magical progenitors of modern man. The most famous and influential version was enshrined in Helena Blavatsky's Isis Unveiled (1877) and became a core tenet of her Theosophical movement (although she relocates Lemuria to the Pacific Ocean). Her disciple, W Scott-Elliot - in The Lost Lemuria (1904) - described it (using a mode of clairvoyance) as an Edenic paradise in which man co-existed with the full complement of Mesozoic dinosaurs and reptiles.
Chapter 3 explores, thoroughly, the legacy of this extraordinary synthesis of science and occultism, its influence on the burgeoning interest in Atlantis and Mu. In particular, the suggestion that survivors from the Lemurian cataclysm relocated to California and rebuilt their civilisation around the Mount Shasta, sacred to the Amerindians of that area (who are, of course, the descendants of Lemurians) survives today in several New Age forms (including the cultish beliefs in ufology, reincarnation, astral travel, mediumship and lost worlds).
There follow chapters on the catastrophes that drowned so many 'lost lands' and on the efforts of cartographers to locate Lemuria in relation to known lands. If this were not already enough to make this book vital to anyone interested in 'lost lands', Professor Ramaswamy's long chapters on the Tamil tradition of a submerged homeland called Kumarinatu - which extended some 7,000 miles (11,250km) southwards from India and Sri Lanka - make it priceless, not least because this is new territory for most of us.
There was a pre-existing mythic theme of flooded lands before the palaso-scientific and Theosophical debates, but it remained in the realm of myth.
When new discoveries forced Western scientists to abandon the idea of 'lost continents', Tamil intellectuals readily appropriated the scientific Lemuria as the lost homeland of the proto-Dravidians. For them, it explained (among other things) the mystery of the origin of the Dravidians in southern India (the Aryans were believed to be later arrivals) when there was no trace in the north of their supposed passage southwards.
The idea that Tamil ancestors migrated northwards, from a land that sank beneath the waves, was taught in Tamil schools until quite recently (1981). One noted scholar-NCKandiah Pillai - fashioned a new myth (for children) out of old elements: that Kumarinatu was ruled by virgin queens who worshipped the mother goddess in the form of Kanyakumari who battles demons.The land was also identified with the legendary Tamilakam, home of the Pandya dynasty (which ruled southern India for most of the first millennium) and the renowned literary academies that preserved the poetic histories.
Some of the more charitable critics attributed the Tamil sense of 'a lost origin' to the historical chaos of the wars of the Pandayan period, grudgingly supposing that a memory of the submerged homeland (which they did not dispute) might indeed be encoded in myth. However, as international cultural differences came into play, the full weight of Western academic scepticism fell on the "Dravidian dreamland" like another cataclysm. As Professor Ramaswamy summarises: it was unacceptable that "Tamil speakers, let alone human beings, lived in the age of dinosaurs... [that] alandmass extended all the way to Antarctica... [and that] no one else but Tamil poets lived to tell about it."
Nevertheless, the subject has endured and Professor Ramaswamy's book is a testament to its highest critical quality.The journey through the heavy landscape of academic semantics and abstruse detours on the politics of imagination is hard work, but the slog is forgotten in the joy of discovering a new place.
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