Kumari Kandam

, Kumarikka am) is the name of a supposed sunken Kumari Kandam (Tamil: landmass referred to in existing ancient Tamil literature. It is said to have been located in the Indian Ocean, to the south of present-day Kanyakumari district at the southern tip of India.

References in Tamil literature

There are scattered references in Sangam literature, such as Kalittokai 104, to how the sea took the land of the Pandiyan kings, upon which they conquered new lands to replace those they had lost.[1]There are also references to the rivers Pahruli and Kumari, that are said to have flowed in a now-submerged land. The Silappadhikaram, a 5th century epic, states that the "cruel sea" took the Pandiyan land that lay between the rivers Pahruli and the mountainous banks of the Kumari, to replace which the Pandiyan king conquered lands belonging to the Chola and Chera kings (Maturaikkandam, verses 17-22). Adiyarkkunallar, a 12th century commentator on the epic, explains this reference by saying that there was once a land to the south of the present-day Kanyakumari, which stretched for 700 Kavatams from the Pahruli river in the north to the Kumari river in the south. The length of a kavatam is unknown, with estimates varying from 7,000 miles (11,000 km) to 1,400 miles (2,300 km), others suggesting a loss of 6-7,000 square miles, or even just a few villages. This land was divided into 49 nadu, or territories, which he names as seven coconut territories (elutenga natu), seven Madurai territories (elumaturai natu), seven old sandy territories (elumunpalai natu), seven new sandy territories (elupinpalai natu), seven mountain territories (elukunra natu), seven eastern coastal territories (elukunakarai natu) and seven dwarf-palm territories (elukurumpanai natu). All these lands, he says, together with the many-mountained land that began with KumariKollam, with forests and habitations, were submerged by the sea Two of these Nadus or territories were supposedly parts of presentday Kollam and Kanyakumari districts. None of these texts name the land "Kumari Kandam" or "Kumarinadu", as is common today. The only similar premodern reference is to a "Kumari Kandam" (written , rather than as

the land is called in modern Tamil), which is named in the medieval Tamil text "Kantapuranam" either as being one of the nine continents or one of the nine divisions of India and the only region not to be inhabited by barbarians 19th and 20th Tamil revivalist movements, however, came to apply the name to the territories described in Adiyarkkunallar's commentary to the Silappadhikaram. They also associated this territory with the references in the Tamil Sangams, and said that the fabled cities of southern Madurai and Kapatapuram where the first two Sangams were said to be held were located on Kumari Kandam.

In Tamil national mysticism

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Tamil nationalists came to identify Kumari Kandam with Lemuria, a hypothetical "lost continent" posited in the 19th century to account for discontinuities inbiogeography. In these accounts, Kumari Kandam became the "cradle of civilization", the origin of human languages in general and the Tamil language in particular. These ideas gained notability in Tamil academic literature over the first decades

of the 20th century, and were popularized by the Tanittamil Iyakkam, notably by selftaught Dravidologist Devaneya Pavanar, who held that all languages on earth were merely corrupted Tamil dialects. R. Mathivanan, then Chief Editor of the Tamil Etymological Dictionary Project of the Government of Tamil Nadu, in 1991 claimed to have deciphered the still undeciphered Indus script as Tamil, following the methodology recommended by his teacher Devaneya Pavanar, presenting the following timeline (cited after Mahadevan 2002): ca. 200,000 to 50,000 BC: evolution of "the Tamilian or Homo Dravida", ca. 200,000 to 100,000 BC: beginnings of the Tamil language 50,000 BC: Kumari Kandam civilisation 20,000 BC: A lost Tamil culture of the Easter Island which had an advanced civilisation 16,000 BC: Lemuria submerged 6087 BC: Second Tamil Sangam established by a Pandya king 3031 BC: A Chera prince in his wanderings in the Solomon Island saw wild sugarcane and started cultivation in Kumari Kandam. 1780 BC: The Third Tamil Sangam established by a Pandya king 7th century BC: Tolkappiyam (the earliest known extant Tamil grammar) Mathivanan uses "Aryan Invasion" rhetoric to account for the fall of this civilization: "After imbibing the mania of the Aryan culture of destroying the enemy and their habitats, the Dravidians developed a new avenging and destructive war approach. This induced them to ruin the forts and cities of their own brethren out of enmity". Mathivanan claims his interpretation of history is validated by the discovery of the "Jaffna seal", a seal bearing a Tamil-Brahmi inscription assigned by its excavators to the 3rd century BC (but claimed by Mathivanan to date to 1600 BC). Mathivanan's theories are not considered mainstream by the contemporary university academy internationally.

Popular culture
Kumari Kandam appeared in the The Secret Saturdays episodes "The King of Kumari Kandam" and "The Atlas Pin." This version is a city on the back of a giant sea serpent with its inhabitants all fish people.

Loss and imagination

Sumathi Ramaswamy's book, The Lost Land of Lemuria: Fabulous Geographies, Catastrophic Histories (2004) is a theoretically sophisticated[citation
needed]

study of the Lemuria legends that widens the discussion beyond previous

treatments [citation needed], looking at Lemuria narratives from nineteenth-century Victorian-era science to EuroAmerican occultism, colonial, and post colonial India. Ramaswamy discusses particularly how cultures process the experience of loss.

Lemuria (continent)
Lemuria (pronounced /l mj ri /) is the name of a hypothetical "lost land" variously located in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. The concept's 19th century origins lie in attempts to account for discontinuities in biogeography; however, the concept of Lemuria has been rendered obsolete by modern theories ofplate tectonics. Although sunken continents do exist like Zealandia in the Pacific and the Kerguelen Plateau in the Indian Ocean there is no known geological formation under the Indian or Pacific Oceans that corresponds to the hypothetical Lemuria. Though Lemuria is no longer considered a valid scientific hypothesis, it has been adopted by writers involved in the occult, as well as some Tamil writers ofIndia. Accounts of Lemuria differ, but all share a common belief that a continent existed in ancient times and sank beneath the ocean as a result of a geological, often cataclysmic, change. There is no scientific evidence to support these claims.

Scientific origins
In 1864 the zoologist and biogeographer Philip Sclater wrote an article on "The Mammals of Madagascar" in The Quarterly Journal of Science. Using a classification he referred to as lemurs but which included related primate groups,[2] and puzzled by the presence of their fossils in both Madagascar and India but not in Africa or the Middle East, Sclater proposed that Madagascar and India had once been part of a larger continent. He wrote: The anomalies of the Mammal fauna of Madagascar can best be explained by supposing that... a large continent occupied parts of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans... that this continent was broken up into islands, of which some have become amalgamated with... Africa, some... with what is now Asia; and that in Madagascar and the Mascarene Islands we have existing relics of this great continent, for which... I should propose the name Lemuria! Sclater's theory was hardly unusual for his time. tienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, also looking at the relationship between animals in India and Madagascar, had suggested a southern continent about two decades before Sclater, but did not give it a name. The acceptance of Darwinism led scientists to seek to trace the diffusion of species from their points of evolutionary origin. Prior to the acceptance of continental drift, biologists frequently postulated submerged land masses in order to account for populations of land-based species now separated by barriers of water. Similarly, geologists tried to account for striking resemblances of rock formations on different continents. The first systematic attempt was made by Melchior Neumayr in his book Erdgeschichte in 1887. Many hypotheticalsubmerged land bridges and continents were proposed during the 19th century, in order to account for the present distribution of species. After gaining some acceptance within the scientific community, the concept of Lemuria began to appear in the works of other scholars. Ernst Haeckel, a German Darwinian taxonomist, proposed Lemuria as an explanation for the absence of "missing link" fossil records. According to another source, Haeckel put forward this thesis prior to

Sclater (but without using the name 'Lemuria').Locating the origins of the human species on this lost continent, he claimed the fossil record could not be found because it had sunk beneath the sea. Other scientists hypothesized that Lemuria had extended across parts of the Pacific oceans, seeking to explain distributions of species across Asia and the Americas.

Superseded
The Lemuria theory disappeared completely from conventional scientific consideration after the theories of plate tectonics and continental drift were accepted by the larger scientific community. According to the theory of plate tectonics (now the only accepted paradigm in geology), Madagascar and India were indeed once part of the same landmass (thus accounting for geological resemblances), but plate movement caused India to break away millions of years ago, and move to its present location. The original landmass broke apart - it did not sink beneath sea level. In 1999, drilling by the JOIDES Resolution research vessel in the Indian Ocean discovered evidence that a large island, the Kerguelen Plateau, was submerged about 20 million years ago by rising sea levels. Samples showed pollen and fragments of wood in a 90 million-year-old sediment. Although this discovery might encourage scholars to expect similarities in dinosaur fossil evidence, and may contribute to understanding the breakup of the Indian and Australian land masses, it does not support the concept of Lemuria as a land bridge for mammals. If this continent were to exist, Australia would have to be sideways while attached to half of Antarctica and Madagascar. Sri Lanka would also be attached to Australia while India would need to have drifted more from its current position it is in today. For Australia to be in its current position, the polar shift theory of a northern boundary in the east would have to be put into effect. The continent would have had to be in the Pacific after it detached from India for it to be in the position it is now. The plate movement would have had to had stretched and contracted from all directions into one new continent for its shape to occur. There would be a river in between the two continents and it would extend eastward to a larger, now submerged portion of the continent known as Mu.

Blavatsky, Elliot, and Bramwell

Lemuria entered the lexicon of the Occult through the works of Helena Blavatsky, who claimed in the 1880s to have been shown an ancient, pre-AtlanteanBook of Dzyan by the Mahatmas. According to L. Sprague de Camp, Blavatsky's concept of Lemuria was influenced by other contemporaneous writers on the theme of Lost Continents, notably Ignatius L. Donnelly, American cult leader Thomas Lake Harris and the French writer Louis Jacolliot. Within Blavatsky's complex cosmology, which includes seven "Root Races", Lemuria was occupied by the "Third Root Race", described as about 7 feet (2.1 m) tall, sexually hermaphroditic, egg-laying, mentally undeveloped and spiritually more pure than the following "Root Races". Before the coming of the Lemurians, the second "Root Race" is said to have dwelled in Hyperborea. After the subsequent creation of mammals, Mme Blavatsky revealed to her readers, some Lemurians turned to bestiality. The gods, aghast at the behavior of these

"mindless" men, sank Lemuria into the ocean and created a "Fourth Root Race"endowed with intellect on Atlantis. One of the most elaborate accounts of lost continents was given by the later theosophical author William ScottElliot. The English theosophist received his knowledge from Charles Webster Leadbeater, who communicated with the Theosophical Masters by "astral clairvoyance." In 1896 he published The Story of Atlantis, followed in 1904 by The Lost Lemuria, in which he included a map of the continent of Lemuria as stretching from the east coast of Africa across the Indian and the Pacific Oceans. James Bramwell described Lemuria in his book, Lost Atlantis, as a continent that occupied a large part of what is now the South Pacific Ocean. Bramwell described the people of Lemuria in detail and attributed them with being one of the root-races of humanity. According to Bramwell, Lemurians are the ancestors of the Atlanteans, who survived the period of the general racial decadence which affected the Lemurians in the last stages of their evolution. From a select division of the Atlanteans - after their promotion to decadence - Bramwell claims the Aryan race arose. Lemurians, Atlanteans, and Aryans are root-races of humanity, according to Bramwell.

Lemuria and Mount Shasta

In 1894, Frederick Spencer Oliver published A Dweller on Two Planets, which claimed that survivors from a sunken continent called Lemuria were living in or on Mount Shasta in northern California. Oliver claimed the Lemurians lived in a complex of tunnels beneath the mountain and occasionally were seen walking the surface dressed in white robes. This belief has been repeated by such individuals as the cultist Guy Warren Ballard in the 1930s who formed the I AM Foundation. It is also repeated by followers of the Ascended Masters and theGreat White Brotherhood. This list includes such organizations as Bridge to Freedom, The Summit Lighthouse, Church Universal and Triumphant, and The Hearts Center. Nowadays this thesis is also described by Kryon.

Kumari Kandam and Lemuria

Kumari Kandam is a legendary sunken kingdom sometimes compared with Lemuria (cf. works of G. Devaneyan, Tamil: ). In Tamil tradition, Kumari Kandam is referred to as the Land of Purity, a

sophisticated kingdom of higher learning, located south of Kanyakumari (Cape Comorin). A violent geologic catastrophe left the entire island submerged under the water. The survivors migrated to the present Indian subcontinent and supposedly sparked the Indus Valley Civilization. This mass of land is often compared to the island of Lemuria According to these modernist interpretations of motifs in classical Tamil literature the epics Cilappatikaram and Manimekalai that describe the submerged city of Puhar (Tamil: ) ]

the Dravidians originally came from land south of the present-day coast of South India that became submerged

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