The Hindu Business Line : Battle lines between ocean & land

"THE mind grieves when it thinks of Cape Kumari for it brings back memories of the seizure of southern Tamil Nadu by the ocean, and the consequent loss... Both creation and destruction are part of God's play," is a 1955 quote of C. Muthuvirasami Naidu that Sumathi Ramaswamy cites in her new book, Fabulous Geographies, Catastrophic Histories. She is Associate Professor of History at the University of Michigan, and her work weaves in poetry, nostalgia and laments, picked up on the trail of the lost land of Lemuria. But there are lines, such as those in the above quote, that seem meaningful in the aftermath of tsunami.

Lemuria is a lost continent, that had an "obscure and humble birth in 1864" when Philip Lutley Sclater wrote in a paper that, "some land-connection must have existed in former ages between Madagascar and India."

An explanation, that was, for the mammal fauna, and more specifically the lemur.

He wrote of "a large continent" that occupied "parts of the Atlantic and Indian oceans" stretching out towards "America to the West and to India and its islands on the East", before proposing the name `Lemuria' for the land mass.

For Tamils, the land was Kumarinadu, points out Sumathi. And what was left, after the ocean seized their possession, is the present Tamil Nadu.

"If Tamil speakers were the original inhabitants of Lemuria, this made them, ipso facto, the most ancient peoples of the world," is a thought for mulling over.

If you came across an ad for a book with a visual showing "waves pounding away at the shores where men and women are seen in flight as the tall neoclassical edifices of the stricken land start to crumble," you'd think it is about tsunami, but one such was for the 1931 work by Wishar Cervé on Lemuria.

That ad had spoken of how Lemurians had attained an exalted culture, wresting from nature her proudest secrets, but... "Then nature reclaimed her power. With a tremendous convulsion she plunged the civilisation of demi-gods beneath the levelling waters. Again she reigned supreme, the victor over man's greatest efforts."

For Tamils, "the ocean takes on a life of its own," as a villain, mercilessly land-grabbing, with a vengeance.

"O Indian Ocean! Where did you conceal our Tamil Nadu, our ripe old land? Why did you plunder the 49 Tamil territories thousands of years ago," wails a 1945 quote of A.M. Paramasivanandam.

"The battle lines are clearly drawn in the Tamil country where labours of loss are also labours of grief, in which the ocean is the principal enemy of the Tamil people and of their drowned ancestral homeland," declares Sumathi.

When tsunami appears transliterated and not translated in the vernacular press, one wonders if there's no word for it in Tamil.

Would katalkôl meaning `seizure by the sea' be apt? "All of Tamil devotion's ocean fears and fantasies turn around this word," observes the author.

It may sound creepy, but she cites K.P. Aravaanan's suggestion that Tamizh has amizh meaning `to submerge'.

"In his reckoning, Tamilians are those people who survived submergence by the sea: they were named as such by their ancestors so that they might remember this original catastrophe."

Perhaps that explains to Sumathi why the typical Tamil "lives a life of loss, forever in exile from an imagined state of plenitude and perfection, of which he can only dream but never ever attain."

That comment may hold good for the survivors of the recent tsunami; and despite therapy, their trauma may take long to wear off.

Even as governments plan to build a sea wall to define the battle lines between the ocean and the humans, a niggling unease is still unsure whether katalkôl is biding its time to do some unfinished task.

SayCheek@TheHindu.co.in

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Battle lines between ocean & land