The Mythical Lost Continent of Kumari Kandam
The Mythical Lost Continent of Kumari Kandam
Did the sunken continent of Kumari Kandam really exist south of the Indian subcontinent or is it just another myth?
The Atlantis of India
I suppose most of us would have heard about Atlantis.
Atlantis was a mysterious island described by the Greek philosopher Plato that was home to an advanced civilization. Then one day, as the story goes, the island sank beneath the sea without a trace.
Further east in the subcontinent of India is a similar tale, though it is probably not as well-known as Atlantis. The vast landmass extending from the south of today’s Indian peninsula to as far to the west as Madagascar and to the east up to Australia was called Kumari Kandam or the Lemuria continent that was swallowed by the seas and eventually lost forever.
Interestingly the term Kumari Kandam has also been mentioned in several ancient Tamil literary works starting from the 1st Century BCE. According to the stories, the Pandiyan kings of Kumari Kandam were the rulers of the whole Indian continent, and the Tamil language spoken by them is the oldest surviving language in the world.
And once Kumari Kandam was submerged into the sea, the people who survived migrated to other parts of the world and founded other civilizations. Thus, the lost continent of Kumari Kandam is also claimed to be the cradle of human civilization.
The Continent of Lemuria
The story of Kumari Kandam starts with the continent of Lemuria, proposed by the English geologist Philip Sclater in 1864.
In his 1864 article entitled ‘The Mammals of Madagascar,’ Sclater proposed that Madagascar and India were once part of a larger continent and named this missing landmass ‘Lemuria’. His theory was accepted because we find lemurs on both continents. This may be possible, as lemurs could have migrated from Madagascar to India or vice versa in ancient times.
Later in the 1890s, Tamil scholars began to detect similarities between Sclater’s Lemuria and the legend of Kumari Kandam from ancient Tamil and Sanskrit literature. The idea caught hold, and soon ‘Lemuria’ became the golden kingdom of Kumari Kandam.
It was the colonial era in India, and nationalistic sentiments against the British were on a high and the idea of a lost ‘glorious’ Indian kingdom became the perfect launch pad to whip the patriotic sentiments into a fervor of pride and nationalism.
The Legend of Kumari Kandam
The earliest mention of this golden continent appeared in the works of the Tamil poet Nakkeerar from the 1st Century BC. He describes a vast, bountiful land ruled by Pandiyan kings, an early Tamil dynasty. He talks about fertile land overflowing with milk, honey, and riches. There were big mountain ranges having forty-eight high peaks and nine rivers flowing through them.
One of the rivers, the Pahruli River, was dammed to irrigate the mountain valley by the Pandyan King Nediyon. Ruby was mined from one mountain Mani Malai and gold from another, Meru Malai. The Kings engaged laborers from as far as Africa and China to mine gold and construct various architectural wonders.
Another work, Silapathikaram, a literary work by Ilangovadigal, gives further details about the land. Ilangovadigal talks about seven kings and 49 vassal kings who ruled this continent. He also describes two vast rivers, namely Pahruli in the North and Kumari in the South, which was south of the present-day Kanyakumari that provided the sweet waters to irrigate and feed the entire continent.
Apart from the above works, other Tamil literary works like Purananuru, Tolkappiyam, and Kalithokkai mention the submerged landmass at various ages and under various kings.
Surprisingly, none of the literary works mention the exact date or cause of the submersion of Kumari Kandam. They all talk about kadalkol, a Tamil word for a giant tsunami that broke Kumari Kandam into two parts and submerged it into the sea forever. The survivors who escaped swam to other continents and established new civilizations, thus making it the cradle of humankind.
Is It Yet Another Myth?
Well, scientifically speaking, continents can be submerged in the sea. According to India’s National Institute of Oceanography researchers, the sea level was lower by 100 m about 14,500 years ago and by 60 m about 10,000 years ago.
Therefore, there may have been land connections connecting the island of Sri Lanka to mainland India and even Africa. And as the rate of global warming increased between 12,000 and 10,000 years ago, the rising sea levels might have resulted in periodic flooding, and a catastrophic tsunami might have occurred at some point in time, submerging Kumari Kandam.
As Conall Mac Niocaill, a geologist at the University of Oxford, tells us.
“A lot of microcontinents could be lurking beneath the Indian Ocean. We know more about the topography of Mars than we do about the [topography] of the world's ocean floor, so there may well be other dismembered continents out there waiting to be discovered.”
Therefore, in a nutshell, the existence of Kumari Kandam is full of controversy and raises many interesting questions. It is entirely up to you to believe, but personally speaking, the idea of a long-lost prosperous continent is quite fascinating.