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 in biogeography. 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 self-taught DravidologistDevaneya 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 Euro-American occultism, colonial, and post colonial India. Ramaswamy discusses particularly how cultures process the experience of loss. Professor Karsten M. Storetvedt, the chair in geomagnetism at the University of Bergen, Norway, and an author of the Global Wrench Theory (GWT), says that the equator regions have always been most prone to natural catastrophes like earthquakes and volcano eruptions. A part of explanation is that planet rotation and especially the difference in rotation speed between poles and equator force earth mantel to strain and to break more easily where the strain is strongest, that is at the equator regions. These tectonic processes played important role in the disappearance of the ancient continent known as Lemuria to western scholars. Sri Lanka together with India, Indonesia and Malaysia were a part of this continent. Many islands in the Pacific and Indian oceans are remnants of this continent that in ancient time covered the whole area of today’s ocean. Storetvedt, who seems to reject the theory of continental drift and plate tectonics, says that descriptions of cataclysms in early literature when land suddenly went underwater are logical. But they should be proven to be scientific facts. This can be done with the help of sea-floor analysis that is possible to carry out. Modern theories find supportive evidences both in ancient literature and language history. For More Information, Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kumari_Kandam http://www.thehindu.com/news/states/tamil-nadu/article482101.ece http://lemuria-kumarinadu.blogspot.com/ Image: #Madurai (City in south #India 3000+ years old) #Meenakshi #Temple. #Dravidian #Architecture