It’s not often that you can turn to geology to settle a racial argument along political lines. In the case of the “Dravidian Problem,” it was tectonic plate theory that put to rest the scientific doubt over an ancient lost continent in the Indian Ocean.
Lemuria occupies the same space in submerged mythologies as Atlantis. If you opened a Tamil school textbook in the 1920s, you might have seen a curious addition to the map of the world – the continent of “Kumarikandam” or “Land of the Virgin” (Kumari) – nestled to the South of the Indian subcontinent, where the Indian Ocean now flows.
For many years, Lemuria and Kumarikandam were the same theorized landmasses; though the former is called so by 19th-century European geologists, and the latter, by Tamil nationalists. The Europeans took the name from the zoologist Phillip Lutely Sclater, who was looking for a way to explain how the lemurs that originated in Madagascar found their way to India. An ancient land bridge, spanning from Africa to Asia, was his answer. He later linked it as far East as Indonesia.
A lost continent did more than just link primates together. It provided a feasible explanation for why Indo-Aryan languages are so different from their Dravidian counterparts. Colonial writings from the 1880s state that the ancestors of Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada and Telugu speakers once inhabited a vast continent; the ‘primitive’ home of India’s ‘aboriginal’ population. Some authors went a step further and argued man himself had evolved from “some animal of a land now sunk beneath the Indian Ocean.”
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