The lost continent of Kumari Kandam

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I’m sure the science-fiction geeks amongst y’all know about the lost continents of Atlantis, Lemuria and Mu. These are the “missing continents” that were submerged in the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific oceans respectively.

[The story of Atlantis has its origin in the Platonic dialogues, while Lemuria was hypothesized in the late 1800s as an explanation for why there were Lemurs in both Madagascar and India but not in Africa or the Middle East. Both are now beloved of mystics and kooks. Nobody really cares about Mu, although it is sometimes confused with Lemuria.]

However, I’ll bet you’ve never heard of the Tamil analogue, the lost continent of Kumari Kandam! Proponents say Kumari Kandam is Lemuria, different names for the same continent that once covered most of the Indian ocean:

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. [Link]

The lost continent of Kumari Kandam

It turns out that everything does not actually come from India, it comes from Kumari Kandam. And by everything, I do mean everything.

“Homo Dravida” first evolved in Kumari Kandam; it is the cradle of civilization; the birthplace of all languages in general and of the Tamil language in particular. This is where the first and second great ages (Sangams?) of the Tamils happened, not in India, but in the true Dravidian homeland, further south.

R. Mathivanan, then Chief Editor of the Tamil Etymological Dictionary Project of the Government of Tamilnadu, in 1991 … [produced] the following timeline …:

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 Tamilnadu.
1780 BC: The Third Tamil Sangam established by a Pandya king
7th century BC: Tolkappiyam (the earliest extant Tamil grammar)… [Link]

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p>The continent was destroyed by three large floods which wiped out most of the golden civilization with it:

It is believed by some Tamil scholars that the first academy existed at southern Maturai and was terminated by sea devouring the city. The Pandya king established a second academy at Kapadapuram. Again, the sea devoured the city. The Pandya king established the third academy in present Maturai (far away from sea coast). [Link]

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p>What was left was later wiped out by the Aryan invasion that corrupted the remnants of the once great Tamil civilizations:

“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”. [Link]

I’m looking forward to seeing a version of the comic book Lemuria entirely settled by Tamils. When Aquaman or Namor come to visit, they can serve them Dosa/Idli .

134 thoughts on “The lost continent of Kumari Kandam”

  1. It is believed by some Tamil scholars that the first academy existed at southern Maturai and was terminated by sea devouring the city. The Pandya king established a second academy at Kapadapuram. Again, the sea devoured the city. The Pandya king established the third academy in present Maturai (far away from sea coast). [Link]

    This brings to mind the effects of the last tsunami in that area. If you remember, a strong majority of the land was covered with water. I wonder if it’s a feasible argument. Interesting post, Ennis.

  3. Regardless of many of these exagerrated claims, there is an element of truth to them. Gondwanaland is accepted as true based on plate techtonics and extrapolated to 200 million years ago. Whether there were remnants of human civilisation during the last ice age about 11,000 years ago who knows. More study is needed.

  4. ca. 200,000 to 50,000 BC: evolution of “the Tamilian or Homo Dravida”

    It seems like Dravidian homeys have been around a long time 🙂 Tolkapiyaar, the famous Tamil grammar, is dated to the 1st century BC (I think), so while Tamil culture is indeed ancient, its nowhere near as hoary as these ridiculous timelines suggest. Tamil chavinism is the stepchild of the Aryan Invasion Theory, and the chauvinism of various North Indians and South Indian Brahmins claiming they are of Aryan, Scythian or even European descent. The Maharashtrian Brahmin Lokmanya Tilak, known now as a populist freedom fighter, posited that the Aryans (and thus the Indian upper castes) came from the North Pole.

  5. The 16,000 BC date is close enough to the beginning of the end of the previous ice age , so melting ice causing low lying areas like Kumari Kandam could have been inundated causing it to sink and leading upto the present day land features that we see now, and could explain the historical memory of the mutamil sangams.

  6. Are they claiming that Dravidians aren’t Homo Sapiens? The Tamilians are Homo Dravida seems like crock to me, because genetic research should be able to figure that out pretty easily.

    Or are they claiming that Homo Sapiens absorbed culture from a lost civilization developed by proto-humans? That seems more likely but still far-fetched. Wouldn’t such an advanced civilization leave some evidence of itself? How did Homo Dravida become tottally extinct

  7. The Tamilians are Homo Dravida seems like crock to me, because genetic research should be able to figure that out pretty easily.

    tamilians are an outgroup to h. sapiens. they live so far south that gene flow between sapiens and dravida as been low, resulting in pre and postzygotic mating barriers.

  8. resulting in pre and postzygotic mating barriers.

    And all this time I thought being a tamilian was quite normal 🙁

  9. tamilians are an outgroup to h. sapiens.

    Again, do you have any evidence of that?

  10. Homo Dravida:

    Similarly, Edgar Thurston identified a “Homo Dravida” who had more in common with the Australian aboriginals than their Indo-Aryan or high-caste neighbors. As evidence, he adduced the use of the boomerang by Kallan and Marawan warriors and the proficiency at tree-climbing among both the Kadirs of the Anamalai hills and the Dayaks of Borneo.[15]. Interestingly, the idea was embraced by national mysticist Tamil activists, and in 1966 Devaneya Pavanar would endorse the separate identity of Thurston’s “Homo Dravida” as the purest descendant of the people of the sunken continent of Kumari Kandam.

  11. Ennis– please to elucidate. If humans evolved in Kumari Kandam, did ALL humans come from there–and if so, where did the Aryans come from? — personally I’m not an AI Theory fan, but still, enquiring minds want to know.

  12. Again, do you have any evidence of that?

    tamil mtDNA tends to coalesce recently, supporting the out-of-africa theory for humans. but, tamil Y chromosomes exhibit deep time divergence from other homonoid groups. this suggests that

    a) either the tamil males preferred human females, or, human female lineages introgressed

    b) tamils were andro-parthenogenetic prior to the introduction of human females

    so i apologize, the tamils are a hybrid speciation event. not an outgroup on all gene lineages….

  14. Sangams actually refer to academies, not ages. Here’s the wikipedia entry (standard caveats apply). The era b/w 200 BC and 200 AD is known as the Sangam era, and witnessed a remarkable flourisihng of Tamil poetry -mostly secular, some even erotic- which stands in marked contrast to the religious compositions that arose later, in the period of the alwars and nayanmars. The title of Vikram Chandra’s novel, Red Earth and Pouring Rain. was based on a Tamil Sangam poem. Here’s AK Ramanujam’s translation:

    What could my mother be to yours? What kin is my father to yours anyway? And how Did you and I meet ever? But in love our hearts have mingled as red earth and pouring rain mingled beyond parting.

  15. tamil Y chromosomes exhibit deep time divergence from other homonoid groups.

    Really? I didn’t know that. THat’s interesting

    tamils were andro-parthenogenetic prior to the introduction of human females

    Dude! Lesbian proto-Tamilians. That’s a movie, right there!! Just joking

  16. MoorNam’s theory of Antiquity: The extent of antiquity claimed by culture/populace is inversely proportional to the extent of happiness and satisfaction with the present and the hope for the future.

    M. Nam

  18. Great discussion, I knew very little about most of this and this is very interesting.

    Moornam in #16, you just might have a point there.

  19. Ennis– please to elucidate. If humans evolved in Kumari Kandam, did ALL humans come from there–and if so, where did the Aryans come from? — personally I’m not an AI Theory fan, but still, enquiring minds want to know.

    I have no clue – this is all I could find on the Kumari Kandam myth, I don’t know how its advocates see things at all. The part about Tamils being a separate species is just bizarre to me and demonstrates that they’re smoking something.

  21. I have no clue – this is all I could find on the Kumari Kandam myth, I don’t know how its advocates see things at all. The part about Tamils being a separate species is just bizarre to me and demonstrates that they’re smoking something.

    It’s bizarre, but not without precedent. The Chinese government had invested money in trying to prove that the Han developed separately from the rest of humanity via a branch of homo erectus. Complete state sanctioned bunk

  22. My grandfather used to tell me this story. As cool as it would be to know that my ancestory did all this stuff, I’m far from sold.

  23. The timelines are clearly skewed, but let’s just all just acknowledge the superiority of Tamil culture and move on, shall we? 😉

  24. According to science there are only 3 main races caucasian,mongloid and negroid. To claim such a comment that tamil people are not homo sapiens but homo dravidian is outright ignorance. Do some research on wikpedia if u want to learn anything about india including the south, yes south india is still india…and research on homo sapiens. And the whole theory about dravidians and aryan races is a huge crock… the people who invented these terminologies are probably “upper class” brahmin north indians. no offense, to anyone here this happened long time ago in the vedas somewhere which has no scientific basis just religious.

  26. My grandfather used to tell me this story. As cool as it would be to know that my ancestory did all this stuff, I’m far from sold.

    Our ancestors did all that and more. Even the humble idli’s shape has a significance. It is meant to remind us of the flying saucer/vimaana that brought us here from the star system MGR-1968 and marooned us among all these damn scythians for the crime of winning too many intergalactic spelling bees

  27. India, Indonesia, Madagascar, Australia?? According to current plate tectonic understanding, that is impossible. But see this:

    In 1999, drilling by the JOIDES Resolution research vessel in the Indian Ocean discovered evidence that a continent about a third of the size of Australia sank about 20 million years ago. Samples showed pollen and fragments of wood in a 90 million-year-old sediment. This might lead one to expect similarity of dinosaur fossil evidence and will help to understand the breakup of the Indian and Australian land masses; it does not support the concept of Lemuria as a land bridge for mammals.

    I say we ask the people of Mt Shasta!

  28. @23 hema:

    you are still not getting any cauvery water from karnataka, ok? 🙂

  29. According to science there are only 3 main races caucasian,mongloid and negroid. To claim such a comment that tamil people are not homo sapiens but homo dravidian is outright ignorance

    there are three human races, yes. dravidians are another branch of the hominid family, as modeled by the multi-regional hypothesis.

  31. Guys, I think Razib the Homo Bengalis is joshing wit u.

    It is meant to remind us of the flying saucer/vimaana that brought us here from the star system MGR-1968 and marooned us among all these damn scythians for the crime of winning too many intergalactic spelling bees

    LOL. Down with the scythians!

  32. does anyone know if Kannadhasan’s “netru varai nee yaaro naan yaaro” was based on the poem which risible quoted above? A lot of Tamil film music, especially during the more explicitly political period of Tamil film, took its inspiration from Sangam poems, and I know that “netru varai…” is one such, but I can’t remember which one.

  33. I think Razib the Homo Bengalis is joshing wit

    risible, the enormous penises typical of bengali men are not a prezygotic isolating mechanism, FYI. therefore one can not make the claim of speciationl.

  34. i mentioned this article to my mom and she got very excited with her dravidian pride. unfortunately, i had to remind her that as telugus who were transplanted to tamil nadu, this does not apply so much to us.

    but i do wonder – physically [and perhaps genetically] many south indians, not just dravidians, seem to have many charecteristics in common – so does dravidian technically apply only to tamilians, or to people from all 4 states? perhaps present-day south indians all started off dravidian and the 3 other languages came about as a result of intermixing with aryans? i say this only because the other 3 languages have relatively more in common with sanskrit. on the other hand, as much as tamilians – and their political parties – try to deny it, there exists much sanskrit both in modern-day and ancient/literary tamil.

  36. And now I’m going into hiding, because although Attack Pandi is safely behind bars, I’m sure Destroy Durai or Siege Selvam will come knocking any minute now…

  37. there exists much sanskrit both in modern-day and ancient/literary tamil.

    I thought Sanskrit had been effective scrubbed out of modern day “literary” Tamil, although everyday Tamil has plenty of Sanskrit-origin words and usage. I can tell you havoc the de-Sanskritization of the language has wreaked on the Tamil spelling of my own name, for example.

    On the other hand, the religious works of the Alwaars and Nayanmaars don’t feature significant usage of Sanskrit words. Off the top of my head, I can only think of the word “nayaka” which appears in a few stanzas of Thiruppavai, as being absolutely a word of Sanskrit origin. Of Sangam literature, I know almost nothing, although I’m fairly certain that Silappadhikaram does not feature much by way of Sanskritized Tamil either.

  38. I can tell you havoc the de-Sanskritization of the language has wreaked on the Tamil spelling of my own name, for example.

    I suggest you change your name to kema or bema or kena hahaha

  39. Kema, Gema and Yema are my options under the “new” spelling. I’ll take Bema under advisement, but “Kena” is just a little too kenai-thanam for me.

  40. hema, you are right – the millennia-old literature probably have minimum sanskrit influence, though even tolkappiyam is said to owe a great deal to the shastras. however, what is modern-day tamil, including modern-day literary language, does, in fact, have a heavy sanskit influence. as much as tamilians might deny it, if you ever listen to “unchi’/proper hindi, it becomes very clear. colloquial hindi seems to have very little in common with tamil. however, when you hear hindi’s literary form, there are so many words that are used in modern-day tamil, in both its spoken and written versions. which is why it irks me that tamilians are so high on their dravidian-pride horse, when they refuse to acknowledge that they have accepted a substantial amount of non-dravidian culture as their own. benedict anderson’s imagined community is an interesting read on this type of a practice.

    btw – re your name – i understand. in my tamil class, there was a girl named kanthi, whom the professor insisted on calling gandhi. [in tamil, there is only one letter for ‘k’ and ‘g’, as well as for ‘th’ and ‘dh’]

  41. it irks me that tamilians are so high on their dravidian-pride horse, when they refuse to acknowledge that they have accepted a substantial amount of non-dravidian culture as their own

    I agree, and I happen to think it’s a bit silly. I’m not sure why the “language powers” in TN feel the need to distance themselves from Sanskrit, other than that they believe it tarnishes past Tamil glories.

  42. Although I understand that this post was intended in all good humor, please note that the link takes you to Tamilnet, a pro-LTTE website. Whatever the scholarship might be, and however harmless an occasional burst of Dravidian pride might seem to us brown people living in a white world, Tamilnet has a very specific agenda in promoting it.

  43. I agree that modern (even “chaste”) Tamil has a lot of Northern influence.

    How did Yema get in there? It’d be just Kema/Hema/Gema. Regarding Gandhi above, Gandhimadhi is common pronunciation of Kanthimathi.

    The limited number of sounds in the Tamil alphabet leads to some interesting changes in pronunciation of foreign words once things have been written down.

    Martin Crowe’s name was written as ‘Kuro’, for instance. Both ‘plate’ and ‘blade’ (you can see these in ads) are written the same way and if one didn’t already know the word, one would probably read it as ‘pilaedu’

  44. How did Yema get in there?

    Because some people just leave the first letter off, and write it as ஏமா.

    I suppose that’s technically “Ema” and not “Yema”, but you get the picture.

  45. Wogay, Gaadit.

    Just a thought I’ve had – the smaller number of letters in Tamil and their very simple shapes (basically the primitiveness, no offence to anyone) suggest to me the language is very old. Nothing scientific, just a feeling. I find the script very beautiful…

  46. Both ‘plate’ and ‘blade’ (you can see these in ads) are written the same way and if one didn’t already know the word, one would probably read it as ‘pilaedu’

    No plate starts with “ip”(i dont have tamil fonts, the pa with the dot on top of it) and blade starts with “pa” with the curve on top of it. But yeah I get the point. Some words are difficult to represent properly, thats why Japanese system have different set of characters to represent foreign words. Which actually tamil uses from sanskrit(like the ha in hema). But I think this is limited only to the tamil purists. Rest of the folks dont even care, even chennai tamil has 50% of its words in english.

  47. btw, how is this ‘kandam’ pronounced? Just like the kaandam in Aranya Kaandam, Kishkinda kaandam etc of the Ramayana?

    btw, somebody in my high school class came up with the bright idea of declaring that condoms (“Kaandam”) were there in the Ramayana (six of them, right?) besides the airplane (pushpak vimaan). Awesome. We even thought that was funny. The mind is strange at the age of fourteen.

  48. பிலெட் as oppposed to இப்லெட், according to Quillpad

  49. btw, how is this ‘kandam’ pronounced? Just like the kaandam in Aranya Kaandam, Kishkinda kaandam etc of the Ramayana?

    ‘kandam’ is pronounced ‘kandam’ which means continent or a land mass.

    ‘kaandam’ is pronounced ‘condom’ which means chapters or volume in a book.