We’ve all heard plenty of stories doing the rounds about the Atlantis, the fictional city that Greeks wrote about in their literature. It was believed that they were quite advanced and liberal for their time. Sadly, it was believed that the whole city was consumed by the ocean, leaving no remnants of its locals. This indeed was a tragic end.
A similar tale, although a less popular one, has been narrated in India. This lesser-known tale is about a lost continent known as the ‘Kumari Kandam.’ Almost a century back, Tamil nationalists believed in the existence of Kumari Kandam and found a similarity with Lemuria – a mythical “lost land” that civilized for more than 20,000 years with Tamil speaking population.
This now-sunken continent was situated in the Indian and the Pacific Ocean and was the connecting line between Africa and South India, via Madagascar. This Tamil continent was ruled by Pandiyan Kings for more 10,000 years, prior to getting submerged. Then, the locals and the Pandiyan King migrated to the residual land of Kumari Kandam and then the capital was moved to Kapatapuram.
Having lost almost the whole of Kumari Kandam, the Pandiyan King then decided to conquer the parts of lands that belonged to the Chera and Chola kings and declared Korkai, which was earlier called Kapatapuram, as the capital in the later days.
As per the Kumari Kandam protagonists, the continent was submerged when the sea levels rose and last ice age ended. It was after this that the Tamil people migrated and mixed with different groups, invariably forming new languages, races, and civilizations. A lot of people also believe that the whole of humanity is descended from the dwellers of Kumari Kandam. Both the tales agree on one common point that the Tamil culture is the foundation of all enlightened cultures in the world, and Tamil happens to be the mother language midst all other languages in the world.
For now, it cannot be ascertained whether Kumari Kandam – the “lost land” as narrated in the medieval Tamil literature – did exist or not. If yes, the theorized size and site cannot be determined with complete surety. To say the best, there are numerous truths behind such urban myths, though no way to tell just yet. For now, while we may assume that Tamil civilization once lost its land that can only be compared to a district or a small city in today’s generation, but we cannot claim if it was as big as a continent.
