Sumathi Ramaswamy, The Lost Land of Lemuria: Fabulous Geographies, Catastrophic Histories

The Lost Land of Lemuria: Fabulous Geographies, Catastrophic Histories by Sumathi

Ramaswamy
Review by: Richard Weiss
History of Religions, Vol. 47, No. 4 (May 2008), pp. 342-344
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
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342 Book Reviews

I could not do serious and honest research on the history of the Soviet evan-
gelicals” (xvii). Lots of interesting and important work is being done these days,
much of it in English. (There has also been an efflorescence of Russian-language
scholarship, though of uneven quality and refinement.) Zhuk’s study might be
read in conjunction with other monographs, such as William B. Husband’s
Godless Communists: Atheism and Society in Soviet Russia, 1917–1932 (DeKalb:
Northern Illinois University Press, 2000) and Edward E. Roslof ’s Red Priests:
Renovationism, Russian Orthodoxy, and Revolution, 1905–1946 (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 2002), which chart some of the terrain between pre-
revolutionary radicalism and Soviet power. Together, such works help under-
mine another simplistic schema—namely, that of “holy Russia” replaced tout court
by “godless atheism” (only to be replaced in turn by “holy Russia”). They present
more-complex maps of religion and secularism in Russia and deserve more atten-
tion from students of religion.

Brian P. Bennett
Niagara University

The Lost Land of Lemuria: Fabulous Geographies, Catastrophic Histories.

By Sumathi Ramaswamy. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.
Pp. xvii+334. $60.00.

Sumathi Ramaswamy, one of the leading historians of contemporary Tamil

South India, ventures beyond South Asia in this study of the lost continent of
Lemuria. She traces the history of this imagined place from its paleogeographic
origins in nineteenth-century Europe, through its occult representations, to its
appearance in Tamil revivalist accounts of the origins of the Tamil people. The
resilience and saliency of this imagined continent in a variety of contexts; the
historical connections through which Lemuria as an idea was translated across
cultures; and the links between science, the occult, and South Indian Tamil reviv-
alism tell a fascinating tale of the modern world. It is a story of science as a source
of occult fantasy and nationalist narratives. The imaginative legacy of Lemuria
not only demonstrates the ways in which the authority of science is invoked for
occult and nationalist projects but also suggests that science itself is often not far
removed from these more fantastic projects that it engenders.
Ramaswamy begins with the origin of the idea of Lemuria in the geological
and biological sciences of Europe, where in 1864 Philip Sclater first theorized
that an ancient continent stretched roughly from what is now India in the East to
America in the West. He called this continent “Lemuria” to explain the distribution
of lemurs throughout Asia and Africa. In 1870, the German biologist Ernst Haeckel
called Lemuria “the probable cradle of the human race,” an innovation that was
rarely supported in the metropolitan sciences, but which would become a key
feature in the way Lemuria was imagined by occult and Tamil leaders (35).
Although Lemuria was to have a short and unimpressive life in the European
sciences, it was picked up by Helena Blavatsky, the cofounder of the Theosophical
Society, who in 1877 speculated that Lemuria was none other than Atlantis, the
History of Religions 343

home of the Garden of Eden (56). Throughout the twentieth century, occult writers
transformed and expanded upon Blavatsky’s thoughts, positing Lemuria as the
original site of the human race, which they conceived as coextensive with the
origins of spirit. For these writers, Lemurian society might be recaptured, and so
they did not simply lament its loss but also awaited its reestablishment. Lemuria
has been a useful notion to occultists at least partly because of its absence, as their
utopian visions are rendered feasible through the absence of contrary evidence.
Their narratives infuse science with spirit, expanding the possibilities of knowl-
edge, being, and human potential beyond those offered by the disenchanted
sciences. By narrating Lemuria in the semblance of science, occultists marshal
the authority of science to their fabulous aspirations. Ramaswamy’s history here,
and her analysis along the lines of Weberian reenchantment, are elegant and
insightful.
For Tamil revivalists, Lemuria is a place of ancient Tamil science and arts
and the origin of all the world’s civilizations. Their narratives on Lemuria invert
Orientalist and nationalist formulations of Indian history and civilization, which
located the value of Indian culture primarily in the Aryan, Sanskritic, and non-
Tamil. In positing the origins of Tamil civilization in Lemuria, and by identifying
it as the font of all the world’s science and civilization, Tamil writers attempt to
salvage respect for their traditions. The chapters on Tamil revivalism are, to my
mind, the strongest of the book, demonstrating detailed research with an impressive
breadth of resources and exhibiting an acute awareness of salient issues that shaped
Tamil discourses on Lemuria. Ramaswamy draws together government documen-
taries, sixth-grade textbooks, and prominent historical accounts, presenting the
dispersed nature of this discourse and its multiple significances.
Her presentation of rich historical detail brings out the disparate histories and
diverging motivations of Lemurian imaginings. However, she tends to homogenize
this diversity in her heavy use of two phrases, “labors of loss” and “place-making,”
to describe all narrations of Lemuria. I was not convinced that the projects of
twentieth-century Tamil revivalists and nineteenth-century German geologists
share enough to be considered under the same rubrics. Not only are the contexts
different, but the methods, agendas, and stakes in the two cases vary radically,
suggesting the need for distinct terms of analysis.
That said, the apparently contradictory vectors of these two phrases, one empha-
sizing destruction and the other creation, together describe the data in the occult
and Tamil cases quite accurately. These are discourses of grief and pleasure, of
loss and gain. Authors construct Lemuria in their descriptions of its disappearance,
thereby creating a place for their hopeful visions. Ramaswamy’s analyses of what is
actually lost to occultists and Tamils who rhapsodize about Lemuria are fascinating
reflections on nostalgia in the contemporary world. Thus, Lemuria for occultists
becomes a utopian site for both the origins of the new age and its aspirations
for the future, on which “modernity’s disjuncture between spirit and matter, and
between science and religion, would be overcome and undone” (95).
I found Ramaswamy to be ambivalent over the contemporary effectiveness and
relevance of these Lemurian imaginings. She considers them to be “off-modern,”
by which she means that they are “ostensibly modern, but not wholly in it, or even
of it” (16). They are narratives outside the mainstream, at the margins of the
344 Book Reviews

modern, because they insert the authority of science into narrative frameworks
and agendas that do not adhere to the dictates of science. This usage suggests the
critical potential of these visions, and Ramaswamy is at her best in her considera-
tion of Tamil and occultist accounts as counternarratives. However, “off-modern”
also suggests a normative notion of what constitutes the modern—that is, the
hegemonic authority of the disenchanted sciences. As historians of religion
know, science is not the only source of authority in the modern world.
This normative position is reflected in Ramaswamy’s criticism of this mix of
science and tradition, as she concludes that the Tamil Lemuria “seems incongruous
and impoverished, meeting the demands of neither history nor fantasy” (226).
Tamil narratives of Lemuria, she asserts, do not go far enough in their embrace
of the fabulous, and so their utopian potential to criticize the present is not fully
realized. I think she misses the point here: occultists and Tamil revivalists
combine science and the fantastic precisely in order to capture the authority of
science for their visions, demonstrating a keen, pragmatic awareness of the work-
ings of authority in the world today. Indeed, this is one of the major strategies
through which traditional practices are legitimated in the modern world. More
attention to the rhetorical, performative dimensions of these narratives, which are
articulated publicly to advance political and social agendas, in addition to her fine
analysis of these as descriptions of inner emotional states, would have more fully
brought out their force. As it is, her criticisms of these writings undermine the
contemporary relevance of those very narratives that she urges us in her introduc-
tion to take seriously.
For historians of religion, Ramaswamy offers an exemplary study of the move-
ment of ideas across communities, a model to a discipline that is often organized
around distinct traditions. This is also a rich historical study of the imagination
of lost worlds and utopian societies, and Ramaswamy’s reflections on the grief,
nostalgia, pleasure, resistance, and rhetoric of narrating loss in the modern world
is suggestive of similar narratives that might be more evidently religious. Further-
more, the mixture of the scientific and the enchanted, the ascertainable and the
fabulous, and the marshalling of the scientific to authorize flights of the imagina-
tion is one of the key features of religious discourse in the contemporary world.
Ramaswamy’s history is illuminating, and her bravado in taking on such a broad
study is praiseworthy.

Richard Weiss
Victoria University, Wellington

Guardians of Tamilnadu: Folk Deities, Folk Religion, Hindu Themes. By

Eveline Masilamani-Meyer. Neue Hallesche Berichte 5. Halle: Verlag der
Franckeschen Stiftungen zu Halle, 2004. Pp. 1+280, 44 plates. E15.80.

The subtitle of Eveline Masilamani-Meyer’s new book is more telling than

its title. Rather than a mere description of the deities that protect South Indian
villages, Guardians of Tamilnadu aims to expose the “Hindu themes” of this
“folk religion.” While neither the words “Hindu” nor “folk” are fleshed out in the