Catastrophic cartographies: Mapping the lost continent of Lemuria

Representations

Volumn 67, Issue , 2000, Pages 92-129

  Ramaswamy, Sumathi ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 0040796854     PISSN: 07346018     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1525/rep.1999.67.1.01p0048w     Document Type: Review

References (130)

1. Christopher Marlowe, "Tamburlaine," quoted in J. B. Harley, "Maps, Knowledge, and Power," in Denis Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels, eds., The Iconography of Landscape: Essays on the Symbolic Representation, Design, and Use of Past Environments (Cambridge, 1988), 277
2. Martin Heidegger, "The Age of the World Picture," in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York, 1977), 134
3. The term Lemuria was coined by the zoologist Philip Lutley Sclater in his essay "The Mammals of Madagascar," Quarterly Journal of Science 1, no. 2 (1864): 213-19
4. I detail at great length the European interest in Lemuria in my forthcoming book, but key works on the continent include Ernst Haeckel, History of Creation: On the Development of the Earth and Its Inhabitants by the Action of Natural Causes, 2 vols. (New York, 1876)
5. A. H. Keane, Ethnology (Cambridge, 1896)
6. and Edward Suess, The Face of the Earth (Oxford, 1904)
7. See, for example, C. D. Maclean, Manual of the Administration of the Madras Presidency (1885; reprint, New Delhi, 1987), 1:33-35, 111-12
8. Edgar Thurston, "The Dravidian Problem," Madras Government Museum Bulletin 2, no. 3 (1899): 182-97
9. Census of India, 1901: Volume 1, Part One: Report (Calcutta, 1903), 342, 507-8
10. In my forthcoming book on the subject, I discuss the lives and sociopolitical imperatives of those who wrote about Lemuria in Tamil India from the 1890s. For now, I would locate their varied speculations on the lost continent within a complex network of praise, passion, and practice centered on the Tamil language that I characterize as "Tamil devotion"; Sumathi Ramaswamy, Passions of the Tongue: Language Devotion in Tamil India, 1891-1970 (Berkeley, 1997). Interest in Lemuria first surfaced within what I have identified as the "classicist" imaginary of Tamil devotion, concerned as it was with establishing the timeless antiquity of Tamil and the primordiality of Tamil "civilization," but soon spread to the religious, the Indianist, and Dravidianist discourses on the language as well
11. See, for example, J. Nallaswami Pillai, "Ancient Tamil Civilization," The Light of Truth or Siddhanta Deepika 2 (October 1898): 112
12. S. Somasundara Bharati, Tamil Classics and Tamilakam (Madras, 1912)
13. V. K. Suryanarayana Sastri, Tamilmoliyin Varalaaru [History of the Tamil language] (Madras, 1903), 6-8, 59-63
14. M. S. Purnalingam Pillai, Tamil India (1927; reprint, Tirunelveli, India, 1945), 1-33
15. Maraimalai Adigal, introduction to K. Appadurai, India's Language Problem (Madras, 1948), xxix-xxxxi
16. K. Appadurai, Kumarik Kantam Allatu Katal Konta Tennaadu [Kumarikandam, or the southern land seized by the ocean] (1941; reprint, Madras, 1961)
17. Fewer than ten years after the continent was named Lemuria, the ancient land connection between India and Africa was briefly discussed in a colonial geography textbook by Henry F. Blanford, The Rudiments of Physical Geography for the Use of Indian Schools Together with a Sketch of the Physical Structure and Climate of India, and a Glossary of Technical Terms Employed (Calcutta, 1873), 119-20
18. The first history textbook that I have found with a discussion of "the great southern continent" is Edmund Marsden, History of India for Senior Classes, Part I: The Hindu Period (London, 1909), 4-5
19. From the 1930s, Tamil language readers, too, increasingly mention Lemuria in various ways; a 1951 publication even included a map of the submerged continent; Sivasailam Pillai, Putumuraik Kalakat Tamilppaatam (Mutal Puttakam) [New Kazhagam Tamil reader for class 6] (Tirunelveli, 1951), 14. I discuss the textbook representations of Lemuria from 1873 to the present in greater detail in my forthcoming book
20. I borrow the notion of "planetary consciousness" from Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London, 1992), 15-37
21. N. S. Kandiah Pillai, Namatu Naadu [Our nation] (Madras, 1945), 2-3
22. Michel de Certeau, "Spatial Stories," in The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendell (Berkeley, 1984), 115-30
23. Donald E. Polkinghorne, Narrative Knowing and the Human Sciences (Albany, 1988), 13-14
24. Arthur H. Robinson and Barbara B. Petchenik, The Nature of Maps: Essays Toward Understanding Maps and Mapping (Chicago, 1986), 50-52
25. See, for instance, de Certeau, "Spatial Stories"; David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Cambridge, Mass., 1990), 241-49
26. Howard Marchitello, "Political Maps: The Production of Cartography and Chorography in Early Modern England," in Margaret J. M. Ezell and Katherine O'Brien O'Keefe, eds., Cultural Artifacts and the Production of Meaning: The Page, the Image, and the Body (Ann Arbor, 1994), 13-40, here 32, 26
27. I have especially benefited from reading Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis, 1977)
28. de Certeau, "Spatial Stories"; Edward W. Soja, Post-modern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London, 1989)
29. Harvey, Condition of Postmodernity
30. and Patricia Yaeger, "Introduction: Narrating Space," in Patricia Yaeger, ed., The Geography of Identity (Ann Arbor, 1996), 1-38
31. Tuan, Space and Place, 6, 12, 73
32. See, for example, Raymond Ramsay, No Longer on the Map: Discovering Places That Never Were (New York, 1972)
33. J. B. Post, ed., An Atlas of Fantasy (Baltimore, 1973)
34. Alberto Manguel and Gianni Guadalupi, A Dictionary of Imaginary Places: Expanded Edition (San Diego, 1987)
35. These works also show clearly that well into our own century the mapping of imaginary lands and fantasy places continues in the West despite the advance of "scientific" cartography, pace Harvey, Condition of Postmodernity, 241-49
36. L. Sprague de Camp, Lost Continents: The Atlantis Theme in History, Science, and Literature (New York, 1970)
37. Robert Wauchope, Lost Tribes and Sunken Continents: Myth and Method in the Study of American Indians (Chicago, 1962)
38. Dorothy B. Vitaliano, Legends of the Earth: Their Geologic Origins (Bloomington, 1973)
39. Thomas B. Macaulay, Speeches, with His Minute on Indian Education, ed. G. M. Young (London, 1935), 351
40. Ludo Rocher, The Puranas (Wiesbaden, 1986), 1-13, 115-31
41. There is a sizable literature on this, but see especially D. C. Sircar, Cosmography and Geography in Early Indian Literature (Calcutta, 1967)
42. For visual representations, see Joseph E. Schwartzberg, "South Asian Cartography," in J. B. Harley and David Woodward, eds., Cartography in the Traditional Islamic and South Asian Societies (Chicago, 1992), 295-509
43. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977, trans. Colin Gordon et al. (New York, 1980), 81-82
44. Kamil Zvelebil, "The Earliest Account of the Tamil Academies," Indo-Iranian Journal 15, no. 2 (1973): 109-35
45. David Shulman, "The Tamil Flood Myths and the Cankam Legend," in Alan Dundes, ed., The Flood Myth (Berkeley, 1988), 293-317
46. Ramaswamy, Passions of the Tongue
47. For the concept of emplotment, see Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore, 1973), 7-11. I should emphasize that European and American discourses on Lemuria also use catastrophe as a mode of explanation for reasons that vary with each specific case. I examine these at greater length in my forthcoming book
48. Oxford English Dictionary, compact ed., s.v. "catastrophe."
49. Stephen Jay Gould, "Is Uniformitarianism Necessary?" The American Journal of Science 263 (1965): 223-28
50. See also C. C. Gillispie, Genesis and Geology: A Study in the Relations of Scientific Thought, Natural Theology, and Social Opinion in Great Britain, 1790-1850 (Cambridge, Mass., 1951)
51. and Richard Huggett, Catastrophism: Systems of Earth History (London, 1990)
52. J. B. Harley, "The Map and the Development of the History of Cartography," in J. B. Harley and David Woodward, eds., Cartography in Prehistoric, Ancient, and Medieval Europe and the Mediterranean (Chicago, 1987), xvi-2
53. My ideas here are largely based on J. B. Harley's numerous provocative essays, but see especially "Maps, Knowledge, and Power"; "Silences and Secrecy: The Hidden Agenda of Cartography in Early Modern Europe," Imago Mundi 40 (1988): 57-76
54. "Deconstructing the Map," in Trevor J. Barnes and James S. Duncan, eds., Writing Worlds: Discourse, Text, and Metaphor in the Representation of Landscape (London, 1992), 231-47
55. See also Matthew Edney, "Cartography Without 'Progress': Reinterpreting the Nature and Historical Development of Mankind," Cartographica 30, no. 2 & 3 (1993): 54-68
56. Haeckel, History of Creation, 1:360
57. H. E. LeGrand, Drifting Continents and Shifting Theories (Cambridge, 1988)
58. Alfred Wegener, The Origin of Continents and Oceans, 3d rev. ed., trans. J. G. A. Skerl (New York, 1924)
59. Other geologists suggested that Wegener had "succumbed to the temptations of [the] map" and had "indulged in some advantageously creative cartographic generalizations." In the words of one of his contemporaries, "It is not improbable that gazing at the map of South America and Africa has the effect of hypnotizing the student. The coast lines appear to be such exact counterparts, even in detail - Wegener must be right!"; quoted in Mark Monmonier, "Continental Drift and Geopolitics: Ideas and Evidence," in Drawing the Line: Tales of Maps and Cartocontroversy (New York, 1995), 164-66. Monmonier himself notes, "Wegener's skilled and relentless use of cartography was a significant force in the history of geology, and the success of his efforts attests to the map's rhetorical power to explain and persuade" (169)
60. Alexander du Toit, Our Wandering Continents: An Hypothesis of Continental Drifting (Edinburgh, 1937), 11-16
61. N. A. Rupke, "Continental Drift Before 1900," Nature 227 (25 July 1970): 349-50
62. James A. Romm, "A New Forerunner for Continental Drift," Nature 367, no. 6462 (1994): 407-8
63. William Harbert, "Catching the (Continental) Drift: Cartographic Contributions to the Theory of Plate Tectonics," Mercator's World 2, no. 4 (1997): 30-34
64. Monmonier, "Continental Drift," 148-69
65. J. M. Harrison, "Nature and Significance of Geological Maps," in Claude C. Albritton, ed., The Fabric of Geology (Stanford, 1963), 225-32
66. Martin J. S. Rudwick, "The Emergence of a Visual Language for Geological Science, 1760-1840," History of Science 14 (1976): 149-95
67. Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley, 1994)
68. Antonio Snider-Pellegrini, La création et ses mystères dévoilés (Paris, 1858)
69. See also Le-Grand, Drifting Continents, 29-30
70. Melchior Neumayr, Erdgeschichte (Leipzig, 1887), 2:336
71. I have not come across any studies of the emergence of the tradition of paleogeographical mapping but have found useful suggestions in Arthur Robinson, Early Thematic Mapping in the History of Cartography (Chicago, 1982), 68-108
72. and Jane Camerini, "Darwin, Wallace, and Maps" (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, 1987)
73. R. D. Oldham, "The Evolution of Indian Geography," The Geographical Journal 3, no. 3 (1894): 169-96 (emphasis mine)
74. Wegener's map is reprinted in Government of Tamilnadu, Tamilnaattu Varalaaru: Tolpalankaalam [History of Tamilnadu: Prehistoric times] (Madras, 1975), 267
75. Such sequential maps, which track the fate of paleo-continents over time, are reminiscent of what Benedict Anderson notes as one of the "avatars" of modern mapmaking, the "historical map." "Through chronologically arranged sequences of such maps, a sort of political-biographical narrative of the realm [comes] into being, sometimes with vast historical depth"; Benedict Anderson, "Census, Map, Museum," in Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London, 1991), 174-75
76. For a detailed study of historical maps and atlases in Europe, see Jeremy Black, Maps and History: Constructing Images of the Past (New Haven, 1997)
77. Wegener, Origin of Continents, 2-3, 64-65. In Wegener's displacement theory, "Lemuria" thus disappears through "compression," not "submergence."
78. For example, Charles Schuchert, Outlines of Historical Geology (New York, 1931), 104
79. Leonce Joleaud, Atlas de paléobiogéographie (Paris, 1939)
80. A. G. Smith and J. C. Briden, Mesozoic and Cenozoic Paleocontinental Maps (Cambridge, 1977), 3
81. Peter Whitfield, The Image of the World: Twenty Centuries of World Maps (San Francisco, 1994), 130
82. Ernst Haeckel, Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte (Berlin, 1870)
83. Haeckel, History of Creation, 2:399-400
84. The one exception I have so far seen is a map tided "Probable Land Area at Close of Jurassic Times," which is printed in Thomas Holdich, India (New York, 1905), 8. Even this is a reproduction of R. D. Oldham's 1894 map that I discussed earlier (fig. 3) and shows the shadowy outlines of an "Indo-African Continent" stretching from the east coast of Africa through Madagascar to peninsular India and beyond
85. U. Kalpagam, "Cartography in Colonial India," Economic and Political Weekly 30, no. 30 (1995): 87-98
86. Kai Friese, "Divider and Rule: Scenes from the Colonial Cartography of India," The India Magazine 16, no. 3/4 (1996): 57-65
87. Matthew H. Edney, Mapping An Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India, 1765-1843 (Chicago, 1997)
88. Bruce Campbell, Ancient Wisdom Revived: A History of the Theosophical Movement (Berkeley, 1980), 40-46
89. de Camp, Lost Continents, 54-70
90. W. Scott-Elliot, The Lost Lemuria with Two Maps Showing Distribution of Land Areas at Different Periods (London, 1904), 14-17
91. K. Browning, Lemuria and Atlantis: Two Lost Continents (London, 1924)
92. Lewis Spence, The Problem of Lemuria: The Sunken Continent of the Pacific (London, 1933)
93. Wishar S. Cervé, Lemuria: The Lost Continent of the Pacific (1931; reprint, San Jose, 1960)
94. Benjamin Orlove reminds us of the importance of such questions in "The Ethnography of Maps: The Cultural and Social Contexts of Cartographic Representation in Peru," in Robert A. Rundstrom, ed., Introducing Cultural and Social Cartography (Toronto, 1993), 29-46. He insists that studies of maps necessarily ought to analyze "form" as well as "practice" and focus on not just how people "draw" maps but also how they "draw on" maps
95. For a beginning in this direction, see Keya Dasgupta, "A City Away from Home: The Mapping of Calcutta," in Partha Chatterjee, ed., Texts of Power: Emerging 'Disciplines in Colonial Bengal (Minneapolis, 1995), 145-66
96. P. K. Adhikary, "Evolution of Thematic Cartography in Post-Independent India," in B. K. Roy, ed., Cartography for Development of Outlying States and Islands of India (Calcutta, 1990), 13-16
97. Sankaran Krishna, "Cartographic Anxiety: Mapping the Body Politic in India," Alternatives 19 (1994): 507-21
98. Susan Gole, Indian Maps and Plans: From Earliest Times to the Advent of European Surveys (New Delhi, 1989)
99. Schwartzberg, "South Asian Cartography."
100. Susan Gole, Early Maps of India (New Delhi, 1976), 37-43
101. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London, 1994), 85-92
102. Centamil 14, nos. 11-12 (1915-1916). The map is printed between pages 466 and 467
103. Anderson, "Census, Map, Museum," 175
104. I borrow the notion of conflicted intimacy from Richard Terdiman, Discourse / Counter-Discourse: The Theory and Practice of Symbolic Resistance in Nineteenth-Century France (Ithaca, 1985)
105. Government of Tamilnadu, Tamilnaattu Varalaaru, 269
106. Sclater, "Mammals of Madagascar."
107. For nuanced analyses of the politics of naming and cartography, see Paul Carter, The Road to Botany Bay: An Exploration of Landscape and History (New York, 1988)
108. J. B. Harley, "Rereading the Maps of the Columbian Encounter," Annals of the Association of American Geographers 82 (1992): 522-42
109. Barbara E. Mundy, The Mapping of New Spain: Indigenous Cartography and the Maps of the Relaciones Geograficas (Chicago, 1996), 135-79
110. Walter D. Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization (Ann Arbor, 1995), 254-58. In my analysis of Tamil maps of Lemuria as "hybrid" products, I have been influenced by Mignolo's nuanced reading of the "fractured" "subaltern" maps of Amerindians from sixteenth-century Peru. He argues that alternate territorial conceptions "cohabit" and "coexist" within the same frame, although social and political power is unequally distributed between colonizer and colonized. The very coexistence of these conceptions suggests that Western cartography was unable to suppress alternate cosmologies. While I agree with this analysis, the "coexistence" of alternate cosmologies suggests a degree of benignity and passivity that I think is questionable, at least for the Tamil maps of Lemuria, considering that they actively attempt to transform the dead paleo-spaces of European cartographies into lived Tamil land. At the same time, as Mignolo rightly reminds us, unlike the modern map produced in the West, which attained universal status with the global political and expansion of Europe, "native" cartographies, resistant and alternate though they may be, remain local, subaltern forms
111. Simon Ryan, "Inscribing the Emptiness: Cartography, Exploration, and the Construction of Australia," in Charles Tiffin and Alan Lawson, eds., De-Scribing Empire (London, 1994), 115-30, here 126-27
112. Appadurai, Kumarik Kantam, 8, 56
113. As Harley notes, "Maps as an impersonal type of knowledge tend to 'desocialize' the territory they represent - they foster the notion of a socially empty space"; "Maps, Knowledge, and Power," 303. For Tamil devotees seeking to emphasize that Lemuria was not some large uninhabited land but populated by Tamil-speaking human beings, mapping the continent thus had its limitation, which could be at least partly overcome by filling up the empty space with the names of Tamil places
114. Harley, "Maps, Knowledge, and Power," 301
115. Purnalingam Pillai, Tamil India
116. The map is published in Pulavar Kulanthai, Iraavana Kaaviyam [Epic poem on Ravana] (Erode, India, 1971)
117. Thongchai Winichakul, Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation (Honolulu, 1994), 152
118. There are numerous works on this, but see especially Harley, "Rereading the Maps of the Columbian Encounter"; Thongchai, Siam Mapped
119. Mignolo, Darker Side of the Renaissance
120. Mundy, Mapping of New Spain
121. Simon Ryan, The Cartographic Eye: How Explorers Saw Australia (Cambridge, 1996)
122. Edney, Mapping an Empire
123. David Ludden, "Orientalist Empiricism: Transformations of Colonial Knowledge," in Carol A. Breckenridge and Peter van der Veer, eds., Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament (Philadelphia, 1993), 253-54
124. Rosane Rocher, "British Orientalism in the Eighteenth Century: The Dialectics of Knowledge and Government," in Breckenridge and van der Veer, Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament, 223-24
125. and especially Edney, Mapping an Empire, 13-15
126. Thongchai, Siam Mapped, 130
127. Harley similarly notes for colonial America that "the map is not the territory; yet it is the territory. In America cartography is part of the process by which territory becomes"; Harley, "Rereading the Maps of the Columbian Encounter," 532
128. Robinson and Petchenik, Nature of Maps, 4
129. Heidegger, "Age of the World Picture," 134-35
130. Donna Haraway quoted in Derek Gregory, Geographical Imaginations (Cambridge, Mass., 1994), 65-66