The Kumari Kandam tradition (1)
Although I am (of course!) writing Underworld with the benefit of hindsight, I have sought to unfold the key information that it contains in something of the gradual and fragmentary manner in which it reached me. Thus I didn’t learn about Kumari Kandam and the Sangam tradition all at once – but rather in dribs and drabs over a period of many months – and this is reflected in the details that I have already given about Kumari Kandam in earlier chapters.
Now, with all the resources of Madurai at my disposal, I was able to compile a more extensive and accurate summary of what the tradition actually says (as opposed to what others say about it):
Over a period of just under 10,000 years, the Pandyans (a part-historical, part-legendary dynasty of Tamil kings) formed three Sangams or Academies in order to foster among their subjects the love of knowledge, literature and poetry: ‘These Assemblies were the fountainhead of Tamil culture, and their principal concern was the perfection of Tamil language and literature.’11
The first two Sangams were not located in what is now peninsular India but in the antediluvian Dravidian land to the south ‘which in ancient times bore the name Kumari Kandam’12 (literally ‘the Land of the Virgin’ – or perhaps ‘the Virgin Continent’).13
The First Sangam was headquartered in a city named Tenmadurai (‘Southern Madurai’). It had 549 members ‘beginning, with Agattiyanar (the sage Agastaya) … Among others were God Siva of braided hair … Murugan the hill god, and Kubera the Lord of Treasure.’14
Patronized by a succession of eighty-nine kings, the First Sangam survived as an institution over an unbroken period of 4440 years, during which time it approved and codified an immense library of poems and literature. These classic texts, all now lost and known only by their titles, are said to have included works such as the Agattiyam, Paripadal, Mudunarai, Mudukurgu and Kalariyavirai – still well known and revered among Tamils today.15
At the end of this golden age the First Sangam was destroyed when the deluge arose and Tenmadurai was ‘swallowed by the sea’ along with large parts of the land area of Kumari Kandam.16
However, survivors of the antediluvian civilization were able to relocate further north, saving some of the First Sangam books, and the Second Sangam, said to have been patronized by fifty-nine kings, was established in another city – Kavatapuram. ‘The Agattiyam and Tolkappiyam, the Mapuranam, Isainunukkam, and Budapuranam were their grammars. The duration of the period of this Sangam was 3700 years.’17 Then, like its predecessor, the Second Sangam was ‘swallowed by the sea’ and lost for ever with all its works (with the possible exception, some claim, of the Tolkappiyam, which has survived to this day).18
Following the inundation of Kavatapuram the survivors of the Kumari Kandam civilization again relocated northward, this time into peninsular India, where the headquarters of the Third Sangam was established in a city identified with modern Madurai – then known as Uttara Madurai or Vadamadurai (‘Northern Madurai’, presumably to distinguish it from its antediluvian predecessor ‘Southern Madurai’).19
The Third Sangam survived for a further 1850 years: ‘Forty-nine were the kings who patronized this Academy.’20
Choosing the right slot
A matter that I found hard to reconcile while I talked to the experts and read up the literature in Madurai was the way in which the very same Tamil authorities who brush off the First and Second Sangams as ‘preposterous stories’,21 accept without demur the existence of the Third Sangam – or anyway some sort of genuinely Tamil institution of letters that might retrospectively have been referred to by the Sanskrit term Sangam. Most, moreover, agree upon dates of between AD 350 and 550 for the termination of this Third Sangam’s activities.22
For example, Ramachandra Dikshitar proposes that ‘the end of the fifth century AD marked the extinction of the Academy’.23 He adds:
Though the origin of the Sangam as an institution is shrouded in deep mystery, still the fact remains that there was something like an organized Academy … and it continued to exist for several centuries. A definite stage was reached by the beginning of the sixth century AD [after the extinction of the Academy] when the Tamil language underwent some transformation in regard to style, metre, etc.24
According to Shivaraja Pillai – as ever pursuing his ‘forgery’ case against the scheme of things set out in the commentary on the Agapporul.
The fabricator appears to have started from some authentic data before him. They were the so-called ‘Third Sangam’ works, which in all probability must have by that time assumed a collected form. These collections furnished the basis on which he proceeded to raise his imaginary structure of the Three Sangams.25
If we accept the generally agreed date of between AD 350 and 550 for the end of the – at least semi-historical – ‘Third Sangam’, then this gives us a fixed reference point on which to anchor the chronology of the myth:
AD 350 minus the 1850 years given as the duration of the Third Sangam takes us back to 1500 BC (i.e., about 3500 years ago);
1500 BC minus the 3700 years given as the duration of the Second Sangam takes us back to 5200 BC (7200 years ago);
5200 BC minus the 4440 years given as the duration of the First Sangam takes us back to 9600 BC (11,600 years ago).
The date of 9600 BC for the formation of the First Sangam (or 9800 BC or 9400 BC for that matter) coincides closely enough with Plato’s date for the inundation of Atlantis – also 9600 BC – to raise the hairs on the back of my neck.
And the question continues to be this: how could Plato less than 2500 years ago, or Nakirar less than 1500 years ago, have managed by chance to select the epoch of 9600 BC in which to set, on the one hand, the sinking under the waves of the Atlantic Ocean of the great antediluvian civilization of Atlantis and, on the other, the foundation of the First Sangam in Kumari Kandam – a doomed Indian Ocean landmass that was itself destined to be swallowed up by the sea?
If Plato and Nakirar were pure ‘fabulists’ working independently of any real tradition or real events, then isn’t it much more likely that they would have chosen different imaginary epochs in which to set their flood stories?
Why didn’t they chose 20,000 or 30,000 years ago – or even 300,000 years ago, or three million years ago – instead of the tenth millennium BC?
And was it just luck that this slot turns out to have been in the midst of the meltdown of the last Ice Age – the only episode of truly global flooding to have hit the earth in the last 125,000 years?
The Kumari Kandam tradition (2)
More information than I have already reported remains to be gleaned within the medieval commentaries. And outside the commentaries there are several allusions in Tamil literature that can also fairly safely be said to be part of ‘the tradition behind the account’ – even if they do not always refer to Kumari Kandam or to the first two Sangams by name. Some are in works of considerable antiquity and high renown, others are in less well-known sources, but all in one way or another add to our picture of the lost Tamil lands and of the floods that ancient peoples believed had swallowed them up.
According to V. Kanakasabhai, a specialist in south Indian history, the Tamils of the early first millennium AD preserved a tradition, already ancient in their time,
that in former days the land had extended further south and that a mountain called Kumarikoddu, and a large tract of country watered by the river Prahuli had existed south of Cape Kumari. During a violent irruption of the sea, the mountain Kumarikoddu and the whole of the country through which flowed the Prahuli had disappeared.26
Kanakasabhai’s sources include the Kalittogai (stanza 104:1–4) and the Silipa-thikaram (xx: 17–20): ‘The river Prahuli, and the mountain Kumari, surrounded by many hills, were submerged by the raging sea.’27 Adiyarkkunelar fills in some of the detail when he tells us that in the time before the flood these forested and populated lands between the Prahuli and Kumari rivers were divided into 49 counties that stretched for
‘700 Kavathams’ – about 1000 miles.28
The historian P. Ramanathan also draws attention to ‘ancient Tamil poems and authentic traditions [that] refer to successive submersions of land to the south of India in the Indian Ocean and the consequent reduction of the extent of the Tamil land’:29
Purunanuru 6 by Karikishar and Purunanuru 9 by Nettimaiyar … refer to Kumari and Prahuli rivers both placed by ancient commentators in the submerged lands to the south of Cape Comorin [modern Kaniya Kumari]. Kalittogai 104 specifically refers to [a Pandyan king] losing his territories to the sea and compensating the loss by conquering new territories from the Chera and Chola rulers (to the north). Silapathikaram – Kadukankathai (lines 18–23) refers to the sea swallowing up the Prahuli river along with Kumarikoddu tract comprising many hill areas. The Venirkathai of Silipathikaram refers to the ocean as the southernmost frontier of Tamilaham and commentator Adiyarkkunelar explains that the reference there is to the topography after the deluge. The Payiram to the Tolkappiyam refers to Venkatam as the northern boundary and [Kaniya] Kumari as the southern boundary of Tamilaham. In his commentary thereon Illampuranar states that the southern boundary (viz Kumari) was mentioned because, before submersion by the sea there were lands to the south of Kumari … In his commentary on the Tolkappiyam, Nachinarkkiniyar mentions that the sea submerged 49 Nadus (counties) south of Kumari river …30
Ramanathan further reminds us that, according to tradition, the Pandyans are:
the oldest of the three ancient Tamil dynasties. Perhaps the oldest ruling dynasty in the world … Some accounts … say that Cheras and Cholas were mere branches of the Pandyan dynasty which separated long ago.31
He then repeats essentially the assertion of the Kalittogai cited above that:
One of the earliest Pandyan kings, Nediyon (‘the tall one’) is said to have organized the worship of the sea. Portions of his land to the south of Cape Comorin [Kaniya Kumari] were submerged by the sea and to compensate for the loss he conquered vast territories to the north of the Pandyan kingdom.32
Likewise, T. R. Sesha Iyenagar refers to Tamil traditions which suggest that, although Kumari Kandam may have included islands, a large part of it was mainland
connected with South India … which was overwhelmed and submerged by a huge deluge. There are unmistakable indications in the Tamil traditions that the land affected by the deluge was contiguous with Tamilaham, and that, after the subsidence, the Tamils naturally betook themselves to their northern provinces.33
What secrets lie concealed in such fragments of folklore and tradition? In his paper ‘The Cultural Heritage of the Ancient Tamils’, Dr M. Sundaram, Chief Professor and Head of the Department of Tamil, Presidency College, Madras, sums up the evidence to conclude that:
The tradition of the loss of a vast continent by a deluge of the sea is too strong in the ancient Tamil classics to be ignored by any serious type of enquiry. In fact the first Tamil Sangam was said to have been functioning from South Madurai, in the lost continent. Ancient grammatical texts in Tamil and their latter day commentators testify that River Prahuli and Kumari Mountain ranges were lost by a deluge, a Purunaruli verse refers to the River Prahuli and Silipathikaram mentions the deluge in which the Kumari continent was lost … There were 49 divisions between River Prahuli and mountain Kumari. The erudite commentator of Tolkappiyam, Per-Asiriyar, has stated that the Kumari river was left as Cape Kumari after a deluge.34
Last but by no means least, the Tamil epic Manimekalai speaks of the flooding of a city off-shore of Poompuhur as divine retribution upon a king who had failed to celebrate the festival of Indra.35 Most archaeologists believe that the reference here is to the shallowly submerged ruins of the historical city of Kaveripumpattinam found just south of Poompuhur in the intertidal zone mainly at 3 metres or less and dated to between 300 BC and AD 300 (see chapter 9). However, the U-shaped structure that is now known to lie much further out from shore and in deeper water raises the possibility that what is remembered in the Manimekalai could be a far earlier event.
Ravana’s antediluvian domain
If the Kumari Kandam tradition is in any way a true guide then we should expect to find underwater ruins not only in south Indian waters, but also in the waters of the island of Sri Lanka – ancient Ceylon. And because Sri Lanka was joined to the mainland during the Ice Age by a land-bridge close to Poompuhur (indeed, would have been an integral part of ‘Kumari Kandam’) logic suggests that Sri Lankan myths and legends should also have something to say on the subject of floods.
It is therefore reassuring to discover that the Mahavamsa, Dipavamsa and Rajavali, Ceylonese chronicles based on archaic oral sources that first began to be set down in writing by Buddhist monks around the fourth century AD,36 ‘speak of three deluges which destroyed a large land area that lay beyond Ceylon’.37 For example the Rajavali remembers a time, long before its own compilation as a text, when
the gods who were charged with the conservation of Ceylon became enraged and caused the sea to deluge the land … In this time … 100,000 large towns, 970 fishers’ villages and 400 villages inhabited by pearl fishers … were swallowed up by the sea …38 Twenty miles of the coast, extending inland [were] washed away.39
The same source also refers to a flood that affected Sri Lanka even earlier – indeed ‘in a former age’40 – during the time of the giant Ravana (the ‘demon king’ whose exploits feature, separately, in the Indian Sanskrit epic, the Ramayana). Ravana, it seems, had angered the gods with his ‘impiety’ and was punished in the usual way:
The citadel of Ravana, 25 palaces and 400,000 streets, were swallowed up by the sea … The submerged land was between Tuticorin [south-east coast of modern Tamil Nadu] and Mannar [north-west coast of modern Sri Lanka] and the island of Mannar is all that is now left of what was once a large territory.41
I was later to realize that there is something remarkable about this. In December 2000 when I was first able to study Glenn Milne’s inundation maps of the Poompuhur region, I noticed that a large tract of land would indeed have been exposed between Tuticorin and Mannar – just as the chronicle said – at around 16,000 years ago. This was soon after the end of the Last Glacial Maximum, shortly before global sea-level began to rise steeply, and Milne’s maps go on to show the flooding of Ravana’s antediluvian domain by the post-glacial floods. Interestingly, the maps also show an area of higher relief that was never submerged and that is today, as the Rajavali correctly reports, the island of Mannar.42
Sir J. E. Tennant, among others who wrote long before the era of inundation mapping, disregarded ‘the traditions of the former extent of Ceylon and submersion of vast regions by the sea’ on the grounds that ‘evidence is wanting to corroborate the assertion, at least within the historic period’.43 But once again, as we now know, there is abundant evidence that before the historic period, at the end of the Ice Age, Sri Lanka was indeed much larger than it is today with the greatest extent of antediluvian land in the north-west bridging the Gulf of Mannar exactly where, ‘in a former age’, Ravana’s citadel is supposed to have stood.
16,000 BC to 9600 BC
This notion of earlier flood epochs – with the parallel thought of layer upon layer of forgotten history receding deep into a past beyond remembrance – is reinforced in certain Ceylonese traditions about the ancient Tamils. Amongst these an intriguing statement is made that the total number of Sangams was not three, as most other accounts maintain, but seven44 – implying the existence at unknown locations of four previous Sangams before the First Sangam set up its headquarters at Tenmadurai on the banks of the Prahuli river.45
In this connection I note that N. Mahalingam, Chairman of the International Association of Tamil Studies, refers in the Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference of Tamil Studies to Tamil traditions that speak of three episodes of flooding in the millennia preceding the supposed foundation date of the First Sangam:
The first great deluge took place in 16,000 BC … The second on
e occurred in 14,058 BC when parts of Kumari Kandam went under the sea. The third one happened in 9564 BC when a large part of Kumari Kandam was submerged.46
The date for the third of these archaic floods, as readers will note, overlaps, give or take forty years, with the date of 9600 BC for the foundation of the First Sangam (and thus also with Plato’s date for the submersion of Atlantis). It is only a hint, but if there is any substance to it, then it raises the possibility that the First Sangam too, like its successors, might have been founded by flood survivors – perhaps even survivors of the very same episode of global floods that in another ocean gave rise to the Atlantis myth.
Cults of knowledge
At the heart of the Sangam story, whether it concerns three or seven ancient Academies, is a theme of entropy and degeneration, spiralling downwards through a series of stages from a golden age, powered by vast cosmic cycles of destruction and rebirth. There are curious echoes here of the yuga system at the heart of the Dwarka story, on the one hand, and of the Vedic notion of the pralaya – the global cataclysm that recurs at the end of each world age – on the other:
In both cases we must envisage an antediluvian civilization of high spiritual and artistic achievement and a group of sages – the Seven Rishis in the case of the Vedas, the members of the ‘Academy’ in the case of the Tamil texts – who gather to serve the interests of knowledge and to provide an archive or repository for poetic and religious compositions.