Lost Land of Lemuria

Sumathi Ramaswamy is Associate Professor of History at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, editor of Beyond Appearances: Visual Practices and Ideologies in Modern India (2003), and author of Passions of the Tongue: Language Devotion in Tamil India, 1891--1970 (California, 1997).

"This path-breaking book makes novel and riveting connections between scientists and occultists in the West and Tamil nationalists in India. Ramaswamy's history of the fabulous and lost continent of Lemuria is a brilliant demonstration of how imagination travels." - Dipesh Chakrabarty, author of Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference "Sumathi Ramaswamy's important book is sure to ignite fresh interest in the place of lost lands in the modern imaginary. Her fascinating account of the least known of these - Lemuria - breathes new life into the centrality of 'labors of loss' in nationalist historiography. In refusing to dismiss such narratives as eccentric and inconsequential, Ramaswamy compels scholars to look anew at the fabulous and occult in order to understand the shaping of scientific and colonial modernity. Impeccably researched and elegantly written, this is altogether a marvelous read." - Gauri Viswanathan, Columbia University, author of Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity, and Belief"