Kumari Kandam

Kumari Kandam
A map of the Kumari Kandam according to the 20th century Tamil revivalist writers
Type	lost continent
Notable characters	Dravidians
First appearance	Kanda Puranam (purportedly alluded to in Sangam literature, but not by this name)

Kumari Kandam (Tamil: குமரிக்கண்டம்) refers to a mythical lost continent with an ancient Tamil civilization, located south of present-day India, in the Indian Ocean. Alternative names and spellings include Kumarikkantam and Kumari Nadu.

In the 19th century, a section of the European and American scholars speculated the existence of a submerged continent called Lemuria, to explain geological and other similarities between Africa, India and Madagascar. A section of Tamil revivalists adapted this theory, connecting it to the Pandyan legends of lands lost to the ocean, as described in ancient Tamil and Sanskrit literature. According to these writers, an ancient Tamil civilization existed on Lemuria, before it was lost to the sea in a catastrophe. In the 20th century, the Tamil writers started using the name "Kumari Kandam" to describe this submerged continent. Although the Lemuria theory was later rendered obsolete by the continental drift (plate tectonics) theory, the concept remained popular among the Tamil revivalists of the 20th century. According to them, Kumari Kandam was the place where the first two Tamil literary academies (sangams) were organized during the Pandyan reign. They claimed Kumari Kandam as the cradle of civilization to prove the antiquity of Tamil language and culture.

After the Tamil writers were introduced to the concept of Lemuria in the 1890s, they came up with the Tamilized versions of the continent's name (e.g. "Ilemuria"). By the early 1900s, they started using Tamil names for the continent, to support their depiction of Lemuria as an ancient Tamil civilization. In 1903, V.G. Suryanarayana Sastri first used the term "Kumarinatu" (or "Kumari Nadu", meaning "Kumari territory") in his work Tamil Moliyin Varalaru (History of the Tamil language). The term Kumari Kandam ("Kumari continent") was first used to describe Lemuria in the 1930s.