Review of Arup K. Chatterjee’s Adam’s Bridge — Sacrality, Performance, and Heritage of an Oceanic Marvel: Protecting a fragile environment

Arup K. Chatterjee’s recent book, Adam’s Bridge: Sacrality, Performance, and Heritage of an Oceanic Marvel, offers a scholarly socio-cultural insight into the enchanting geological feature called the Adam’s Bridge (also known as Ram Setu). The structure in question is a linear coralline ridge separating a shallow sea between Pamban Island on the southeast coast of India and Mannar Island on the northern coast of Sri Lanka. Celebrated in Hindu mythological lore as a ‘bridge’ or ‘setu’ built by Lord Ram’s army, it has been a hot topic of discussion both among environmental scientists and religious enthusiasts, ever since the Indian government mooted the idea of dredging a navigable route through the limestone shoals. Chatterjee takes us through a complex web of ethnography, historiography, and ecological equity concerning this oceanic structure. In working towards that objective, Chatterjee explores ‘the entanglement of Adam’s Bridge’s discursive history with India’s colonial history, contemporary geology, domestic politics, and the nation’s emerging position in a complex geopolitical order around the Indian Ocean region.”

An aerial view of Ram Setu. | Photo Credit: Special arrangement

Marvel of nature

In this eloquent work, the author enables us to think about ways of heritagisation of a marvel of nature by fostering cross-cultural collaborative efforts. He does not allow the otherwise widely prevalent dichotomy between religion and science to affect the historiography of Adam’s Bridge because he offers to answer whether the ‘Ramayan legacy,’ as he calls it, is adequate to historicise and produce objective knowledge on Adam’s Bridge or Ram Setu. Besides the obvious challenge of multiple versions of Ramayan — several of which do not even tackle the episode of the building of the legendary bridge — Chatterjee’s task is made more complex by the fact that he intends to give no inferior weightage to the history of science, anthropology of religion, colonial history, history of cartography in India, the administrative history of dredging plans in the Sethusamudram region, environmental history, the plight of Tamil fishermen on both sides of the international border, and so on. Further, the book’s final chapters also take us to more global themes such as the economic and geostrategic history of the Indian Ocean region and the utmost relevance of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea in matters of the oceanic territory in question.

Fishermen hoist black flags against the Sethusamudram Ship Channel Project, in Tuticorin. | Photo Credit: N. Rajesh

Like this reviewer, Chatterjee too perhaps understands that the current frenzy to legitimise Indic myths and legends through ‘scientific’ jargon may have some political value but the long-term losses to its reputation can undermine the short-term profits for some groups. Where Chatterjee differs resolutely from rigid scientific or religious notions is in suggesting that scientific temperament, geological awareness, and religious sentiments can play complementary and not conflictual roles in society. According to him, Hindu, Abrahamic, and Buddhist registers of thinking around Adam’s Bridge/Ram Setu are symbiotic and represent millennia of evolution of such religious and mythological ideas.

Contentious location

The geographical location of Ram Setu is still a contentious matter among academics, and Adam’s Bridge is just one potential candidate because of its geographical attributes. Scholars like H.D. Sankalia and Devdutt Pattanaik have located Ram Setu in the Vindhyan (around Amarkantak or Chhota Nagpur) or the lower Mahanadi Valley in Orissa, quite far from Adam’s Bridge. Chatterjee mentions that tenth-century Chola rulers were the first to correlate Sri Lanka with Ramayan’s ‘Lanka’. Colonial Orientalists popularised the phraseology ‘Ram Setu’ in the 18th and 19th century, when Hindu merchants of Jaffna and Tamil country were not as sentimentally attached to the idea of a legendary sacred ‘bridge’ connecting India and Ceylon. However, according to Chatterjee, the Sethupathis of the region had been the protectors of the ‘Sethu’ since at least the fourteenth century.

The cantilever railway bridge over the Palk Strait connecting mainland India with Rameswaram. | Photo Credit: Special arrangement

Chatterjee discusses at length why dredging the Palk Strait is a terrible idea on environmental, economic, and geological grounds — not due to religious sensitivity, alone. He ends on a philosophical note, which suggests that the region around Adam’s Bridge needs to be monumentalised as a sacred ‘bridge’ of sorts and should highlight what this reviewer and some others including the author have called a ‘geo-heritage’. The environmental fragility of the Gulf of Mannar and Palk Bay regions, both from environmental and political standpoints, do require serious conversations and pseudo-science and post-truth are certainly not the way forward. Adam’s Bridge also shows a path of environmental diplomacy between India and Sri Lanka. This book will be extremely significant for those who desire a reasonably objective historiography of Ram Setu.

Adam’s Bridge: Sacrality, Performance, and Heritage of an Oceanic Marvel; Arup K. Chatterjee, Routledge, $180.

The reviewer is an adjunct professor at the National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bengaluru, and author of ‘Rumbling Earth: The Story of Indian Earthquakes’.