This article seeks to think about decline as part of the sociology of time, by exploring ways former politically dominant communities seek to negotiate their ritual traditions by forging newer relationships to modern time. This is particularly important considering that nationalist voices, largely represented by the right-wing BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party), RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh) and the Sangh Parivar in general, and liberal voices representing the Congress (Indian National Congress), or regional political voices such the DMK (Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam) and AIADMK (All Indian Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam), have dated the origins of the proposed Sethusamudram project to the colonial era, erroneously prolonging the implication that the British government aided plans of demolishing Adam's Bridge. The British colonial state adopted epistemes or modes of knowing Adam's Bridge that were ostensibly compatible with pre-Western forms of enchantment. Without understanding how the British colonial state saw Adam's Bridge, we may wrongly infer that today's Indian nationalist assertions of its sacrality necessarily stem from an anticolonial praxis to restore a politics of enchantment within Indian modernity. The religious and epistemic conundrum around the Sethusamudram project and Adam's Bridge is a colonial-era legacy. The Sethusamudram Shipping Canal Project, whose construction was halted by a 2013 judgment of the Supreme Court of India due to religious sensitivity, has become a domestic and international strategic flashpoint. Reflecting on Ramaswamy's study of nineteenth-century occultist and theosophical imaginations of Lemuria, I believe that, ultimately, empiricism and material science are insufficient to rationalize or reify the sacred mythography of Ram Setu. Like Ramaswamy (2004), mine is an epistemic concern for discourses of enchantment that are thwarted by modernity or instrumentalized by promissory antagonists to modernity. 15) "hegemony of the real and the visible" is deeply appropriate with regard to the abject status of: those place-making imaginations that are not necessarily rooted in disciplinary geography's normative planetary consciousness that transformed the globe into a disenchanted place over the course of the imperial nineteenth century, that disavowed imagination in favor of empirical reason, and that consolidated (the metropolitan) man as the allknowing subject and master of all he surveyed … they remind me … that our earth can continue to be an enchanted realm even after being colonized by modern science (Ramaswamy, 2004, p. Sumathi Ramaswamy ultimately reveals how loss itself has become a condition of modernity, compelling us to rethink the politics of imagination and creativity in our day. More than a consideration of nostalgia, it shows how ideas once entertained but later discarded in the metropole can travel to the periphery-and can be appropriated by those seeking to construct a meaningful world within the disenchantment of modernity. The Lost Land of Lemuria widens into a provocative exploration of the poetics and politics of loss to consider how this sentiment manifests itself in a fascination with vanished homelands, hidden civilizations, and forgotten peoples. A sustained meditation on a lost place from a lost time, this elegantly written book is the first to explore Lemuria's incarnations across cultures, from Victorian-era science to Euro-American occultism to colonial and postcolonial India. During the nineteenth century, Lemuria was imagined as a land that once bridged India and Africa but disappeared into the ocean millennia ago, much like Atlantis.
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