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History at Land's End: Lemuria in Tamil Spatial Fables

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 March 2010

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This paper seeks to address the theme of this volume by exploring the place of the fabulous in the imaginary geographies of a lost world in the Indian Ocean.

I begin with three enchanted flights of imagination that seek to convey a useful truth. All three are occasioned by travel to a real place—Kanyakumari, the “Cape Comorin” of colonial atlases, and the land's end of the Indian peninsula and of its Tamil-speaking region (“Tamil Nadu”).

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Copyright © The Association for Asian Studies, Inc. 2000

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