In the 19th century, some European and American scholars speculated the existence of a submerged continent called Lemuria to explain geological and other similarities between Africa, Australia, the Indian subcontinent and Madagascar.

[2] The words "Kumari Kandam" first appear in Kanda Puranam, a 15th-century Tamil version of the Skanda Purana, written by Kachiappa Sivacharyara (1350–1420).

The earliest explicit discussion of a katalkol ("seizure by ocean", possibly tsunami) of Pandyan land is found in a commentary on Iraiyanar Akapporul.

It was divided into 49 territories (natu), classified in the following seven categories:[10] Other medieval writers, such as Ilampuranar and Perasiriyar, also make stray references to the loss of antediluvian lands to the south of Kanyakumari, in their commentaries on ancient texts like Tolkappiyam.

The Sanskrit-language Bhagavata Purana (dated 500 BCE–1000 CE) describes its protagonist Manu (aka Satyavrata) as the Lord of Dravida (South India).

[15] Manimeghalai (dated around 6th century CE) mentions that the ancient Chola port city of Kaverippumpattinam (present-day Puhar) was destroyed by a flood.

However, in 1885, the Indian Civil Service officer Charles D. Maclean published The Manual of the Administration of the Madras Presidency, in which he theorized Lemuria as the proto-Dravidian urheimat.

In a footnote in this work, he mentioned Ernst Haeckel's Asia hypothesis, which theorized that the humans originated in a land now submerged in the Indian Ocean.

He wrote about the theory of a lost continent in the Indian Ocean (i.e. Lemuria), mentioning that the Tamil legends speak of floods which destroyed the literary works produced during the ancient sangams.

[27] After the Dravidian parties came to power in the 1967 Madras State elections, the Kumari Kandam theory was disseminated more widely through school and college textbooks.

[32] Tamil writers characterized Kumari Kandam as an ancient, but highly advanced civilization located in an isolated continent in the Indian Ocean.

Many Tamil writers do not assign any date to the submergence of Kumari Kandam, resorting to phrases like "once upon a time" or "several thousands of years ago".

Unlike its description in the Kanda Puranam, the Tamil revivalists depicted Kumari Kandam as a place free of the upper-caste Brahmins, who had come to be identified as descendants of Indo-Aryans during the Dravidian movement.

The non-utopian practices of the 20th century Tamil Hindu society, such as superstitions and caste-based discrimination, were all described as corruption resulting from Indo-Aryan influence.

[3] A land lost to the ocean also helped the Tamil revivalists provide an explanation for the lack of historically verifiable or scientifically acceptable material evidence about this ancient civilization.

[34] In the 1950s, R. Nedunceliyan, who later became Tamil Nadu's education minister, published a pamphlet called Marainta Tiravitam ("Lost Dravidian land").

[37] M. S. Purnalingam Pillai, writing in 1927, stated that Indus Valley civilisation was established by the Tamil survivors from the flood-hit Kumari Nadu.

[40][41] In 1953, R. Nedunceliyan, who later became the education minister of Tamil Nadu, insisted that the civilization spread from South India to the Indus Valley and Sumer, and subsequently, to "Arabia, Egypt, Greece, Italy, Spain and other places".

Instead, they described it as a utopia which had reached the zenith of human achievement, and where people lived a life devoted to learning, education, travel and commerce.

Sumanthi Ramaswamy notes that this "placemaking" of Kumari Kandam was frequently intended as a teaching tool, meant to inspire the modern Tamils to pursue excellence.

[37] Suryanarayan Sastri, in 1903, described the antediluvian Tamils as expert cultivators, fine poets and far-traveling merchants, who lived in an egalitarian and democratic society.

The film, personally backed by the Chief Minister M. G. Ramachandran and directed by P. Neelakantan, was screened at the Fifth International Conference of Tamil Studies in Madurai.

Others listed books on a wide range of topics, including medicine, martial arts, logic, painting, sculpture, yoga, philosophy, music, mathematics, alchemy, magic, architecture, poetry, and wealth.

The work talked about the exploits of an antediluvian Tamil king Sengon, who ruled the now-submerged kingdom of Peruvalanatu, the region between the rivers Kumari and Pahruli.

Sastri insisted that the lost land mentioned in Adiyarkunallar's records was barely equivalent to a taluka (not larger than a few hundred square miles).

[53] In 1927, Purnalingam Pillai published a map titled "Puranic India before the Deluges", in which he labeled the various places of Kumari Kandam with names drawn from ancient Tamil and Sanskrit literary works.

[7] Kumari Kandam is a mythical continent,[1] and therefore, the attempts to mix this myth with Tamil history have attracted criticism since the late 19th century.

[56] One of the earliest criticisms came from M Seshagiri Sastri (1897), who described the claims of ante-diluvial sangams as "a mere fiction originated by the prolific imagination of Tamil poets.

"[57] CH Monahan wrote a scathing review of Suryanarayana Sastri's Tamilmoliyin Varalaru (1903), shortly after its publication, accusing the author of "abandoning scientific research for mythology".

[61] According to him, the land lost to sea, as described in the ancient Tamil legends, was a small area comparable to a present-day district, and submerged around 5th or 4th century BCE.