Fabulous Geographies, Catastrophic Histories: The Lost Land of Lemuria

This exceptionally innovative exploration of the historical imagination?in India and elsewhere?looks at ideas about vanished homelands, hidden civilizations, and forgotten peoples. During the nineteenth century, Lemuria was imagined as a land that once bridged India and Africa. Much like Atlantis, Lemuria is supposed to have been submerged by the oceans long ago. This elegantly written book is the first to explore Lemuria?s incarnations across cultures, from colonial period science, to European and American occultism, to histories and mythologies in Tamil. Fabulous Geographies, Catastrophic Histories is a provocative and unusually imaginative book about Utopian ideas, poetry, nostalgia, and the envisioning of loss; and of how such sentiments are a part of the condition of modernity.