Where Poonguzhali was
Notes on geography.
If you have either read Kalki Krishamurthy’s Ponniyin Selvan or watched Maniratnam’s film adaptation of the novel, you know Poonguzhali. She is the pretty and powerful fisherwoman who transports the story’s other leading characters across the Palk Strait, from Chozha Nadu to Eelam, in her rowing boat. The ease with which she floats in and out of the two geographies struck me when I read the book. Crossing the ocean similarly today is a crime.
Although Poonguzhali, the character, is fictional, her character-defining act of ocean crossing at will is not. In 10th Century AD, when the story is set and before European conquests, Tamils living in the north of Eelam were more closely tethered to cities across the Strait, such as Thanjavur and Madurai, than they were to cities to their south, over land, such as Polonnaruwa and Yapahuwa. The 32 kilometer stretch of sea, punctuated by small islands and lined with limestone shoals, then, was a porous border unlike today. Goods, people, religion, literature, and culture flowed freely between these two geographies wedged by the ocean. Before trains and cars, before railway tracks and asphalt roads, the ocean was more readily navigable (than land). Geographically speaking, before the colonial period, Tamil people in the north of Eelam looked across and beyond the ocean rather than to the south, beyond the thick and treacherous forests that covered the island’s plains.
Today we are fed a potent myth: the earth is flat and the globe is a village without borders. But the fact is that geography is central to us as both individuals and collectives. As Timothy Snyder, a professor of history at Yale University, remarked in one of his recent lectures on Ukraine, ‘who can get to what geography at what time determines history’. As a motivating example, he proposes contending what might have been had Batu Khan, the Mongol ruler of western eurasian steppes (today’s Central and Eastern Europe) had conquered Paris. Batu Khan’s armies, under the command of General Subutai, laid waste to every European army they encountered. They came as far as Poland and Hungary and were planning to invade Austria and Italy, further to the west. In the year 1241, if Batu Khan had not been called back to Mongolia to deal with issues of succession and had entered (today’s) western Europe, what might have been indeed. In all probability: no Renaissance, no Age of Exploration, no European colonial conquests. Our world would be fundamentally different to what it is today. Batu Khan’s descendants, a few centuries later, would cross dry and rocky mountains to the south east and conquer most of the subcontinent. But the Mughals did not quite fully get to Madurai though, even at the zenith of their empire. What might have been if they did? Although the Mughals did not possess a powerful naval fleet, what if they did and ventured further south, across and beyond the seas, to a small island known for its spices? Consider what might have been if the Europeans never made it beyond Cape Town. More close to home and perhaps more trivially, what if the Portuguese or the Dutch got to Kandy? For one, there would be far fewer Kandyan Govi Buddhist matrimony advertisements in our Sunday newspapers. It matters, as Snyder notes, that Vladimir Putin did not get to Kyiv in the first few weeks of the Ukraine war. It matters for those of us in Sri Lanka — aragalayas notwithstanding — that it is Mahinda Rajapaksa and not Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga who got to Nandikkadal.
Further, as I discussed with someone very dear to me recently, geography is also personal. Where we are and how we relate to space has deep implications for how we see ourselves. For an American citizen the earth is flatter and the globe more village-like than for a Sri Lankan. Rowing across the Palk Strait took Poonguzhali an entire night. With motorised boats, a Mannar fisherman should be able to get to Dhanushkodi much faster than her. Yet, to us, the south eastern coast of India is far more distant today than what it was to our ancestors a thousand years ago.
How we experience geography orients our being. When our geographies change, we change in turn. I wonder how Poonguzhali thought of herself. In the story, it is clear that she saw herself as King Sundara Chola’s subject. She spoke Tamil but did she see herself as part of a single and unified ethnic group called the Tamils? After all, the Cholas’ primary enemies were the Pandyas, who were also . . . Tamils. Moreover, did she see herself as distinct from Tamil speakers she encountered in Eelam, whose northern shores and their neighbouring isles she was so intimately familiar with? Whatever Poonguzhali thought of herself, we can be certain that she did not see herself as an Indian; certainly, not in the same post-British Empire, modern sense of the nationality. If she belonged to a country, she belonged to Chozha Nadu but Nadu here just stands for kingdom. At a more personal level, I wonder what was it like for my Tamil speaking ancestors who lived in Jaffna during Poonguzhali’s time? We can be certain that Poonguzhali did not see them as Sri Lankan Tamils. We can also be certain that they, my ancestors, did not see themselves as Sri Lankans. Certainly, not in the post-British Empire, modern sense of the nationality. The geography attached to the word Eelam itself has evolved over time. For Poongulazhi, Eelam referred to the whole of the island. The word did not denote the north eastern region claimed by Tamil nationalists and hated by Sinhala nationalists today.
Thus, while I walk the same parts of the earth as my ancestors did and speak their language, my geography is not theirs. There is no historical continuity between our meta-identities, least of all between our ‘national’ identities. There cannot be because my geography is not theirs. We easily forget that nation states are modern: the nation state of Sri Lanka is a colonial creation and Ancient Sri Lanka is an oxymoron. I am not suggesting that we revert to geographies of AD 950 [1]. We can, however, stop drawing lines of continuity where they do not exist. My geography is what it is. I can do less or more with it. Because geography has changed in the past, it can change today as well. My geography can change and I can change my geography. At the very least, I can change how I relate to it. What I should not — in fact, cannot — do is turn to the past and to my ancestors to moor my present. For my geography is not theirs and theirs not mine.
[1] I do think — Indo-Lankan fishing conflict nothwithstanding — that that we need to open up the Palk Strait for exchange of people and trade, similar to what it was at the time of independence. The present closed status is a harmful abberation.
