Ram Setu: The Memoirs of an Enchanted Bridge (Rupa 2025) is now available for purchase on Amazon: https://www.amazon.in/RAM-SETU-Memoirs-Enchanted-Bridge/dp/9370031804
In the second episode of his series The Legends of Ram Setu, Indian writer, academic, and educator, Arup K. Chatterjee continues his effort to pull one of India’s most disputed sea passages out of the shouting arena and into a quieter, evidence-based space. If the first episode explained why he devoted two major books to Ram Setu, this instalment turns the clock back to the seventeenth century and to one of the earliest European witnesses of the region: the Dutch Calvinist minister Philippus Baldaeus.
Chatterjee begins by restating the basics. Ram Setu, known in many British and European sources as Adam’s Bridge, is a roughly 30-mile chain of sandbanks and shoals linking Pamban Island, off Rameswaram in Tamil Nadu, to Mannar Island in Sri Lanka. In the Valmiki Ramayan, this is the legendary causeway built by Lord Ram, with the help of Nala, Hanuman and their monkey and bear allies, to cross into Lanka. Modern scientists, he notes, see something different but no less intriguing: a series of shallow shoals, in places less than a metre deep, that have long “seriously hindered navigation.” Geologists have even suggested that it may once have formed a continuous land bridge between the subcontinent and the island.
For Chatterjee, this duality is the point. Ram Setu is both natural formation and possible human intervention, both sacred geography and maritime problem. It sits at the intersection of science, history, religion and politics, making it a lightning rod in today’s India. Yet, as he stresses, many Indians care about it not out of “blind faith” but because it is a dense node of heritage, memory and research questions. Geologists work on its formation; historians and cultural scholars trace its place in local lore and colonial records; citizens see it as a symbol that links nation and civilisation. The debate, he insists, is not about superstition versus science but about how to treat an “island-rich history and heritage” with seriousness.
That insistence on calm leads him to Baldaeus. The Dutch minister arrived in Ceylon in the 1650s, accompanying a Dutch East India Company expedition that seized Jaffna from the Portuguese. He remained in the region, moving between Jaffna and the Coromandel Coast, preaching and closely observing the local Tamil-speaking communities. His work, eventually published in Amsterdam in 1672 as A True and Exact Description of the East-India Coasts of Malabar and Coromandel, and also of the Isle of Ceylon, would become one of the foundational European accounts of southern India and Sri Lanka. So influential were his surveys that early eighteenth-century atlases still credited “Philippi Baldaei” as a source.
Chatterjee sketches Baldaeus as an unusually attentive figure for his time. The minister learned local languages, translated the Lord’s Prayer into Tamil—albeit imperfectly, in what became the first printed Tamil text in Europe—and documented Tamil customs with a degree of respect rare in seventeenth-century missionary literature. He did not dismiss Hindu practices out of hand; he simply recorded them.
On Ram Setu, however, Baldaeus said little about gods or miracles. Like most European observers of his day, he treated what we now call Ram Setu as a geographical obstacle: a line of shoals complicating navigation between the Gulf of Mannar and Palk Bay. In his Dutch text, he catalogued coasts, ports and hazards to shipping. The chain of reefs was one such hazard.
Yet from this pragmatic stance emerged a striking maritime legend. Nineteenth-century reports, drawing on Dutch records via Baldaeus, recall an anecdote in which a group of Portuguese frigates allegedly escaped pursuing Dutch forces by threading their way through the shallow passages of Adam’s Bridge. The nineteenth-century historian Peter Suckling, writing in the 1870s, repeats the tale of ships “escaping… by sailing through the passage” of the shoals. For Chatterjee, this is revealing: the bridge appears here not as a templed monument, nor as a miracle site, but as a treacherous sea route, the stuff of naval folklore rather than religious devotion.
In Baldaeus’s time, Chatterjee points out, Europeans did not assign the structure any formal religious status. They adopted the name Adam’s Bridge from older Arabic and Biblical lore about Adam’s footsteps, or referred to it simply as reefs. The Ramayanic associations that dominate Indian nationalist discourse today had not yet entered European consciousness. For Baldaeus and his successors, it was a cartographic feature to be drawn as a broken line of reefs on a chart, marked clearly as an obstacle.
What interests Chatterjee is not to scold Baldaeus for failing to recognise Hindu sacred geography, but to show how different knowledge systems coexisted over the same stretch of sea. While coastal communities lived with Ramayanic legends and local ritual practice, European mapmakers were busy turning the region into atlases and sailing directions. Baldaeus stands as an example of a curious outsider who neither mocked local belief nor romanticised it, but did what observers of his trade were meant to do: record what they saw.
The episode uses his story to make a larger point. Ram Setu matters today, Chatterjee argues, not because of superstition but because of its endurance across disciplines and centuries. Geologists still probe its structure as part of larger questions about plate tectonics and sea-level changes. Historians revisit colonial-era schemes to dredge the shoals, reading them as early markers of the region’s geostrategic value. Cultural historians trace how the bridge has shifted from a passing note in European travelogues to a potent symbol in Indian political and religious life.
Baldaeus, crucially, did not feel compelled to choose sides between God and geology. He recorded a chain of reefs, a naval anecdote and a set of local customs. Chatterjee suggests modern India can afford to be just as steady. By returning to reliable sources—old travel narratives, archival maps, official reports, scientific studies—it is possible to assemble a richer picture of Ram Setu, one that neither reduces it to a miracle nor dismisses it as mere superstition.
As the episode closes, Chatterjee signals where the series will go next: deeper into seventeenth-century mapping and the history of the Sethupathis, the traditional guardians of the Setu. The sea, he suggests, still has layers of history beneath its surface, and it will take patience, not polemics, to read them.
Ram Setu: The Memoirs of an Enchanted Bridge (Rupa 2025) is now available for purchase on Amazon: https://www.amazon.in/RAM-SETU-Memoirs-Enchanted-Bridge/dp/9370031804
Arup K. Chatterjee 