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
As the Indian writer, academic, and educator, Arup K. Chatterjee sits down for the first episode of his new series Legends of Ram Setu, he makes it clear that this is not going to be another shouting match over faith and science. Instead, he introduces the subject quietly: a narrow chain of shoals between Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka, revered in India as Ram Setu and known to older European cartography as Adam’s Bridge — a place, as he puts it, that “keeps insisting on being both a landform and a story.”
The premiere episode, titled “Why I Wrote Ram Setu,” serves as a manifesto for the project. Chatterjee explains why this fragile strip of sea and sand compelled him to spend more than six years in research and to consult over two thousand primary sources, eventually resulting in two substantial books: Adam’s Bridge: Sacrality, Performance, and Heritage of an Oceanic Marvel (Routledge, 2024), and its reworked Indian edition, Ram Setu: The Memoirs of an Enchanted Bridge (Rupa, 2025).
For Chatterjee, Ram Setu is not an abstraction. It is an intimate landscape, embedded in the everyday rhythms of coastal life. He describes how the bridge shapes the lives and imaginations of island communities: fisherfolk heading out at dawn, pilgrims moving through temple circuits, families whose calendars still hinge on fishing seasons and religious observances. To write about the bridge, he suggests, is to write about how people inhabit a place that is at once sacred, fragile and politically charged.
That charge comes, in part, from the way the landscape has been read and renamed over centuries. Chatterjee notes that Ram Setu has been interpreted through many lenses: as scripture, as geology, as curious cartographic feature, as engineering obstacle. These interpretations are never neutral, he argues. They influence policy, law and development projects, and in the process determine who benefits from the sea and who is pushed to its margins.
The longer motivation behind the project is Chatterjee’s unease with the way public debate tends to frame sites like Ram Setu in simple binaries: faith versus science, heritage versus development, nationalism versus cosmopolitan scholarship. Those oppositions, he says, may work well on television, but they flatten the complexities of history and lived experience. Ram Setu, the book and now the series, is conceived as an attempt to resist that flattening, to show that history, religion, geology, law and ecology can be brought into conversation without one discipline swallowing the others.
That ambition is anchored in method. Chatterjee describes a double commitment: archival depth and interdisciplinarity. He has worked through old maps, colonial surveys, travelogues, government debates, photographs and obscure gazetteers to trace how the bridge has been imagined and reimagined over time. Alongside that, he reads geological reports and remote-sensing studies next to the Ramayanic tradition and contemporary ritual practice. The bridge, for him, is both “text and terrain.”
From this combination of sources emerge several key conclusions. One concerns naming. The term “Adam’s Bridge,” popularised by British cartographers such as James Rennell, is not a neutral label, Chatterjee argues, but part of an imperial project that reframed South Asian geographies through European eyes. That move was not uncontested, either by local actors or by other Europeans, and those earlier struggles over naming help explain why arguments about terminology still ignite passions today.
Another conclusion is that Ram Setu remains a living sacred geography. The legends associated with the Ramayanic tradition are not, in his view, fossilised tales. They are enacted in pilgrimage routes, temple rituals and community memories. Chatterjee prefers the word “legend” to “myth,” signalling his respect for their continuing performative power while retaining a historian’s critical distance.
Science, he insists, does not need to stand opposite this sacred geography. Geological and satellite studies have produced several hypotheses about how the structure formed — whether entirely natural, partly engineered or something in between. Chatterjee’s readings of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century geological commentaries alongside modern work suggest that sweeping dismissals of belief or of science are equally unsatisfying. He points to plausible historical moments in which human intervention and collective labour may have shaped portions of what is now called Ram Setu, opening up a denser conversation about how humans alter and are altered by marine environments.
The stakes, he adds, are not only symbolic. Debates over the Sethusamudram shipping channel, the vulnerability of the Gulf of Mannar’s biodiversity, and the precarious livelihoods of fisherfolk — particularly women whose labour often goes uncounted — are, in his view, central to any honest discussion of the place. Ignoring the thousands of nonhuman species in the region, or the seasonal economies of Pamban and Rameswaram, is tantamount to not speaking about Ram Setu at all.
Chatterjee is careful to stress what his work is not. He did not write Ram Setu to prove or disprove religious belief. His aim, he says, is constitutional rather than doctrinal: to explore how a plural democracy might hold faith and inquiry together, giving legitimate space to both reverence and critique. It is, he insists, a practical proposal for governing contested heritage without delegitimising either devotion or scientific labour.
One image seems to crystallise his approach. Early in the research, in a colonial archive, he found a map annotated by many hands over a century — merchants, naval officers, surveyors. In the margins, a small sketch of a boat appeared, likely drawn by an Indian fisher. That layering — official lines overlaid with an ordinary person’s drawing — captured, for him, what Ram Setu represents: multiple voices, overlapping times, occasionally clashing, but together turning a line on a chart into a lived, contested, shared place.
The podcast series, he promises, will follow those layers. Upcoming episodes of Legends of Ram Setu will delve into colonial cartography, rituals at Rameswaram, the Sethusamudram controversy, testimonies from fishing communities and conversations with geologists, historians and activists. Chatterjee ends with an invitation to viewers — devotees, fishers, scientists, or simply curious listeners — to write in with memories, photographs and oral tales. The series, he suggests, hopes to live in those exchanges, as much as in the archives and laboratories that first shaped his work.
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 