Adam's Bridge - Controversies

Controversies

Certain historical inscriptions, old travel guides, old dictionary references and some old maps have been said to reinforce a religious and geographical belief that this is an ancient bridge.(see Ramayana). In 2007 the Sri Lankan Tourism Development Authority sought to promote religious tourism from Hindu piligrims in India by including the phenomenon as one of the points on its "Ramayana Trail", celebrating the legend of Prince Rama. Sri Lankan historians condemn the undertaking as "a gross distortion of Sri Lankan history". Vaishnava News Network and some other U.S.-based news services suggested that they had discovered the remains of the bridge built by Rama and his Vanara army that is referred to in the Ramayana, and that it was not a natural formation, basing their claim on 2002 NASA satellite footage. NASA distanced itself from the claims saying that what had been captured was nothing more than a 30-km-long, naturally occurring chain of sandbanks. It also clarified that, "The images reproduced on the websites may well be ours, but their interpretation is certainly not ours. Remote sensing images or photographs from orbit cannot provide direct information about the origin or age of a chain of islands, and certainly cannot determine whether humans were involved in producing any of the patterns seen."

A team from the Centre for Remote Sensing (CRS) of Bharathidasan University, Tiruchi led by Professor S.M. Ramasamy in 2003 said "the land/beaches were formed between Ramanathapuram and Pamban because of the long shore drifting currents which moved in an anti-clockwise direction in the north and clockwise direction in the south of Rameswaram and Talaimannar about 3,500 years ago." and, "as the carbon dating of the beaches roughly matches the dates of Ramayana, its link to the epic needs to be explored". A former director of the Geological Survey of India, S. Badrinarayanan, claims that such a natural formation would be impossible. He justifies the same by the presence of a loose sand layer under corals for the entire stretch. Corals normally form above rocks. He feels that thorough analysis was not conducted by the Geological Survey of India before undertaking the SSCP project. Government of India, in an affidavit in the Supreme Court of India, said that there is no historical proof of the bridge being built by Rama. In connection with the canal project, the Madras High Court in its verdict stated that the Rama Sethu is a man-made structure.

Hindu belief is that the bridge was created by Shri Rama and Shri Lakshman with the assistance of Lord Hanuman and the 'monkey army' to reach Lanka in order to find Shri Rama's wife Sita who was kidnapped by Ravana. A 2007 publication of the National Remote Sensing Agency said that the structure "may be man-made", contradicting the report from the Archaeological Survey of India which found no evidence for it being man-made. In a 2008 court case, a spokesman for the government stated "So where is the Setu? We are not destroying any bridge. There is no bridge. It was not a man-made structure. It may be a superman-made structure, but the same superman had destroyed it. That is why for centuries nobody mentioned anything about it. It (Ram Setu) has become an object of worship only recently,".