that the progenitors of the other races must have migrated from Lemuria to other places via South India. This theory was also cursorily discussed by other colonial officials like Edgar Thurston and Herbert Hope Risley, including in the census reports of 1891 and 1901. Later, Maclean's manual came to be cited as an authoritative work by the Tamil writers, who often wrongly referred to him as a "scientist" and a "Doctor". The native Tamil intellectuals first started discussing the concept of a submerged Tamil homeland in the late 1890s. In 1898, J. Nallasami Pillai published an article in the philosophical-literary journal Siddhanta Deepika (aka The Truth of Light). He wrote about the theory of a lost continent in the Indian Ocean (i.e. Lemuria), mentioning that the Tamil legends speak of floods which destroyed the literary works produced during the ancient sangams. However, he also added that this theory had "no serious historical or scientific footing". Popularization in Tamil Nadu In the 1920s, the Lemuria concept was popularized by the Tamil revivalists to counter the dominance of Indo-Aryans and Sanskrit. Tamil revivalist writers claimed that Lemuria, prior to its deluge, was the original Tamil homeland and birthplace of Tamil civilization. They often misquoted or miscited the words of Western scholars to grant credibility to their assertions. During the British era, the loss of small patches of lands to cyclones was cataloged in several district reports, gazetteers, and other documents. The Tamil writers of the period cited these as evidence supporting the theory about an ancient land lost to the sea. In curriculum The books discussing the Kumari Kandam theory were first included in the college curriculum of the present-day Tamil Nadu in 1908. Suryanarayana Sastri's book was prescribed for use in Madras University's Master's degree courses in 1908-09. Over the next few decades, other such works were also included in the curriculum of Madras University and Annamalai University. These include Purnalingam Pillai's A Primer of Tamil Literature (1904) and Tamil literature (1929), Kandiah Pillai's Tamilakam (1934), and Srinivasa Pillai's Tamil Varalaru (1927). In a 1940 Tamil language textbook for ninth-grade students, T. V. Kalyanasundaram wrote that Lemuria of the European scholars was Kumarinatu of the Tamil literature. After the Dravidian parties came to power in the 1967 Madras State elections, the Kumari Kandam theory was disseminated more widely through school and college textbooks. In 1971, the Government of Tamil Nadu established