Book: RAM SETU: MEMOIRS OF AN ENCHANTED BRIDGE
Author: Arup K. Chatterjee
Published by: Rupa
Price: Rs 495
For centuries, the chain of shoals stretching between India and Sri Lanka has shimmered in the twilight between faith and fact. Known to some as Ram Setu and to others as Adam’s Bridge, it has been imagined as both divine architecture and coral geology. In this book, Arup K. Chatterjee returns to this contested site — not to settle the debate but to reveal how its mystery has always been inseparable from the stories told about it.
Chatterjee’s strength lies in his ability to braid together myth, history, geology, and politics without letting any strand fray. Drawing on the Ramayana, colonial surveys, satellite imagery, and contemporary environmental movements, he shows how Ram Setu has been remade in every era: by scholars who named it “Adam’s Bridge” to fit Islamic cosmology, by leaders who reclaimed it as a symbol of Hindu faith, and by climate activists who see it as a fragile marine ecosystem. The bridge, in his telling, is less a structure than a palimpsest of human longing and belief.
The narrative flows like the tides it describes — sometimes gently reflective, sometimes charged with the cross-currents of politics. Chatterjee gives equal space to mythical figures, colonial explorers, archaeologists, and the coastal communities that live in the shadow of the Setu. This pluralism is refreshing. In lesser hands, Ram Setu might have remained a spectacle of legend or litigation. Here, it becomes a living geography where devotion, livelihood, and identity converge. He studies the site neither just as 48 kilometres of shoals nor as just an idea, but as a unified ecosystem — a chain of reefs and sandbanks that once formed an unbroken causeway, later broken by storms and shifting seas. By grounding the narrative in geological time, Chatterjee shows how even nature carries traces of human belief.
The book’s greatest ambition is also its occasional weakness. Chatterjee writes with intensity, but there are stretches where the prose is complex, where one wishes for sharper editing to match the lucidity of the ideas — especially as Ram Setu stands as the accessible version of his more scholarly work. Still, such density is a small price for a book that spans so vast an intellectual terrain.
What makes Ram Setu compelling is its refusal to choose between reverence and reason. It neither debunks nor defends myths. Instead, it asks why this sliver of land continues to matter so deeply to Indians. The answer, Chatterjee suggests, lies in our need to find meaning in geography — to see, in the shifting sands of the Setu, a reflection of our own questions about faith, nationhood, and the environment.
The book achieves what few works on heritage do: it transforms a polarising controversy into a study on coexistence. Ram Setu is at once travelogue and testimony, science writing and cultural history. It reminds us that bridges — whether built of coral or conviction — connect more than they divide.