The Legend of Rama Setu: The Ancient Bridge Built by Monkeys

The story of the Ramayana and its vanara sena is well-known in every Hindu household. Of particular attraction is the miraculous episode of the construction of the Rama Setu for Sita’s rescue from the island of Lanka. This setu (bridge) and its association with the Palk Strait or Adam’s Bridge in the Bay of Bengal is an intriguing topic for scholars and common people alike.

The Ramayana, the revered Hindu epic, is dotted with supernatural episodes. Be it the flying chariots or the fantastic talking animals, they indeed make us wonder about the divine features associated with the Treta Yuga, the period in which the story of the Ramayana is set. However, a story so distant in the past often finds itself surrounded by a mist of doubt — a doubt whether it is just a myth or a thing of history per se. However, for the Hindu folks, the Rama Setu gives a glimpse of hope. 

The Rama Setu is a collection of reef shoals that extends from Pamban Island in Tamil Nadu to Mannar Island in Sri Lanka. It is nearly 30 kilometres long, 100 metres wide, and 10 metres deep. It might just be a geographical structure for the outsiders, but for the Hindus of India, it has religious significance, for they believe it to be the setu or the bridge built by the vanara sena (army of monkeys) of Lord Rama for rescuing his wife Sita from Lanka — the island kingdom of Ravana. This episode finds mention in the Yuddha Khanda of Valmiki’s Ramayana. 

And not just in the Ramayana, we do find vivid mentions of this event in other ancient texts as well. Pravarasena, a seventh-century-CE poet, in his Prakrit poem Setubandha, describes how the first attempt at building the bridge had failed as every rock would sink into the sea. It was only with the intervention of Nala, a vanara (monkey) that the Rama Setu could actually be built. The miraculous story of the floating rocks that followed thereafter is well known. It was hence also referred to as the Nala Setu. 

It also finds mention in Bhavabhuti’s Mahaviracarita, wherein Ravana’s wife Mandodari can be seen warning him about the sea bridge made by the vanara sena and how Ravana was initially reluctant to believe her.

It is believed that the setu was functional well into the fifteenth century, but cyclones and other natural disasters of the sort had sunk the structure and rendered it unusable ever since.

The Rama Setu had become a site of pilgrimage or tirtha by the medieval period, at least according to some writings of the time. Phyllis Granoff, a specialist in Indic religions, cites Samarapungava’s Yatraprabandha, a sixteenth-century text, to be pointing towards this practice. She believes that the poet had most probably visited the site of the Rama Setu to be able to describe it so astoundingly and that too with visual imagery.

However, other scholars like David Sopher associate such things with ‘mythic geography’ and see it as an abstract idea of literature which in most cases has no tangible existence. Porcher, another scholar, had talked of a similar idea about other religious places and viewed them as mythic spaces.

Recently, there have been governmental plans to dredge the Rama Setu for the ease of marine transportation under the Sethusamudram Project but, as was likely, this has now become a matter of both political and religious contention. As of now, a government-sponsored scientific expedition has been underway since 2021. This three-year-long project would hopefully clear the clouds of doubt surrounding this geographical structure and perhaps bring forth the true history of its formation.