On Rama's Bridge

At the south eastern tip of India, just beyond the ruins of Dhanushkodi - a city destroyed by a hurricane and slowly being reclaimed by the shifting sands - lies the border between Sri Lanka and India. Not a sea border, but a semi-mythical land border: you won't see Arichal Murai, a limestone shoal whose location shifts with each immersion under the shifting tides, conclusively on any map.

Its name means 'the tipping point'. And Arichal Murai is the last point of India, the first of Sri Lanka… or indeed, vice-versa. A place sitting just a few kilometres between each that exists partly in theory: a psychological and physical borderland between two nations, faiths and peoples of uneasy brotherhood: linked in myth by Buddha and Rama, whose history is intertwined yet whose politics, societies and geopolitical trajectories are stubbornly divided.

Against the backdrop of the waves, wind and historical destruction on this borderland, join Nandini Das in a sonic exploration of a Sri Lanka that is both 'just there' and just beyond reach - geographically and memorially. Nandini reflets upon memory, collective and individual, about identity, about the fragile, contentious, impermanent yet ever-present foundations on which we build stories of nations and peoples.

A mosaic of memories gives this story its shape:

There is the ancient, classical Indian epic of the Ramayana and its story of the bridge built by its hero, Rama, between the two nations in order to reach Lanka and rescue his wife Sita from Ravana.

There's Buddhism and its peripatetic history - a religion and culture whose lived and practised presence is largely erased in India but looms large in the memorial backdrop in Sri Lanka as it does elsewhere across the world.

There is the story of Queen Padmavati, the Rajasthani queen mythologised in India as the epitome of Rajasthani women's century-old legacy of resistance to invaders - except that this Rajasthani queen, we are reminded, was first a displaced Sri Lankan princess, brought across the waters to the desert land she learnt to call her own.

And in today's world, there is the memory of spaces of an entire Sri Lankan diaspora, cut off by decades of civil war: memories of homesteads, food, culture: a generational thread that connects British Indians, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis to their heritage and geography - the reconstruction and communing with a 'motherland' - for Sri Lankans, cut off for decades. And now slowly, exactly 15 years after the end of the war, flowing back into bloodline and memory.

Together with Indian writer Pradeep Damodaran, Nandini explores how myth, history and memory work to shape the relationship between two near-neighbouring nations; how migration shapes the contours of generational memory of a remembered land; and how real lives - here and now, in the UK, in India and in Sri Lanka, are caught up in the process.

An Overcoat Media production for BBC Radio 3
written and presented by Nandini Das, with contributions from Pradeep Damodaran
Producers: Steven Rajam and Chhavi Sachdev
Sound: Mike Woolley