the intriguing samudrams.....
the origins of names of places have always intrigued me..though i am a novice in this area , i do keep my eyes and ears open for any information.quite a bit of research has been done in this area when it comes to big cities.A sample could be localities in Madras.

Kodambakkam : Essentially a corrupted ( if i may use the word) form of Ghoda Bagh.The denizens of this place were the horses of the Nawab of Arcot.

Mandaveli: This was a place where cows used to graze ( Mandai veli)

Washermanpet : (vannarapettai). quite recent in origin, this was a place where dhobhis used to wash clothes. even at the time of the british,madras was a water starved place n Vannarapettai was one place where there was adequate water.

the pettais' ( As in saidapettai) , the Urs' ( as in Pudur), the pallis' (as in athipalli), purams' ( as in ramanathapuram) have again puzzled me. i still beleive all of them are the same , corrupted according local sensibilities and history.

Though a little bit of research into this could reveal more concrete answers, this is always restricted to names which are quite common..
The less significant problems in life are assigned to people like me to come out with conjectures, theories and wild swings. here i indulge in an attempt to throw one such argument to solve one such puzzle. "The puzzle of the samudrams"

I have come across 4 samudrams so far. they are:
tirunelveli district : ambasamudram, gopalasamudram and ravanasmaudram
Near hosur :ramasamudram.
First things first why the samudrams...
Most of these places are close to river systems. for instance ambai n gopalasamudram are right into the womb of the tamirabarani river systems.ravanasamudram must be close to gadannadhi or ramanadhi ( it's a guess here).these places must have got their names well before the dams were constructed to tame the river sytems. before that these palces would have witnessed floods at a regular basis.Further the huge waterlands nearby could have been responsible for these places to get the "samudram" tag.
then comes the ambai, ravana and gopala names..
i cannot figure out why ambai (could be something to do with amma). but gopala would be krishna.but why did they miss out rama before opting for ravana.one reason could be the existense of ramanadhi. Now that we have a name with rama tag probably ppl resorted to ravana. There are 2 things here. either the place ravanasamudram had a highly negative connotation to it(an evil place types). But this is negative connotation is associated with the portrayal of ravana in the ramayana versions of the north.In the south , especially in TN ravana is not looked at from an evil perpective. he is considered to be erudite scholar . the only negative character he exhibited was arrogance.Going by this reasoning ravanasamudram need not have a negative history associated with it.this place could have been named to honour ravana.its surprising to note that all these places are associated with Vishnu.Guess ,at some point of time this must have been a hotbed of Vainavism.

The only thing which does not fit into the puzzle is ramasamudram. i do not find any major rivers existing in this place except for probably a stream which flows nearby. it quite possible it must have been a viable river system before it started drying up (like the palar system).Why did'nt they name it as Ravanasamudram or say gopalasamudram.my eagerness to find a solution prompts me to take a wild guess here. Could it be possible that these 2 places which are far apart by 700 odd Km be linked in some way.it's quite possible that people could have migrated from the northern districts to southern ones. If not archeological, we would need some anthropological evidence to prove this wild claim.But my personal opinion is, more research into this could give us startling results. well, its been fun conjecturing , the difficult part is proving the same. but folkfore has always supported wild conjectures. may be this conjecture would might as well be part of folkfore, a few generations down the line.