Eleven gaps published in full. Each is a place where data does not exist, is legally prohibited, has been destroyed, has never been collected, or where a framing decision is being made openly rather than hidden. Naming the gaps is what keeps the rest of the atlas honest.
South Africa, the UK, Australia, Trinidad, Guyana, Fiji, Seychelles and Mauritius (by law) do not publish Tamil-specific census counts. They track 'Indian' or 'South Asian' as a category. Only India, Sri Lanka, Singapore and Canada publish Tamil as an ethnic or linguistic category. Other Tamil population figures in this atlas are community or academic estimates and carry ±30–50% methodological uncertainty.
The Karana community of Madagascar is of Gujarati Muslim origin (Bohra and Ismaili), not Tamil. No peer-reviewed academic source, UNESCO body, or national statistics office classifies Madagascar's Karana as a Tamil community. UNHCR ('Madagascar's Karana people still awaiting nationality') and McInerney in the Tilburg Law Review (19:1-2, 2014) document this consistently. The atlas excludes Madagascar; the exclusion is itself the finding.
The majority of indentured labourers sent to Fiji, Trinidad and Guyana were from North India (present-day UP, Bihar). Madras Presidency workers were approximately 16–25% of Caribbean indenture and a smaller proportion in Fiji. The degree of Tamil cultural retention versus assimilation into broader Indo-Caribbean identity is contested. No surviving Tamil-language press or Tamil-medium institution operates in Trinidad, Guyana, or Fiji.
There is no EAP project, UNESCO Memory of the World inscription, or national archive digital collection specifically for the Up-country (Malaiyaha) Tamil community of Sri Lanka. The Kangani-system records of the Labour Department of Ceylon/Sri Lanka are largely undigitised and uncatalogued at research-grade level. This is a major preservation gap that the atlas notes but does not fill.
Myanmar National Archives have been inaccessible to independent researchers since the February 2021 military coup. The British Library EAP1615 project on Chettiar mercantile account-keeping is the only publicly accessible digitised material on Burma Tamil economic history. Official Myanmar census disaggregation for Tamil or Indian sub-communities does not exist.
France legally prohibits the collection or publication of ethnic statistics; all Réunion Tamil population figures are academic estimates with significant uncertainty. Mauritius does not publish ethnic breakdowns in its census (though community language/religion data is collected). Tamil population estimates for Mauritius derive from religious or cultural-survey data, not census enumeration.
A 2021 census was planned but not completed due to the economic crisis. The 2012 figures (Sri Lanka Tamil 2,270,924; Indian Tamil estate-sector 839,504) remain the most recent official counts. The atlas cites 2012 explicitly and does not project current figures.
The World Bank KNOMAD Bilateral Remittance Matrix tracks remittance flows by country pair (e.g. UK→Sri Lanka, Canada→Sri Lanka), not by ethnicity or sub-national group. There is no Tamil-specific remittance corridor data anywhere in the peer-reviewed or official literature. The KNOMAD matrix is the best available proxy and is cited explicitly as such.
Germany, France and Switzerland do not publish Tamil-specific migration or population statistics at a national level. BAMF (Germany) tracks national origin (Sri Lanka, India) but not Tamil ethnicity. All EU Tamil population figures used here are academic estimates.
No Tier-A or Tier-B institution maintains a comprehensive, current census of Tamil-language press and cultural bodies globally. The outlets named in per-node pages were identified through public research but cannot be claimed as exhaustive. A dedicated media audit would be required to establish a living directory — and is outside TLTE's citation-only mandate.
The /ecumene/network view defaults to a kindred spine that pins Eelam-Jaffna at the centre, and offers an indenture spine that pulls Tamil Nadu to the centre. Neither is a neutral mathematical fact: both are editorial framings of the same eighteen nodes and the same cited edges. A pure degree-ranked graph would put Tamil Nadu at the centre automatically because the 19th-century colonial shipping ledger recorded ports of departure from Madras Presidency. The kindred spine is TLTE's civilisational reading; the indenture spine is the colonial historical reading; both are published so neither can quietly overwrite the other. See tlte-cite:ecumene-spine for the full self-anchor.
Even after the Karana-are-Gujarati exclusion is stated, readers keep reaching for Madagascar. The pull is not irrational; five real threads keep it alive, and none are load-bearing enough to make Madagascar an Ecumene node. (1) Indian Ocean trade memory — Chola and later Tamil mercantile networks moved across the western Indian Ocean rim, and Madagascar sits inside that rim geographically. (2) Austronesian substrate confusion — Malagasy is Austronesian (Barito family, Borneo origin); pseudoscience occasionally folds this into 'lost Tamil / Kumari Kandam' framings, which the Atlas explicitly refuses. (3) Réunion / Mauritius adjacency — the two nearest confirmed Tamil indenture nodes did produce small estate-labour and Hindu-festival circuits that touched Madagascar's east coast, never a settled Tamil community. (4) Karana ≠ Tamil but are South Asian Muslim — 'South Asian Muslim trader in the Indian Ocean' can sound like it overlaps with Tamil Muslims of the Eastern Province; it does not (Gujarati not Tamil; Kutch/Surat not Kayalpattinam). (5) A small contemporary Hindu Tamil professional presence in Antananarivo — real but uncited at scale. Naming the recurrence so it stops looping is itself part of the methodology. Full breakdown at /ecumene/methodology/madagascar §'Why this question recurs'.
Karana are of Gujarati Muslim origin (Bohra/Ismaili), not Tamil. No peer-reviewed source, UNESCO body, or national statistics office classifies Madagascar's Karana as a Tamil community.
