The Kerguelen Plateau is a submarine, Cretaceous Large Igneous Province in the southern Indian Ocean. Drilling on Elan Bank, a western salient of the Kerguelen Plateau, yielded a approximately 26 m section of fluvial conglomerate intercalated with basalt. Chemical dating of monazite within garnet and matrix monazite in metapelitic clasts from the conglomerate indicates that high-grade metamorphism of the pelitic protolith occurred between 785+ or - 2 and 694+ or -18 Ma. A calculated P-T pseudosection indicates that the observed core-to-inner rim compositional zoning in garnet is consistent with P/T decrease from 10.2 kb/760 degrees C to 6.2 kb/560 degrees C. In an Early Cretaceous paleogeographic reconstruction, the Elan Bank drill site is located on a SSW continuation of the Eastern Indian Tectonic Zone (EITZ), a 876-784 Ma, NNE-SSW metamorphic belt with sinistral shear zones in eastern India. The retrograde P-T path of the Elan Bank metapelitic clast overlaps with that of the EITZ metapelite, and the Elan Bank monazite chemical dates and previously determined 824-675 Ma U-Pb isotope monazite dates by the TIMS method are remarkably similar to the monazite chemical dates from the EITZ metapelites and high-grade metamorphic rocks from the eastern margin of the Eastern Ghats Belt. Based on the demonstrable affinity of metamorphic, geochronologic, and spatial data, this study concludes that the EITZ was likely a continuous, approximately 1,800-km-long tectono-metamorphic belt in the Rodinia supercontinent stretching from eastern India through the Eastern Ghats to the basement of Elan Bank and probably to the Rayner Complex of East Antarctica. Copyright 2011 Springer-Verlag