History · 9 min read

Three Rivers and a Tea Empire: The History of Munnar

How a remote hill tract of the Poonjar chiefs became South India's most famous tea country, and the people who made it.

By GK Global, Adimali, Munnar · Trails & Tales by GK

Long before the first tea bush, the high ranges of what is now Idukki district were a world of grassland, shola forest and elephant paths. The name Munnar comes from the Malayalam moonu (three) and aaru (river): the town sits where three mountain streams, usually named as the Muthirapuzha, the Nallathanni and the Kundala, meet. Get to know those three rivers and you have the key to Munnar's whole story: water, steep slopes and a cool climate that suits the tea plant.

Before the planters

The hills were home to forest communities, among them the Muthuvan (Mudhuvan) people, who still live in settlements in and around today's protected areas. Down in the rain-shadow valley of Marayoor and Kanthalloor, the old Anchunadu or "five villages", farming went back centuries, and megalithic burial monuments known as dolmens still stand there.

In law, much of the high range was a jenmam holding of the Poonjar royal family, chiefs who held landlord rights over the hills under the Travancore kingdom. Local tradition links the name of the hills, Kannan Devan, to the people who guided the first outsiders through them. Accounts differ on who those guides were, so treat any single version with care.

Munro's lease

In the 1870s John Daniel Munro, a British planter and official in Travancore service, came to the high range while settling a border question. He saw its potential, and in 1877 he persuaded the head of the Poonjar family to lease him the Kannan Devan Hills. Two years later, in 1879, he formed the North Travancore Land Planting and Agricultural Society to open the land to planters.

The early planters tried coffee, cardamom and cinchona (the bark that gives quinine) before settling on tea. The first tea is usually credited to A. H. Sharp, who planted about 50 acres at Parvathy in 1880. That land is now part of the Seven Mallay estate. Some accounts name A. W. Turnor as the first planter, in 1879, and the old records are not fully consistent.

Finlay and the Kanan Devan company

Small independent estates struggled with distance, disease and labour shortages. In 1895 the Scottish firm Finlay Muir & Co. (James Finlay & Co.) bought 33 of them, and in 1897 the Kanan Devan Hills Produce Company was formed to run them. Most of the workforce came up from the plains of Tamil Nadu, and many of today's estate families descend from those first workers. That is why Tamil is spoken as widely as Malayalam on the estates.

A railway in the clouds

Getting tea out of the hills was the great problem. The answer was a remarkable chain of transport:

• 1902A monorail pulled by bullocks begins carrying goods from Munnar towards Top Station.
• 1908The monorail is replaced by the Kundala Valley Railway, a 2 ft narrow-gauge line of about 32 km from Munnar to Top Station.
• RopewayFrom Top Station, tea chests went down an aerial ropeway to Kottagudi (the "Bottom Station"), then by cart to Bodinayakanur, by rail to the coast and by ship to Britain.

The name Top Station, today a famous viewpoint on the Kerala–Tamil Nadu border, comes straight from this railway.

The Great Flood of '99

In July 1924 days of extreme monsoon rain caused what Kerala still calls the Great Flood of '99, after the year 1099 of the Malayalam calendar. In Munnar, landslides and floodwater destroyed the Kundala Valley Railway so thoroughly that it was never rebuilt. The estates switched to ropeways and roads, and accounts say an electric ropeway between Munnar and Top Station kept running until the late 1960s. Remnants of the old line can still be traced today. Kerala Tourism has spoken of reviving a heritage railway, but nothing has been built.

Power, dams and a growing town

The fast-falling rivers that defeated the railway were soon put to work. The Pallivasal Hydro-Electric Project, on the Muthirapuzha below Munnar, was inaugurated in March 1940 by Travancore's Diwan, Sir C. P. Ramaswamy Iyer. It is widely described as Kerala's first major hydroelectric scheme. Later dams at Mattupetty, Kundala and Anayirangal created the lakes that visitors photograph today.

From Finlay to Tata to the workers

• 1964The Tata group and Finlay form a joint venture to grow and market tea, the beginning of Tata's long association with Munnar.
• 1975The Eravikulam plateau becomes a wildlife sanctuary, upgraded to Eravikulam National Park in 1978, mainly to protect the Nilgiri tahr.
• 1983Tata takes over Finlay's South Indian tea interests, and the business later becomes Tata Tea.
• 2004The Tea Museum at Nallathanni estate opens (1 April 2004), preserving early machinery and photographs.
• 2005Tata steps back, and the Kannan Devan Hills Plantations Company (KDHP) is formed on 1 April 2005. Most of its shares are bought by its own workers, which makes it one of India's largest employee-owned plantation companies.
• 2015Thousands of women tea pluckers stage a historic strike in Munnar for higher wages and bonus, a reminder that the people who pick the tea are central to its story.

Munnar today

Munnar is now one of India's best-known hill destinations, but it is still a working landscape. Tea pluckers move across the slopes at dawn, factories hum through the night and the old estate bungalows look down on a busy market town. Hard lessons from floods and landslides, most tragically at Pettimudi in 2020, have also made the hills a place where conservation and safety are part of everyday life.

A hundred and fifty years ago these hills were a blank on the planter's map. Today every slope tells a story of rivers, railways and the hands that pick the leaf.