History · Long read · 12 min read

Karinthiri Malai: The Mountain the River Took

In July 1924 a hill on Munnar's old Royal Road slid into its valley and was never seen again. What happened to Karinthiri Malai, and did it really become an island in Kochi?

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

Ask an old-timer in Mankulam or Adimali about the Great Flood of '99 and sooner or later you will hear about Karinthiri Malai, the hill that was there one week and gone the next. In July 1924, after days of relentless monsoon rain, Karinthiri slid down into its valley and took Munnar's only road to the plains with it. A century later the story still circulates, often with a remarkable ending: that the mountain's soil was carried all the way down the Periyar and laid down in the sea at Kochi, where it became Vypin Island.

This article sets out what the records tell us about Karinthiri, why a hill can "vanish", what the flood changed for Munnar, and what the evidence says about the Vypin story.

A hill on the old Royal Road

Before 1924, Munnar was not reached the way it is today. The main link between the high ranges and the plains of Travancore and Cochin ran north-west from Munnar through Mankulam, down through the forests of Pooyamkutty and Kuttampuzha, and out to Kothamangalam, from where goods and travellers continued to Aluva and the coast. Locals remember it as the Raja Patha, the Royal Road.

The route is far older than the tea estates. Local accounts say forest paths along this line were used for many centuries by traders and hill communities. Some go as far as to claim a footpath here over two thousand years ago, a claim that cannot be verified. What is documented is its colonial history: the planting companies of the Kannan Devan Hills pressed for a proper road, and it was upgraded to a cart road around 1914. For a decade it carried bullock carts, planters, labourers and supplies between Munnar and the plains.

Between Mankulam and Munnar, near the place called Perumpankuthu, the road crossed the flank of a large hill called Karinthiri. A stream known as the Karinthiriyar still joins the other streams that meet near Mankulam. These waters run west through the Pooyamkutty forests into the Periyar, Kerala's longest river.

July 1924: the Great Flood of '99

The flood takes its Malayalam name from the year 1099 of the Kollam Era, which corresponds to 1924. The south-west monsoon that year was extraordinary. Kerala's June–September rainfall is recorded at about 3,368 mm, some 64 per cent above normal. In the high ranges the rain came in a single crushing burst: one compilation gives 2,023 mm at Munnar between 15 and 25 July 1924, roughly two metres of rain in eleven days. Figures from 1924 were collected unevenly and later retold many times, so they should be read as approximate, but every account agrees that the rain was without parallel in living memory.

Within those days the Munnar the British had built was largely destroyed:

• 16 JulyThe great rain begins on 1 Karkidakam 1099 and continues, with breaks, for about three weeks.
• Mid-JulyLandslides tear through the Kundala valley. The Kundala Valley Railway, the narrow-gauge line that carried tea to Top Station, is wrecked beyond repair and is never rebuilt.
• MattupettyLandslide debris and runoff pond up water in the valley where the Mattupetty reservoir lies today. Contemporary testimony blamed the sudden rise of water in Munnar town on "the natural bund at Mattupatty" bursting.
• 23 JulyLandslides at Karinthiri sweep away the hillside and the Royal Road across it. Malayalam accounts say the worst damage near Munnar was in the stretch from Karinthiri to Perumpankuthu. Munnar is cut off from the plains.
• DownstreamThe Periyar floods Aluva and the lowlands of central Kerala. Low-lying areas from Paravur to Vypin and Chellanam are reported as affected.

The human toll was never properly counted. A local historian quotes official figures of 110 deaths in Devikulam taluk alone, and estimates of the deaths across the region run well over a thousand. Some people in Kerala still believe that a breach of the Mullaperiyar dam caused the surge. Few authoritative accounts support that, and the scale of the rain alone explains the disaster.

What the people on the spot wrote

The disaster was reported at the time by the people who lived through it. The planting companies of the Kannan Devan Hills kept records of the flood, and these are still cited as evidence of how severe it was in Munnar. The Travancore government also received reports from the hills: the historian Manu S. Pillai, in The Ivory Throne, draws on the report of a Munnar Flood Relief Deputation that set out the losses in detail. Local tradition holds that a planter's letter to the government describing the calamity specifically mentioned the loss of Karinthiri Malai. We have not yet been able to trace that letter in a published collection. Records of this kind are most likely to survive in the Kerala State Archives (Travancore government files of 1924), in the archives of the Kannan Devan Hills company, or in the records of the planters' associations. If you know where the letter can be read, we would be glad to hear from you so that it can be cited here.

How does a mountain "vanish"?

Every account says Karinthiri was "washed away". It helps to picture what that means on the ground. Hills in this part of the Western Ghats are made of old, hard crystalline rock, covered by a thick mantle of weathered soil and loose rock, often several metres deep, on very steep slopes. In normal years this mantle holds, bound by roots and kept partly dry by drainage.

In July 1924 two metres of rain in under two weeks saturated that mantle completely. Water pressure inside the soil rose until the slope could no longer support its own weight. The whole hillside then failed as a debris flow: a fast-moving slurry of mud, boulders and uprooted trees that rushes downhill, gathers more material as it goes, and empties into the valley streams below.

It is unlikely that the rock core of Karinthiri literally disappeared. What vanished was the hill as people knew it: its forested face, its shoulder and the road cut across it, gone in a night and replaced by a raw scar and a valley choked with debris. To travellers who knew the road, the mountain was simply no longer there. The same process, on a smaller scale, caused the landslides of 2018 and the tragedy at Pettimudi in 2020, both in these same hills.

The road that was never rebuilt

After the flood, the Travancore government repaired the old route only as far as Pooyamkutty. Beyond it, through Karinthiri to Mankulam, the road was abandoned. Instead a completely new road was surveyed from Aluva through Kothamangalam, Neriamangalam, Adimali and Pallivasal to Munnar. Its great bridge over the Periyar at Neriamangalam was built on the orders of Maharani Sethu Lakshmi Bayi and inaugurated in March 1931. Some sources date the opening of the road itself to 1926, so the new route probably opened in stages.

That decision still shapes life in the hills. Adimali, our own home town, grew up on the new road. On the old line, the forest closed back over the abandoned road, and settlements such as Edamalakkudy were left remote for decades. The old road was used in part until around 1990, and the Forest Department closed the forest stretch in 2010. Today there are regular demands to reopen the Royal Road as a shorter route to Kochi. Environmental groups and the Forest Department oppose this, because the road would cut through dense forest and elephant habitat between Pooyamkutty and Mankulam.

Where did the mountain go? The Vypin legend

The most striking part of the Karinthiri story is its ending: that the soil and debris of the mountain were carried by the flood down the Periyar and deposited in the backwaters of Kochi, building up Vypin Island. The story makes geographical sense. The streams below Karinthiri do drain into the Periyar, and the Periyar does reach the sea through the Kochi backwaters and the estuary at Munambam. In July 1924 the river carried an enormous load of mud and sand from the high ranges.

The history and geology, however, point firmly the other way.

Vypin is much older than 1924

• By long tradition Vypin emerged after an earlier great flood of the Periyar in 1341 CE. That flood is also linked to the silting of the ancient port of Muziris and the opening of Kochi's harbour.
• Local reckoning even had a calendar named after the event, the Puthuvaippu era, from puthu (new) and vaippu (deposit), counted from 1341.
• The Portuguese built a fort at Pallippuram on Vypin in 1503, first in timber and then in stone by 1505. Vypin was a settled island more than 400 years before Karinthiri fell.
• Geologists studying the central Kerala coast describe islands like Vypin as barrier islands: long sand bodies built over centuries to millennia by waves, currents and river sediment, under changes in sea level through the Holocene (roughly the last 10,000 years). An island 25 km long is not built from a single hill in a single flood.

▶ Video: Pallippuram Fort History

The story of the Portuguese fort at Pallippuram on Vypin island, built in 1503. More in our video gallery

Why the two stories became one

Folk memory tends to fold great events together, and here there is a lot to fold. Kerala remembers two "great floods" of the same river, centuries apart: the flood of 1341 that tradition says created Vypin, and the flood of '99 that destroyed Karinthiri. Both are told as stories of the Periyar reshaping the land. Vypin itself was flooded in 1924. And in the years just after the flood, Kochi really did gain a new island: from 1926 the harbour engineer Robert Bristow dredged a channel through the sandbar at the harbour mouth, and the spoil was used to build Willingdon Island. A new island rising in Kochi's backwaters within a few years of the flood that took Karinthiri is exactly the kind of coincidence that turns into legend. Willingdon Island, though, was made from dredged lagoon and seabed material, not from the hills of Munnar.

So the honest answer to "where did Karinthiri go?" is less dramatic but still remarkable. Most of the hill lies in the valleys below Perumpankuthu, long since grown over by forest. Some of its finest soil almost certainly rode the Periyar to the coast, and became part of the silt of the backwaters and the sea floor off Kochi. It did not make an island, but it did travel from the roof of Kerala to the sea.

What Karinthiri teaches

Karinthiri is more than a curiosity. It is the clearest example in Munnar's history of what steep, soil-mantled hills do under extreme rain. The pattern of 1924 returned in 2018, when floods and landslides again cut off the high ranges, and at Pettimudi in 2020, when a single slope failure killed 66 people. Every debate about roads, quarries and construction on Munnar's slopes, including the debate about reopening the Royal Road itself, is in some way a debate about Karinthiri.

The hill is gone, but the lesson it left is still standing: in these mountains, the rain decides.

Visiting the area

There is no monument at Karinthiri, and the old forest road is closed. The nearest place most visitors reach is Mankulam, a quiet village of rivers and waterfalls north-west of Munnar. Close by is Anakkulam, where wild elephants come down to drink at the river in the evenings. Our Anakkulam Elephant Spotting Safari drives through this country. Ask your driver to point out the valleys of the old Royal Road on the way.

Note on sources: no detailed official survey of the Karinthiri landslide has been found. This account is assembled from published histories of the 1924 flood, newspaper retrospectives drawing on local records and memory, and studies of the Kerala coast. Where sources disagree, the differences are noted above.