History · Long read · 13 min read

The Strangers Who Shaped Munnar: Early Europeans of the High Range

Surveyors, a forest officer's son, two shikari brothers, a grieving husband, a Glasgow merchant and a Spanish priest. The people behind the names you still see on Munnar's map, and the records they left.

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

Walk up the hill behind the old church at Old Munnar and you come to a small grave set apart from the rest, behind a low wall and a screen of flowers. The stone belongs to Eleanor Isabel Knight, a young Englishwoman who came to these hills as a bride in 1894 and died of cholera a few weeks later, two days before Christmas. She was twenty-four. Hers is one of the earliest European graves in the High Range, and it is a good place to begin the story of the outsiders who turned a roadless wilderness into the Munnar we know.

This is their story: the surveyors who first mapped these hills, the men who leased them, the planters who tried coffee and cinchona before tea, the company that bought them out, and the institutions they left behind. It is told from published records, estate chronicles and local histories, and where those sources disagree, as they often do, we say so.

It is also only half the story. The high ranges were not empty when the Europeans arrived. They were home to the Muthuvan and other hill communities, who guided the first outsiders through them, and the estates were built by thousands of workers who walked up from the plains of Tamil Nadu. (We tell their stories in The First People of the Hills and Three Rivers and a Tea Empire.)

A soldier who turned back

Planters' tradition in Munnar begins with a famous name. According to an account in the planters' journal Planting Opinion in 1896, the first European to approach these hills was Colonel Arthur Wellesley, the future Duke of Wellington, sent in 1790 during the war against Tipu Sultan to cut off the Sultan's retreat through the Kumily gap. Tipu was forewarned, the plan was abandoned, and Wellesley was ordered back before he reached the high ranges. The story is repeated by the plantation company today, but it rests on that late account, and it is best read as tradition rather than established fact.

The surveyors: Ward and Conner

The first Europeans who certainly saw the high ranges were mapmakers. Between 1816 and 1820, two young officers of the Madras infantry, Lieutenant Benjamin Swayne Ward and Lieutenant Peter Eyre Conner, carried out a great survey of the kingdoms of Travancore and Cochin, linked to the work that became the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India. Their parties climbed into the mountains and fixed the positions of the great peaks, among them Anamudi, at 2,695 m the highest point in India south of the Himalayas, and Chokkanad.

Ward's record of the hills, made in 1816–17, is generally treated as the first official description of the region. The survey's findings were later published as the Geographical and Statistical Memoir of the Survey of the Travancore and Cochin States, whose first volume was printed in 1863. Conner also wrote one of the earliest English descriptions of the hill tribes of Travancore, published in 1834. He did not live to see it in print: he died at Hyderabad in 1821, still a young man.

"Surpassingly grand": Douglas Hamilton

Forty years later the hills found a publicist. Douglas Hamilton (1818–1892), an officer of the Madras infantry who had managed the teak forests of the Anamalai hills from 1857, was given a roving commission in 1862 by Sir Charles Trevelyan, a former Governor of Madras, to search the hill plateaus of the south for sites where European troops might be stationed in a healthy climate.

His journey took him through the high ranges, and his description of them has been quoted ever since: "surpassingly grand and incomparably beautiful; undulating grassy hills, wooded valleys, rocky crags." Hamilton was also a skilled artist, and his careful drawings of the southern hills survive as some of the best early images of the region. His recommendation for a hill station eventually went to the Palani hills rather than Munnar, but his words spread the reputation of the high ranges among the British in South India.

John Daniel Munro: the man with the lease

The person most often called the founder of Munnar was born in the region. John Daniel Munro (1833–1895) was the grandson of Colonel John Munro, who had served as British Resident and Diwan of Travancore early in the century, and the son of Urban Vigors Munro, Conservator of Forests of Travancore. Orphaned as a boy, he grew up to become a coffee and tea planter at Peermade, a keen shikari (hunter) and an official of the Travancore government, serving as Superintendent of the Cardamom Hills.

In 1877 a two-man commission was appointed to settle whether the high ranges belonged to Travancore or to the Madras Presidency, and it ruled in favour of Travancore. Munro's work on the boundary took him into the hills, and like Hamilton before him he was captivated by them. In law the land belonged to the Poonjar chiefs, who held it as jenmam (landlord) property under Travancore. On 11 July 1877, the Poonjar chief, named in the Kerala Museum's account as Kela Varma Raja, leased the Kannan Devan Hills to Munro, an area of about 136,600 acres. The Kerala Museum's history of the hills gives the terms as an annual rent of ₹3,000 and a security deposit of ₹5,000. Estate chronicles describe the deed as the first Pooniat Concession, followed by a second concession in 1879.

Local tradition says the name of the hills honours the Muthuvan men who guided the first outsiders, remembered as Kannan and Devan; the Munnar panchayat's own history speaks instead of a local chieftain, Kannan Thevan, who helped Munro. Either way, the name on every packet of Kanan Devan tea points back to the people who knew the hills first.

In 1879 Munro formed the North Travancore Land Planting and Agricultural Society to hold the concession and open it to planters, and in 1880 he published a short pamphlet, The High Ranges of Travancore, printed at Peermade, to attract them. He died on 18 February 1895 and is buried in the cemetery of St George's CSI Church at Pallikkunnu, near Peermade. Beside his grave lies his favourite white horse, Downy, one of the most unusual memorials in Kerala.

The Turner brothers and the climb to Anamudi

Munro was not alone. The Kannan Devan company's own history gives a central role to two brothers: Henry Gribble Turner of the Madras Civil Service and his half-brother A. W. Turner. They came to the hills for shikar, entered them through the Bodimettu pass from the Tamil side and, with Muthuvan guides, reached the summit of Anamudi. Before leaving, according to this account, they obtained a concession of about 227 square miles from the Poonjar Raja.

Other sources give the lease to Munro and date the Turners' exploration of his land to 1878, after which a labour force from the plains began a cinchona plantation under Devimalai on what became Devikulam estate. The sources simply tell the story differently, and the original deeds are not published. What is certain is that within two years of 1877 the high ranges had been surveyed, leased and opened for planting.

Coffee, cinchona, sisal, and finally tea

The first planters did not set out to grow tea. They tried coffee and cardamom, which Munro knew from Peermade; cinchona, whose bark gave the quinine that the Empire needed against malaria; and sisal, a fibre plant. Supplies came up on ponies, donkeys and bullocks along bridle paths, and rice from the plains was traded for cinchona bark.

The first tea is credited to A. H. Sharp, who planted about 50 acres at Parvathy, now part of Seven Mallay estate. The Kerala Museum and most popular histories give the year as 1880; an estate chronicle gives 1883 and records that the tea field had grown to 100 acres of a China variety by 1885. Some accounts give A. W. Turner the credit for the first tea planting, in 1879. The records are not consistent, but by the late 1880s it was clear which crop suited the high ranges best. Coffee, cinchona and sisal faded, and tea took over the hills.

The settlement began to organise itself. Planters' chronicles record the Kannan Devan Planters' Association in 1888, the first apothecary in 1890 and the first post office, on Devikulam estate, in 1892. Other Europeans opened land on the southern edge of the concession, among them the brothers Baron John and Baron Otto von Rosenberg, who developed the Lockhart estate near Devikulam.

Henry and Eleanor Knight

Henry Mansfield Knight was one of the pioneer planters of the 1880s, acquiring land at Munnar and Chokkanad, and became one of the most senior men in the hills. In November 1894 he married Eleanor Isabel May, whom he had met in England, and brought her to Munnar. The story told in Munnar is that she fell in love with the view from a hill near their bungalow and said that if she died there, she would like to be buried on that spot. Within weeks she caught cholera, and she died on 23 December 1894.

Her family wanted her body sent home to England. Knight refused and buried her on the hill, as she had asked. Her epitaph reads: "Lord all pitying Jesus, blest, grant her thine eternal rest." In the years that followed, the hill became the cemetery of Munnar's planting community, and in 1910–11 the planters built Christ Church beside it, in rough-hewn granite, with many fittings brought from England. It opened for worship on 16 April 1911 and is today CSI Christ Church, where services are held in English, Tamil and Malayalam.

Knight's own career went on for many years. Estate chronicles record him as a founding director and general manager of Travancore Tea Estates in 1897, with estates in the Peermade hills and Periyar valley, and as the man who made the first clearings at Surianalle. In 1904, after the death of Baron Otto von Rosenberg, he married the Baron's widow.

Sir John Muir and the coming of Finlay

Small estates scattered across a vast concession, far from any road or port, were hard to make pay. The solution came from Glasgow. Sir John Muir, a partner in the merchant house of James Finlay & Co. (then trading as Finlay, Muir & Co.), visited the hills in 1894 to arrange a purchase, and in 1895 the firm bought the concession deeds and the independent estates, which accounts number at about 33. In 1897 the Kanan Devan Hills Produce Company was registered to run them, managed by Finlay's, and by around 1900 the concession had been organised under it. General managers such as W. O. Milne and his successor P. R. Buchanan (from 1901) ran the estates from Munnar.

Finlay's gave the high ranges what the pioneers could not: capital, factories and transport. By 1915 about sixteen fully equipped tea factories were working on the estates. Tea chests left the hills by a chain of bullock monorail (1902), narrow-gauge railway (1908) and aerial ropeway down to Kottagudi, the story we tell in Three Rivers and a Tea Empire. Much of that work was undone by the great flood of July 1924, which destroyed the railway and swept away the original town; the settlement at the confluence was rebuilt, and the older site became Old Munnar.

A Spanish priest and a church for the workers

Not every European in the hills was a planter. In 1898 a Spanish Discalced Carmelite, Fr. Alphonse Maria de los Angeles, began holding services in a shed on land given by the estate management, for the Catholic workers who had come up from the Madras Presidency and southern Travancore. A permanent church followed in 1909. Fr. Alphonse died of malaria in 1916 and was buried inside it. The present church was blessed in 1938, and in 2024 Pope Francis raised it to the rank of a minor basilica: today's Mount Carmel Basilica, the first Catholic church of the high ranges.

The High Range Club

The planters' social life centred on a club. A Gymkhana Club was formed by planters around 1905, and its clubhouse was built in 1909; it was electrified and connected by telephone in 1916. The 1924 flood destroyed its golf course and tennis court. In 1934 the club admitted its first member of Indian origin, the Diwan of Travancore.

The High Range Club still stands, and still keeps its most famous tradition. When a long-serving planter retires, his colleagues carry him to the bar and lift him up to hang his hat on the wall, beside some eighty hats already there, each painted with its owner's initials.

Who really built Munnar?

It is easy to tell this history as a list of famous Europeans, and much of the written record encourages that. But the concession was leased from a Kerala chief, the way into the hills was shown by Muthuvan guides, and every road, factory and field was built by workers from the plains of Tamil Nadu, whose descendants still make up most of the estate community. Their lives are much less well recorded than Eleanor Knight's or John Munro's, and that silence is part of the history too.

The European era ended slowly. The last Europeans to be buried at Christ Church were two young assistant managers who drowned in the Munnar river in 1959. In the early 1960s Finlay's formed a joint venture with the Tata group. In 1971 the Kerala government passed the Kannan Devan Hills (Resumption of Lands) Act, resuming the lands of the old concession for the state. Tata took over Finlay's South Indian tea business in 1983, and in 2005 the estates passed to the Kannan Devan Hills Plantations Company, owned largely by its own workers. A lease signed with a Poonjar chief in 1877 had become, 128 years later, a company owned by the people who pick the tea.

In 1862 Hamilton called these hills "surpassingly grand and incomparably beautiful". Every newcomer since has agreed with him. The difference is that the people who were already here never needed to be told.

Note on sources: early dates in Munnar's history come from estate chronicles, company histories and later accounts, and they often differ by a year or more, especially for the first tea planting (1879, 1880 or 1883) and the Turner brothers' role in the 1877 concession. Where sources disagree, we have given the main versions rather than choosing one.