People & culture · Long read · 10 min read

People of the High Ranges: The Tribal Communities of Munnar

Long before the tea estates, the Muthuvan, the Hill Pulaya and the Mannan made their homes in these mountains. Their origins, ways of life and the changes they face today.

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

Every year in the Malayalam month of Vrischikam, when Munnar celebrates Karthika, families walk down from the forest settlements to the old Subrahmanya Swamy temple in town. For centuries the temple has been a place of worship for the hill people, and the lamp festival is still known locally as Muthuvan Karthika. For a few days the busy tourist town is reminded that its oldest residents are not the planters, the tea workers or the hoteliers, but the communities who lived in these mountains long before any of them arrived.

This story is an introduction to those communities: who they are, where they came from, how they live, and what is changing for them. It is written from published research and reporting, and we have tried to let their own traditions speak for themselves.

A note on words

In official records these communities are Scheduled Tribes; many people also use the word Adivasi, "first inhabitants". Neither word describes one people. Each community has its own name, language or dialect, history and customs, and the differences between them are as real as the differences between any two neighbouring towns. Older writing about the hills often used words like "primitive" or "wild". Those words were wrong then and are wrong now.

The Muthuvan: the people who carried their goddess

The Muthuvan (plural Muthuvar) are the largest tribal community of the Munnar hills. They live in the forests of the Anamalai and Cardamom hills on both sides of the Kerala–Tamil Nadu border, and about 24,000 people speak the Muthuvan language.

Their name is usually explained by the word muthuku, "back", and by a story of migration from Madurai. The story has several versions. In one, recorded among Muthuvan families near Adimali, the community left Madurai when the city fell under the wrath of the goddess Meenakshi, carrying her image on their backs and shoulders up into the hills of Suryanelli. In another, they carried their children, their belongings and a dethroned king, and the king gave them their name. Munnar's own panchayat history describes them as people who fled the wars of Tamil chieftains with their possessions on their backs. Whatever the details, all the versions agree on the essentials: the Muthuvan came up from the Tamil plains, they carried what mattered most on their backs, and Meenakshi of Madurai remains their goddess.

Hamlets, clans and the chavadi

Muthuvan families live in hamlets called kudi, usually of thirty or more households, most of them related to each other. Traditionally each kudi was led by a headman called the kani or moopan, chosen by a council of elders, together with a ritual leader who guided the agricultural year.

The community is divided into clans called koottam; one study near Adimali recorded six. Descent is matrilineal: a child belongs to the mother's koottam. Marriage traditionally took place within the community but outside one's own clan, and cross-cousin marriage was preferred, though these rules have become more flexible.

A distinctive institution is the chavadi (or saavady), a dormitory where young unmarried people sleep after puberty until they marry. With a fire burning at its centre for warmth, the chavadi works as a clubhouse, a school of the forest and a place where songs, stories and skills pass from one generation to the next.

Gods, festivals and the farming year

The Muthuvan honour Meenakshi, Murugan and Vinayaka alongside their ancestral spirits and the deities of the hills. Their main festivals are Thai Pongal and Karthika, and the clapping dance kaikottikali is performed at celebrations as a religious act as much as an entertainment.

Traditionally the Muthuvan practised shifting cultivation, clearing a patch of forest, growing ragi (finger millet) and other grains for a few seasons, then moving on and letting the forest return, with rituals marking each stage. Today most families cultivate settled plots. Ragi is still the staple food, and cardamom, pepper, tapioca, bananas and lemongrass are grown for sale. Forest honey and other forest produce add to household income.

The Muthuvan language is related to Tamil, with many Malayalam words and features of its own, and it has no script. Children are now schooled in Malayalam, and younger people use the community language less. At Edamalakkudy, a teacher known to the community as Murali "Maash" spent years drafting a script for Muthuvan, warning that without one "the language too might die".

The Muthuvan and the making of Munnar

When John Daniel Munro came to these hills in the 1870s and leased the Kannan Devan Hills from the Poonjar chief in 1877, the forests were already home to Muthuvan settlements. Accounts differ on how the hills got their name. One version says that Kannan and Devan were two Muthuvan men who guided the first British explorers; another names Kannan Thevan as a local chieftain who helped Munro. Either way, the name of the most famous tea district in South India appears to honour the people who were here first.

The plantations changed everything. As forest was cleared for tea and workers arrived from Tamil Nadu, many Muthuvan families moved deeper into the forest, to Edamalakkudy and other remote areas. (We tell the wider story of the plantation era in Three Rivers and a Tea Empire.)

Edamalakkudy: Kerala's first tribal panchayat

North of Munnar, beyond Pettimudi, a cluster of about two dozen Muthuvan settlements lies scattered through some 106 sq km of reserve forest stretching towards Valparai in Tamil Nadu. In 2010 this area became Edamalakkudy grama panchayat, the first in Kerala formed exclusively for a tribal community. Recent estimates put its population at more than 3,200 people in about 750 families.

It is also one of the most isolated local bodies in India. The settlements are about 30 km from Munnar, but reaching them has long meant a trek of around six hours or a rough forest track washed out by every monsoon, and for years the panchayat office worked from Devikulam town. In 2022 the state sanctioned ₹13.7 crore for a road from Pettimudi. Development and protection pull in different directions here: residents have asked for better access to hospitals, schools and markets, while community voices have also asked for a road on which outside entry is strictly restricted, so that their culture and their forest are not exploited.

Keepers of the grasslands

The Muthuvan know the high grasslands of Eravikulam better than anyone. When the area was protected in 1975 for the endangered Nilgiri tahr (it became a national park in 1978), the Kannan Devan company promised to support patrolling and to involve Muthuvan men as watchers, an early example of a company, the government and a tribal community working together for conservation. Elders knew which cliffs the tahr used for calving and which ridges the bachelor herds walked, knowledge gathered over generations of walking the same paths.

One of them, the long-serving tahr watcher Muthuvan Krishnan, used to say that his people did not talk about protecting the grass; they spoke of respecting it. "Grass listens," he said. "Heavy steps break it." (Read more in our story on the Nilgiri tahr of Eravikulam.)

The Hill Pulaya of Anchunad

In the rain-shadow valleys of Marayoor and Chinnar live the Hill Pulaya, also called Mala Pulayan. They are a smaller community, about 3,000 to 3,400 people in recent counts, with three traditional subgroups: the Kurumba Pulayan, Karavazhi Pulayan and Pambu Pulayan. Their settlements include Kummithankuzhi, Thattikkad, Nachivayal, Malakkad and Chavakkalam in the Marayoor and Chinnar areas. Their dialect mixes Tamil and Malayalam, with Tamil dominant, reflecting the valley's long ties with the Tamil country to the east.

Unlike the forest-dwelling Muthuvan, the Hill Pulaya are mainly a land-holding, settled farming community. The government allotted at least one acre of land to each family, and many also work as daily-wage labourers, keep cattle and goats, run small shops or collect minor forest produce. Their religion combines the wider Hindu pantheon with their own deities, among them Kali, Mariamma, Kannimara, Karuppan and Chapalamma, traditionally represented by stones.

That last detail connects the Hill Pulaya to the oldest monuments of the valley. One of the protected groups of Iron Age dolmens stands in the Hill Pulaya settlement at Kanakkayam, and at Marayoor an ancient dolmen has become the Kannimara shrine, still in worship today. (See our story Houses of the Sages: The Dolmens of Marayoor.)

Inside Chinnar Wildlife Sanctuary, Muthuvan and Hill Pulaya families live in eleven settlements, seven Muthuvan and four Hill Pulaya. Through eco-development committees run with the Forest Department, community members guide treks, staff watchtowers and share in the income from eco-tourism, turning their knowledge of animal behaviour, weather and forest paths into a livelihood.

The Mannan: a kingdom without a kingdom

About two hours' drive south of Munnar, near Kattappana, the Mannan community keeps a tradition found nowhere else in South India: a king. From his seat at Kozhimala (Kovilmala), the Raja Mannan is the customary head of more than 48 settlements, and on formal occasions he wears the traditional turban, the thalappavu. The present king, Raman Rajamannan, succeeded Ariyan Raja Mannan in 2012. An economics graduate and a farmer, he was invited with his wife to the Republic Day celebrations in New Delhi in 2025.

Like the Muthuvan, the Mannan look to Meenakshi of Madurai as their tutelary goddess, another thread linking the hill communities of Idukki to the Tamil country. Most Mannan families today are farmers, labourers or gatherers of forest produce. The king's role is ceremonial and social rather than political, but the kingship remains a powerful symbol of the community's identity.

Change, and what it costs

Life in the hills has changed fast in a single generation. Schools, mobile phones, television, roads, housing schemes such as LIFE and women's groups through Kudumbashree have reached settlements that were isolated a few decades ago. Studies among the Muthuvan record changes in language, dress, food, marriage rules and leadership. The moopan's role is now often described as largely ceremonial, and fewer young people know the old dances and songs.

Many of the challenges are familiar across rural India, with sharper edges in the forest: distance from hospitals and colleges, landslides and washed-out roads, uncertain prices for cardamom and pepper, and conflict with elephants and other wildlife over crops. Questions of land and forest rights under the Forest Rights Act, 2006 remain central to every community's future. The communities themselves are clear about one thing: they want the benefits of development on terms that keep their land, their forests and their culture in their own hands.

GK Global does not take guests into tribal settlements. On our safaris you will drive through landscapes these communities have shaped and protected for centuries, and our drivers are always happy to tell you more about them.

The tea came in 1877. The Muthuvan, the Hill Pulaya and the Mannan were here long before, and they are still here: farming, guarding the grasslands and carrying their goddess, as their stories say they always have.

Note on sources: origin stories are given as the communities and researchers have recorded them, often in several versions. Population figures come from different counts (the 2011 Census, a 2008 tribal survey and later estimates) and are not strictly comparable.