Munnar

Until the 1870s the high ranges around Munnar were forest and grassland, long inhabited by the Muthuvan and Malayarayan peoples. The name is usually explained as the Tamil or Malayalam for "three rivers", after the Muthirapuzha, Nallathanni and Kundala streams that meet at the town. In 1877 John Daniel Munro, a British planter, leased the Kannan Devan hills from the Poonjar chief, and in 1879 clearing of the forest began around Devikulam.

Tea proved the crop that suited the altitude. Planting began in earnest in the 1880s, and in 1897 the Kannan Devan Hills Produce Company, part of the group of the Scottish firm James Finlay and Company, was formed to hold the land; it built the estates, the factories, the planters' bungalows and the club, and brought in labourers from the Tamil districts across the border to pick the leaf. A light railway carried tea to Top Station, where a ropeway dropped it to the plains, until the great flood of 1924 destroyed it. Christ Church in Old Munnar recalls the European community of those years.

In 1964 Tata and Finlay acquired the company, and the estates later became part of Tata Tea; in 2005 Tata Tea left the plantations, transferring its holdings to Kanan Devan Hills Plantations under participatory management. The grasslands above the town were protected as a wildlife sanctuary in 1975 and as Eravikulam National Park in 1978, and as tourism grew the resorts spread along the valleys. In 2018 heavy rain caused severe landslides across Idukki and left the hill districts isolated, and the balance between estates, tourism and the forest remains the town's central question.

Munnar is a Tamil town inside Kerala. The great majority of the estate workers and their descendants are Tamil, brought up the ghats by the planters from the 1880s, and Tamil is heard as often as Malayalam in the bazaar; Pongal is celebrated alongside Onam, and Tamil temples and the Catholic churches built for the labour lines sit together on the hillsides. The Malayali presence is in trade, government and tourism, and the visitors — from Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and further afield — add a third population that at peak times outnumbers the residents.

Tea is the culture. The work of the estates — picking, weighing, the factory shifts — shapes the week, and the identity of the labour lines is tied to the company that housed, schooled and employed families for generations. The planters' legacy survives in the High Range Club, the church and the bungalows, and the Tea Museum keeps the story. A nine-day strike by women tea pickers in 2015, which kept the established unions out and formed an all-women union, is seen as a turning point in Kerala's political history.

The hill communities who were here first — the Muthuvans in particular, forest-dwelling cultivators of the Anaimalai hills — still live in the surrounding forests. Christianity has deep roots in both the Tamil and Keralite populations, and Hindu temples serve the estate villages. Manners are those of small-town South India: modest dress, a courteous reserve, and an easy welcome for the visitors on whom the town now depends.

Munnar town is small — the panchayat's population is a little over 30,000, spread across the bazaar, Old Munnar and the estate settlements that fill the valleys around it. The tea estates remain the biggest employer, with pickers, factory workers and staff housed in company lines and settlements across the Kannan Devan hills; cardamom, pepper and vegetables are grown on the lower slopes. Tourism is now a major source of income: resorts, homestays, jeep drivers, guides, tea and spice shops and the restaurants of the bazaar.

The day begins early and cold, with pickers in the fields by first light and the bazaar's tea stalls open for the bus crews. Shops sell tea, spices and warm clothes to visitors through the morning; the sightseeing jeeps leave for the dams and viewpoints, and the town's traffic is at its worst around the bus stand by midday. Evenings are quiet and chilly, with the bazaar's restaurants busy early and most places closed by ten. Weekends and Indian holidays transform the place, when car-borne families from Kochi, Coimbatore and Bengaluru fill the roads and every room.

Water and waste are strained by the visitor numbers, and the sprawl of resorts into the estates and towards the forest has been argued over for years, with periodic drives against unauthorised buildings. Wild elephants sometimes come close to settlements and reservoirs; landslides in the monsoon are a recurring threat; and wages and housing on the estates remain the workers' issue. Young people increasingly leave for Kochi or the Gulf.

Munnar eats the food of two states. The Kerala kitchen supplies the morning staples — appam, soft lacy rice pancakes with a vegetable or chicken stew; puttu, steamed rice-flour cylinders eaten with kadala, black chickpea curry; and idiyappam, string hoppers with coconut milk. The lunchtime 'meals' is rice with sambar, a dry vegetable thoran cooked with coconut, a pappadam and buttermilk, and in non-vegetarian houses a fish curry made with kokum-like kudampuli and coconut. Beef fry and Kerala parotta, the layered flatbread, are everywhere in the bazaar.

The Tamil estate community brings its own: idli and dosa with sambar and chutneys, vegetarian canteen lunches, and the Pongal-season dishes of sweet rice and jaggery. Both traditions meet in the town's bakeries, with their egg puffs, sweet buns and plum cake. Munnar has also become known among Indian visitors for homemade chocolate, sold in the bazaar's shops in dozens of flavours, and for the cardamom, pepper and estate tea that go home as gifts.

Drinking means tea above all — milky, sweet chai from the stalls, and the estate's own leaf brewed in the homestays — and the cool climate makes a hot glass welcome at any hour. Alcohol is served in licensed hotels and bars rather than in ordinary eating places. The homestays and estate bungalows are often the best places to eat, cooking Kerala and Tamil home food for guests in the evening.