Idukki

Kannan Devan Hills is a large village located in Devikulam taluk of Idukki district in the Indian state of Kerala.[2] The village of Kannan Devan Hills in Devikulam Taluk, was given on lease on 11 July 1877 by the Poonjar Thampuran to John Daniel Munroe, of London and Peermedu, for tea plantation. The lands and plantations were later resumed by the Government of Kerala by the Kannan Devan Hills (Resumption Of Lands) Act, 1971. The tradition that Col Arthur Wellesley, later to be the Duke of Wellington, leading a British detachment from Vandiperiyar to Bodinayakanur, then over the High Range and into the Coimbatore plains to cut off Tipu Sultan's retreat from Travancore, was the first English man in the High Range appears to be belied by the dates involved. If the story is a dozen years too early for Wellesley, it is quite possible that some other officer in General Meadow's Army may have had that distinction. Unfortunately, no record of that pioneering mountain crossing has been traced. What is available is a record of the surveying of this terrain in 1816-17 by Lt Benjamin Swayne Ward, son of Col Francis Swayne Ward to whom we owe many of the early views of Madras and South India Now available in lithoprints.[4] Ward and his assistant Lt Eyre Connor were on orders to map the unexplored country between Cochin and Madurai and so they followed the Periyar into the mountains and then headed north into what at that time was described as ‘‘ the dark impenetrable forests of the High Range’’. They lost men to at least one elephant charge, suffered agony from leech bites and once ran so short of food that a deer run down and being feasted on by wild dogs was manna for the party and their jungle guides. The subsequent report by Ward and Connor was to lead to the Periyar Dam project, completed only in the 1890s,but for the present they were more pre occupied getting into the mountains that they could see towering in the distance from Bodi. Then, on 14 October 1817, ‘‘the weather having improved the ascent into the High Range began’’. Their first major camp was at a flat promontory at 6000 feet. And this was ever afterwards to be known as Top Station. Moving north, they saw to their south the Cardamom Hills, a slope 45 miles long and 30 wide from the heights above Bodi stretching into Travancore. To their north there appeared to be grasslands on high rock peaks. And in front of them, ‘‘an outstanding mountain, shaped like an elephant’s head’’. On 8 November, they established camp at the confluence of three rivers, which they judged to be the centre of the district, and from Munnar (Moonar – three rivers), as it came to be known, they surveyed the area, discovered the ancient village of Neramangalam in ruins but surmised that it might well have been from here that ivory and peacock feathers, pepper and cardamom, sandalwood and other timber went to the lands to the West across the Arabian Sea". It was to be nearly 50 years later that Sir Charles Trevelyan, Governor of Madras, instructed Col Douglas Hamilton to explore the hill country in the western part of the Madras Presidency, requesting special advice on the feasibility of establishing sanatoria for the British in the South and of developing revenue- earning projects without endangering the environment, as had happened in Ceylon where coffee had destroyed not only the rain forest but also paddy cultivation in the north – central rice bowl of ancient Ceylon.