There is a particular moment on the drive up to Munnar from Kochi when the road begins to climb in earnest, the air cools, and the first ridge of tea-covered hills appears across the valley. Most travellers see this view for the first time and feel they are looking at something that has always been there. Few realise they are looking at the result of a single 19th-century lease agreement, the labour of three generations of migrant workers, and a long sequence of corporate mergers, restructurings, floods, strikes, and inheritances that brought the Kannan Devan Hills to where they stand today.
Munnar is one of the most visited destinations in Kerala. Its history is also one of the most actively contested. The story most often told to travellers is a clean colonial narrative: a British official saw a beautiful valley, leased it from a friendly raja, planted tea, and built one of the world’s great hill stations. The reality is more interesting and considerably more uncomfortable, and the parts that are best documented sit alongside parts that exist mostly in oral tradition.
This is the version we tell our guests on the drive to Munnar. It draws on the documented record where it exists, on conversations with local historians where it does not, and on what we have observed in fifteen years of organising trips through these hills. Where the historical record is unclear, we say so. Some of what is below is verifiable fact. Some is the version that has come down through plantation families and labour communities. We have tried to be honest about which is which.
The land before the planters
Long before any European arrived, the Kannan Devan Hills were the home of the Muthuvan people, a semi-nomadic adivasi community of hunters, gatherers and shifting cultivators who knew this stretch of the Western Ghats more intimately than any subsequent settler ever has. Their name for the hills, the relationships they maintained with the landscape, and their seasonal movements between elevations are partly preserved in oral tradition and partly lost. Two Muthuvan men, said by tradition to have been called Kannan and Devan, are remembered as the guides who led the first British surveyors into the hills. The range is named after them.
Politically, the hills sat within the kingdom of Travancore, but they were the jenmam land of the Poonjar royal family, a sub-kingdom whose ancestors had migrated centuries earlier from the Pandyan court at Madurai. Jenmam was a form of absolute land holding, and within Travancore the Poonjars held the Kannan Devan Hills as their private domain, ungoverned in any active sense by anyone above them. For most of recorded history the hills were undisturbed forest with the Muthuvan moving through them.
The first Europeans to set foot in the area passed through almost by accident. In 1790, Colonel Arthur Wellesley, later the Duke of Wellington, was sent through the Kumily gap to cut off Tipu Sultan’s retreat. He failed and the hills returned to their forested anonymity. In 1817, two officers of the Madras Army, Lieutenants Benjamin Ward and Peter Connor, conducted a trigonometric survey of the high ranges and made the first written record of the landscape. Forty years passed before any commercial European interest followed.
The lease that started everything
In 1877, John Daniel Munro, a lawyer in the Travancore civil service who had been appointed Superintendent of the Cardamom Hills, arrived in the high ranges to settle a border dispute between Travancore and the Madras Presidency. His remit was administrative, not commercial. But by the time he completed his survey, he had identified the Kannan Devan Hills as ideal for plantation cultivation, and he understood, as a Travancore officer, exactly how the Poonjar jenmam tenure worked.
On 11 July 1877, at the Poonjar palace, Rohini Thirunal Kerala Varma Valiya Raja signed a concession deed leasing approximately 136,600 acres of the Kannan Devan Hills to Munro for an annual rent of 3,000 rupees and a security deposit of 5,000 rupees. The document is now known as the Poonjar Concession or the First Pooniat Concession. It is the founding document of plantation Munnar, and it is one of the most consequential land transactions in 19th-century South India. For a sum that would have been modest even in its time, the entire future of one of the most beautiful stretches of the Western Ghats was placed under European commercial control.
Munro did not plant the first tea. In 1879 he founded the North Travancore Land Planting and Agricultural Society, a syndicate of European planters who began experimenting with various commercial crops, coffee, cardamom, cinchona for quinine, and sisal. Most of these crops failed in the local conditions. Tea worked. The first tea was planted in 1880 by A.H. Sharp on around fifty acres at the Parvathy estate, now part of the Sevenmallay estate. By the late 1880s, it was clear that tea, and only tea, was going to be the crop of the Kannan Devan Hills.
Sir John Muir and the Finlay era
The next pivot in the story is one the original version of this post got wrong, and a reader corrected us on it years ago. The man who consolidated the small planters’ estates into a single industrial operation was not Finlay. He was John Muir.
James Finlay & Co was a Scottish trading house, originally a cotton merchant, founded in Glasgow in 1750. By the 1860s, the American Civil War had disrupted the cotton trade and the firm’s leadership had passed to John Muir, a partner who turned the company toward Indian tea and jute. Muir built the company’s Indian operations from offices in Calcutta and Bombay, gradually buying out the original Finlay family interests until, by 1883, he was the sole owner. He was knighted in 1892 and became the first Baronet of Deanston in 1893.
In 1895, Sir John Muir personally bought the Poonjar Concession deeds from Munro’s syndicate, with the intention of consolidating the scattered estates and operating them at industrial scale. In 1896, his Glasgow firm Finlay Muir & Co (the brand name James Finlay used for its Indian operations) acquired thirty-three independent estates in the Kannan Devan Hills. In 1897, the Kannan Devan Hills Produce Company Limited was incorporated to manage them. By 1900, the entire concession area was operating under the KDHP name, and the brand of Kannan Devan tea was beginning to find a market in the United Kingdom.
This is the period when Munnar as we recognise it today was built. Roads, factories, ropeways, hydroelectric power stations, planters’ bungalows, churches, clubs, schools and hospitals were constructed across the hills, mostly between 1895 and 1925. The first hydroelectric power house in India, at Pallivasal, was built by KDHP in 1900. The Kundaly Valley ropeway, completed in 1926, transported tea from the highest estates to the plains. By 1915, sixteen factories were processing tea from the Kannan Devan estates. The infrastructure that visitors photograph today, the colonial bungalows, the High Range Club, the old Lockhart factory, the road network through the estates, is largely from this period.
The labour that the plantations were built on
The story of how the tea got planted, picked and processed is the part of the Munnar narrative that is least visible to most travellers and the part that matters most to understanding the plantations as they stand today.
The Kannan Devan Hills had no resident labour force of any scale. The Muthuvan were a small community, semi-nomadic, with no tradition of plantation agriculture. The forest itself was unworked. To plant tea on the scale that Muir’s syndicate envisaged required, simply, the importation of labour.
The labour came from Tamil Nadu. From the late 19th century onward, Tamil migrant workers were brought from the Tirunelveli, Madurai and Tanjore districts of Tamil Nadu’s southern plains into the Kannan Devan Hills. Most were Dalits and members of other backward communities for whom subsistence at home had become difficult, and for whom the offer of work and housing in the hills represented a survival option. They were brought up in batches, settled in plantation labour lines, and put to work clearing forest and planting tea bushes. They cleared and planted on land that was not their land, and built houses on land that they did not own.
The migration continued through the early 20th century. The descendants of these workers form the bulk of the plantation workforce in Munnar today. Their first language is Tamil. Most have lived in Munnar for three or four generations. They are, in the formal sense, citizens of Kerala, but the social distance between the labour lines and the surrounding Malayali population has remained considerable. The houses they live in still belong to the plantation company. Most plantation worker families do not own a single piece of land in the state where they were born and where their grandparents are buried.
This is the part of the Munnar story that no travel brochure mentions. It is also the part most directly visible to anyone who walks through a working tea estate. The women picking tea on the slopes are the granddaughters and great-granddaughters of the original migrant workers from Tirunelveli. The houses you can see in the labour lines along the estate roads are the same housing pattern, with concrete now replacing the original tin sheets. When travellers stop and watch the picking, this is the labour history they are watching.
In 2015, this came to a national moment. A spontaneous strike led by women plantation workers, calling themselves Pembilai Orumai (Women’s Unity), shut down the Munnar tea estates for nine days over a cut to the annual bonus. The strike was significant because it bypassed the established trade unions, which had become aligned with management, and because it was led entirely by women on the ground. The bonus was restored. The strike has since become one of the more studied labour movements in modern Indian history.
Two disasters, two pivots
The plantations have been shaped by two events as much as by any commercial decision.
The first was the great flood of 1924. Heavy monsoon rain across the high ranges that year produced landslides and flooding on a scale that destroyed roads, swept away rail track and the ropeway, washed out factories, and killed an unknown number of estate workers. The plantations took years to recover. The original Munnar-to-Kochi road, which had run via Pooyamkutty and Mangulam, was destroyed beyond repair and abandoned. The Travancore government built a new road via Neriyamangalam and Adimaly, completed in 1926, which is the road most travellers drive on today. The 1924 flood is the reason the Munnar approach is what it is.
The second event, in 1971, was political rather than meteorological. The Kerala state government, then in a left-wing phase, decided to reclaim plantation land that was not under active cultivation, with the intention of returning it to forest or distributing it to landless workers. After lengthy negotiations, KDHP, by then a part of Tata Tea, was permitted to retain around 23,000 hectares of its leased area, with the remainder reverting to the state. The current size and boundaries of the Munnar plantations date from this 1971 settlement.
Tata, and the worker-shareholder transition
Through the 1960s, James Finlay began winding down its Indian operations as post-Independence policy made foreign-owned plantations increasingly difficult to operate at scale. In 1964, Finlay entered into a joint venture with the Tata group to set up an instant tea factory at Nullatani, the first of its kind in India. In 1976, Finlay sold its remaining Indian tea interests to Tata Sons, and in 1983 the Tata group took full ownership and renamed the company Tata Tea Limited. For the next two decades, Munnar’s tea was a Tata operation.
The most genuinely interesting moment in this corporate history came in 2005. By then, the global tea industry was under considerable price pressure, plantations were no longer the profit centres they had been a generation earlier, and Tata Tea was looking to restructure. Rather than sell or shut the Munnar estates, the company chose to do something almost unprecedented in Indian corporate history.
In April 2005, Tata Tea transferred ownership of its Munnar plantations to a newly formed company, Kannan Devan Hills Plantations Company Private Limited, in which the workers themselves became majority shareholders. Around 13,000 workers and staff acquired equity. Tata Tea retained a minority stake (around 19 percent at the time of transition) and continued to provide management support, but the operating company became, in effect, employee-owned. KDHP today is the largest worker-shareholder company in India and one of the most genuinely participatory plantation operations in the world.
It is not a perfect model. The 2015 Pembilai Orumai strike happened a decade into the worker-shareholder era and the underlying labour grievances had not gone away with the equity transfer. But the model is real, and the financial returns from the plantations are now distributed in a way that has no precedent in Indian colonial-era industry.
What you actually see when you visit
For a traveller driving up to Munnar today, the layered history above is mostly invisible. What you see is the scenery, the mist, the tea bushes in their geometric rows, the small towns of plantation workers along the road, the colonial-era bungalows on hillside ridges, the occasional old factory still in operation. The relationship between what you are seeing and how it came to be is rarely obvious.
A few specific places give you a way to read the landscape historically.
The Tata Tea Museum at Nullatani estate is the official version of the story. It is well-curated, has the original machinery, and tells the corporate history clearly from Munro through Sharp through Muir through Tata to KDHP. It is genuinely worth two hours of a Munnar visit. The labour story is mostly absent from the exhibits, which is to be expected.
The Lockhart factory, built in 1936 and still operating, is the most authentic working tea factory open to visitors. The orthodox processing line you walk through is more or less the same machinery that has been in use for ninety years. A working factory tour here gives a real sense of how tea moves from leaf to chest, and the smell of fermenting leaf in the withering room is something you do not forget.
Kolukkumalai, at around 7,200 feet, is the highest tea estate in the world and one of the few estates that still produces orthodox tea on original machinery. The road up is rough and the tour is honest. The view from the summit is one of the great views of the Western Ghats.
The High Range Club in Munnar town is the planters’ club founded in 1909. Day visits and lunches can be arranged for non-members. The club is a working museum of British plantation culture: hunting trophies on the walls, old planters’ photographs, a colonial bar, and a sense of physical continuity with the period when the plantations were being built.
The labour lines, which are the worker housing along the estate roads, are not a tourist attraction and should not be treated as one. But they are visible from any drive through the estates, and travellers who want to understand the human dimension of the plantations should at least look at them with awareness of what they represent.
The Munnar tea industry today
The current state of Munnar’s tea industry is not what it was. Global tea prices have been under sustained pressure for two decades. South Indian orthodox tea, which is the higher-quality category Munnar produces, sells at a premium but in much smaller volumes than the bulk CTC (crush-tear-curl) tea that dominates the global market. Some of Munnar’s smaller estates have been sold or converted to tourism use. The plantation workforce is ageing, and the children of plantation workers are increasingly choosing to leave the estates rather than continue the family work.
Whether the next chapter of the Munnar plantations is a graceful continuation of the worker-shareholder model or a slow contraction is genuinely unclear. KDHP continues to operate around 24,000 hectares with around 12,000 workers, and remains the dominant employer in Munnar. But the industry as a whole is no longer expanding, and the tea-tourism balance is shifting toward tourism more sharply each year.
For a traveller, the implication is simply that the Munnar you see today is closer to the end of one chapter than the beginning of one. The plantations will probably still be here for several more decades, but the cultural ecosystem of working planters, planters’ clubs, factory routines, and estate communities is in slow transition. Visiting Munnar now, with attention, is partly visiting something that will not be the same in twenty years.
A note on the limits of what we know
We have tried in this post to be honest about what is documented and what is local oral tradition. The dates, names, lease terms, and corporate transitions above are taken from the public record. Where the post draws on the version of events told by Munnar’s plantation families and labour communities, we have tried to flag it. Different historians of Kerala plantation history give somewhat different versions of certain details, particularly around the early dynamics between Munro, the Poonjar court, and the Muthuvan community. Where you read this post against another account, you may find specific points of disagreement. The broader shape of the story, however, is well established.
If a part of the story interests you and you want to read further, the Wikipedia entry on James Finlay & Co covers the corporate history thoroughly, the Kerala Museum’s piece on the Kannan Devan Hills covers the local context, and Jijo Jayaraj’s PhD thesis on the colonial making of Munnar is the most substantial academic treatment of the labour and ecological history.
Plan a Munnar visit
We organise visits to Munnar on most of our Kerala itineraries, with a particular interest in helping guests understand the plantation history beyond the surface. The Tata Tea Museum, the Lockhart factory, Kolukkumalai, the High Range Club, and the workings of an active estate can all be built into a Munnar stay if the traveller is interested in the historical and industrial layer of the place rather than just the views.
For broader context, see our Munnar destination guide for the full picture of the region, and our best tea factory in Munnar post for the visit-specific guide. To plan a journey, tell us what you are looking for.