Munnar: History

History
It started in 1879 with a British planter named John Daniel Munro, who leased land from the Poonjar royal family and decided to try growing tea at altitude. He was onto something — the elevation, the rainfall, the specific soil chemistry of the Western Ghats turned out to be close to perfect for it, and within two decades a serious colonial plantation economy had taken root. British bungalows went up. Churches followed. So did a narrow-gauge railway built specifically to carry tea down to the coast — until a brutal 1924 flood wiped it out for good, leaving the winding mountain road as the only way in or out ever since.

Finlay Muir and Company, a Scottish trading firm, swallowed up most of the early plantation land and turned it into one of the largest integrated tea operations in Asia. After independence in 1947, ownership shifted considerably, and by the 1980s Tata Group had taken a controlling stake — a relationship that, through various restructurings, still shapes who farms these hillsides today.

What’s genuinely interesting is how the operation has evolved. The Kannan Devan Hills Plantations company, formed in 2005, now runs much of the land as an employee-owned enterprise — a real departure from the purely extractive model the whole thing began under. Many of the workers are descendants of the Tamil labourers brought here under British rule, still working the same slopes their families have worked for generations.

If you want this fuller story rather than just the scenery, the KDHP Tea Museum in town doesn’t sand off the rough edges — colonial origin, labour history, the shift to employee ownership, all of it. Worth an hour of your time before you head out into the plantations themselves.