IdukkiIdukki

Idukki's history is written in stone long before it was written on paper. At Marayur, megalithic dolmens and rock paintings point to settlement thousands of years old, and Adivasi communities such as the Muthuvan have lived in these hills for generations.

In 1895 the Mullaperiyar Dam, built under Colonel John Pennycuick, flooded a forest valley to send Periyar water east to Tamil Nadu, under a lease agreed with Travancore in 1886. The lake it created became the core of a game sanctuary in 1934 — today's Periyar Tiger Reserve, part of Project Tiger since 1978.

British planters arrived in the Kannan Devan Hills in the late nineteenth century and turned the high grasslands around Munnar — 'three rivers' — into tea. A monorail and later a light railway carried tea down the hills until the great flood of 1924, remembered in Malayalam as the flood of '99, swept them away.

The district was formed on 26 January 1972. Its great arch dam, completed in the mid-1970s, sits between the Kuravanmala and Kurathimala hills and drives Kerala's largest hydroelectric project. Idukki grows most of India's small cardamom, and once every twelve years its hills turn blue when the Neelakurinji blooms — last in 2018.