Few are aware that Munnar, Kerala’s most popular hill resort, is observing the first centenary of the disastrous floods that all but obliterated the town and its environs. Triggered by a devastating cyclone that raged for three days and nights from July 16 to July 18, 1924, the unprecedented rainfall and consequent flooding wrought widespread and numbing havoc.
Archival records show that along with howling gale-force winds, it poured incessantly and torrentially, notching up a record 30 inches of rain at Rajamallay estate — the highest so far for a single day. Small streams turned into roaring rivers that swelled alarmingly into vast expanses of swirling water, hillsides caved in, and whole forests slid down
into ravines, destroying everything in their way. Floodwaters overflowed bridges, washing several away.
The local Scottish tea company’s 20-mile-long narrow-gauge railway system, entirely imported from the UK, was so badly damaged by the floods that it had to be permanently abandoned. Parts of the locomotive used then are on display in a local tea museum.
A local store—the Scottish tea planters’ sole source of groceries and food supplies—saw floodwaters rise right up to its roof, about 20 feet above ground level. There are black-and-white photos of this grim scene in the local archives. The store employees managed to escape, clinging to a rope strung from the store’s porch to a nearby cenotaph. However, the soda maker drowned while crossing over, much to the horror of his colleagues. Incidentally, the store still functions in the original building, which faced the fury of the floods.
Rescue efforts saw a great deal of ingenuity come into play. A young Scottish planter found a group of people helplessly marooned on a knoll, with the water level rising menacingly around them. Quick-witted, he literally drove a golf ball with one end of a strong fishing line plastered to it across the raging river. Using the line, the stranded group hauled over sufficient rope and improvised a ‘bridge’ of sorts to cross over to safety at a fordable point.
A huge tree, driven inexorably by a landslide, bulldozed its way through the wall of a planter’s bedroom, its occupants escaping narrowly. Workers clambering up or down hillsides to save their meagre possessions were fatally overwhelmed by the deluge. A whole row of workers’ houses was swept away along with the occupants, and many dwellings burned down due to untended and abandoned cooking fires. To add to the plight of the populace, food was in acute short supply. Further, several tea factories situated on low ground were inundated, and their machinery was damaged beyond repair.
Munnar town, lying as it does at the confluence of three rivers, was virtually washed away. Hundreds of people sought shelter in the Catholic Church, perched on a hillock overlooking the town. Interestingly, it is on record that, on reaching the shrine of St Antony just below the church, the floodwaters began to recede quite miraculously. The shrine and the church, by the way, are still extant.
According to a first-hand account from a Scottish planter’s wife who survived the catastrophe, high-velocity winds repeatedly battered the hills on July 16, 17, and 18, stripping the tender tea shoots (ready for harvest) off hundreds of acres of tea fields and blowing roofs off homes. The cyclone left a trail of utter devastation in its wake: more than 100 people had lost their lives, several large herds of cattle had perished, most dwellings had been rendered uninhabitable, and major mishaps across the district had maimed many for life, including a Scottish planter. The loss of personal possessions was substantial. And many were stories of personal courage and grit in the face of grave danger.
Never before (or since) had rainfall of such intensity been experienced in the district. The surging floodwaters are said to have radically altered the geography of Munnar and its environs, scarring the landscape grotesquely. With many tea factories incapacitated and most arterial roads and bridges washed away, tea production ground to a halt, and as a result, the Scottish tea company faced a grave economic crisis. This was compounded in no small measure by the substantial costs of reconstruction of the extensively damaged infrastructure and rehabilitation of the workforce; hundreds of them had been rendered homeless, entire housing colonies having been inundated and washed away.
Nevertheless, undaunted by adversity and the magnitude of the herculean task confronting them, the dour Scottish planters resolutely set to work to rebuild, virtually from scratch, what nature’s fury had razed over 72 hours. It took several months of hard, back-breaking labour for normalcy to return to the district, but eventually Scottish grit, perseverance, and resilience saw a new town and environs rise from the debris.
(The writer is a Munnar-based freelance writer)