Wayanad was safe and serene for ages, with its hills and forests. To its east, stood the Nilgiris. To the northeast, the Mysore plateau. On the northwest, the Kodagu hills. On July 30, however, landlocked Wayanad was bobbing in a sea of grief as one of its hills came crashing down. The landslide obliterated several villages and took hundreds of human lives.
People all over Kerala whimpered why―even though they knew why. Life in Wayanad had been rooted in agriculture, and past generations had lived close to nature. They worshipped trees, snakes, birds, animals, ancestors and the five elements. They were simple, unlettered people without bile or guile, who trusted everyone. Legal contracts were unknown until the British arrived and until clever settlers trickled in from beyond the hills.
Life changed slowly as ‘civilisation’ spread. ‘Rational’ men ran down rustic wisdom as superstition. Men of scientific temper scorned the land’s sacred groves and dammed its rivers at the crest of the hills. As age-old beliefs trembled and loosened, so too did the invisible tree roots that bound the rocks deep inside the hills. Meandering streams lost their rhythm and went wayward. Who can strengthen the binding roots and the rustic customs―if only to keep alive the flickering hope of averting recurring landslides?
Wayanad was as right as rain in my childhood. Raindrops fell steadily but gently, not scaring anyone. An occasional torrential rain larded the earth. There was fleeting flooding during the monsoons, but no deluge. When the streams overflowed, we swam in the biting cold water or made rafts out of banana stalks and punted around with a pole. The water drained in a day or two.
The rain never hurt us. Old-timers say there were four types of rain in Wayanad, besides the two monsoons in June and October. The Kumbha rain in February-March and the Mina rain in March-April had their own distinct traits. So did the Karkitaka rain July-August and the Chinga rain August-September. Regular rain kept Wayanad evergreen and watered local culture and lore. And it set the calendar for every human activity. An old-world Malayalam saying in Wayanad was, Thula-pathu kazhinjal, pila-pothilum kidakkam. Translation: After the 10th of the month of Libra, you can sleep even in the hollows of jackfruit trees. The rain was punctual and gentlemanly then. Low pressure and climate change were unfamiliar terms.
Four types of winds, from four different directions, blew across Wayanad. They pushed the plants and trees to flower and fruit, said Cheruvayal Raman, a tribal farmer of Wayanad and preserver of rare rice seeds who received the Padma Shri award. These winds bound Wayanad’s soil and climate together, he said. The easterly winds made the place shiver in the chill of November-December. The evenings were cold even in summer, and local people huddled around fire while attending temple and church festivals. People arriving from other parts would wear woollen sweaters and monkey caps as their bus approached Wayanad. The land was so beautiful with its heavenly mist, so inviting with its fertility. Bewitched, outsiders poured in steadily, and then in torrents. Their assaults on nature first wounded the hills, then human lives.
Wayanad has many stories to tell; fearsome stories of Tipu Sultan’s military run; heroic stories of Pazhassi Raja’s guerrilla tactics against the British; stories of an ineffectual Naxalite spring thunder since the late 1960s; and stories of cruel denial of tribal rights. But the most saddening is the story of its loamy soil, which is now a steady lament. An elegy.
The soil was rich in humus―natural manure that nurtured coffee, cardamom, pepper, paddy and tea. The rains always arrived on time. Rains in February-March made coffee flowers bloom and fattened the beans. They also turned black pepper corns long and luxuriant. Relying on the rains, paddy farmers would sow in June as soon as the southwest monsoon arrived, and harvest in November-December after the northeast monsoon receded. Some of them would sow again, but lightly on dry earth, in February-March. This age-old schedule has undergone haywire, said Echom Gopi, a local farmer and cultural activist. Erratic rains have disrupted Wayanad’s agricultural tenor.
Every house had an attached ala, a thatched shed for the cattle. It was just an extended awning in modest houses. The cattle roamed the fields, their dung nourishing the fields. Rice stalks left to rot in the fields after harvest, along with bundles of green leaves and grass, further enriched the clayey topsoil. Wayanad’s fertility began declining after farmers turned to monoculture and chemical fertilisers. The topsoil has lost its clayey quality.
As a boy, I had to hop across four rivulets to reach an unpaved road in my village, Panamaram, which is now a small town. Wayanad was full of such brooks. People called them kaithod, edathod, aruthod and naduthod, indicating their size; thod means rivulet. Many rivulets vanished when rubber trees invaded our backyards on invitation. Rubber also erased tall trees like ebony and mahogany from villages, just as tea plantations had done on the hill slopes decades before. Lush undergrowth too was lost, along with humble herbs like thumpa, thakara and touch-me-not. Thousands of pits for planting rubber were noticed in the upper parts of Kavalappara, one of the villages that disappeared in the landslide in July.
On the evening before the disaster, flocks of panicky birds pecked at the windows of many houses in Chooralmala and Mundakkai villages. A herd of elephants entered Chooralmala that evening, an unusual occurrence in this village. Perhaps they had intimations of an impending rush of a river of tears. The villagers pounded on tin drums to drive the herd back―and then went to bed, never to wake up again.
Man-animal conflict was uncommon in Wayanad in the last century. Now, wild animals come raiding quite often, while many kinds of birds, butterflies and dragonflies have deserted the villages. So have the fish. There were 40 varieties of fish in the Kabani river in Mananthavadi. The British civil servant William Logan, who wrote the Malabar Manual (1887), gave the Valliyoorkavu river a shimmering name: he called it the fish pagoda.
Jackals and wild hens of our village now play their hunter-prey game elsewhere perhaps. Even our crabs and earthworms have slid away. The eerie calls of the cicada and the cricket, which kept timid little me indoors after dark, can no longer be heard. More than them, I miss the swamps in the rice fields where people made wells in a natural way. A length of palm tree trunk, its bark chiselled out, was sunk vertically into the swamp―and up came unbelievably pure drinking water.
We called these swamps koravakandam. These were like quicksands that in our local legends sucked in humans and animals. Near my home, there was a large and deep pond, now extinct. Thousands of wells, ponds and brooks in Wayanad have become ‘developed’ land.
The word quarry was unknown in my childhood. Now there are countless quarries in the crests of our hills where granite is blasted with dynamite. The road from Vellamunda to Banasura Sagar is heartbreaking with the sight of hills being split, bored and blasted for ripping rocks. One can see these wounds from miles away.
Some decades ago, there were shops and tea plantations only at Adivaram, the place from where vehicles climb up the hills. Now plantations have trekked to the top of the hills, said Azeez Tharuvana, a social worker and professor of Malayalam. “The owners say it is private land. But, for us it was forest.” Tourist resorts stand unchallenged even on the Kuttiady pass to the west of Wayanad. Kuttiady has a hydroelectric power station with several dams in the hills, including Banasura Sagar, but everyone turns a blind eye to the dam water damaging the innards of the hills.
The hills no longer look dark and mysterious at night. Yellowish lights from tourist resorts on hilltops serve as beacons for visitors driving from the passes, and each resort has built kilometres of roads on private land. Unplanned tourism has been robbing Wayanad of its own charms. In caring countries, tourists trek from the valleys to the hills; in Wayanad, tourist resorts have been built on the peaks and their slopes.
Humans and wild animals were once good neighbours in Wayanad. They respected an invisible fence between them. But as encroachers shrank the forest, the animals felt compelled to seek food outside. Teak plantations posed another threat to them by depleting water in the forest. As the watering holes dried, elephants and deer forayed into villages to feast on another recent spectacle―banana plantations. Banana has edged out paddy in many villages. The story of human-animal conflict has many layers to it.
The 14-day Vallioorkav temple festival has been a symbol of solidarity of rivers, forests and tribals. The temple stands on a hill, with the Kabani flowing below, and the place was serene until concrete buildings came up. A building for the weekly market hinders drainage of water during heavy rain. Now hardly anyone remembers the sacred ritual of feeding the fish in the river.
Tribal ways of growing food had changed with the arrival of Jain families from Karnataka centuries ago. The Jains did many a good turn for Wayanad―they built small bunds and canals for irrigation, and mud paths for bullock carts. Wayanad had no tall buildings 50 years ago. My early childhood was spent in a grass-roofed house made of mud. All the neighbouring houses were covered with grass, straw or leaf. While I was in primary school, my father changed our grass roof with thatch, which was considered a major upgrade in those days. Among the hundred houses in my village, only two had concrete roofs. All the houses stood on the edge of rivulets and were several hundred metres apart. Today concrete structures on tiny plots dot the valleys.
The road to Mananthavadi town offered a visual feast for us children. Along one side, there stretched an abyss, breathtaking with green vegetation and silvery streams. Today you will find tall buildings rising from terraces in the abyss and peeping at the tarmac.
Tribals of Wayanad were a resilient lot who had defied deadly malaria. Some of them, like the Kurichya, lived as joint families in sprawling ancestral homes. Most other tribal groups―the Paniya, Adiya, Kuruba and Naika―lived in clusters of thatched little houses. In the name of modernity, the government offered them money to build concrete houses. The uprooting of tribals from their habitat has affected the very culture of Wayanad.
A landslide had destroyed an entire tea estate in Mundakkai in 1984. The survivors of that disaster have fallen victim again―the whole village disappeared in the July landslide. The Puthumala tea estate, which suffered a landslide in 2019, is only 5km from Mundakkai. Why did they rebuild their houses at the very spot where terrible landslides had occurred? How did this area grow into a town?
For visitors, Meppadi is just a tourist centre; for the local residents, it is a trading hub. It is a small town surrounded by tea estates. The tea workers here live in the estate padi (also called layam), but are ejected from there upon retirement. To get government aid to build a house, one needs to own at least five cents of land. Land in the villages is too expensive for the tea workers to buy, so they buy where they can―on marshes and hilltops. Many victims of the landslide in Mundakkai and Chooralmala had despicable wages.
The communist leader Annie Raja was a candidate in the last Lok Sabha election from Wayanad. She had first visited Wayanad in the 1980s. She remembered a bus ride on a chilly morning from Iritti to Kalpetta to Wayanad: “Dahlia flowers were blooming all the way. Dark-red roses and many other beautiful flowers swayed in every backyard. What a land of flowers it was.”
No flowers waved at her during the election campaign last April. “The dahlias have disappeared,” she said. “The weather has completely changed. Thoughtless tourism and development have done Wayanad in.”
Who can save the land of lost flowers?
The writer is an award-winning Malayalam journalist.