Kadavari: the village inside the sanctuary that sends its harvest out by pony

The thing that makes Kurinjimala unlike Eravikulam or Chinnar is that people live in it. Kadavari is a settlement inside the notified boundary, at about two thousand metres, three and a half kilometres beyond Kottakamboor on a mapped footpath and roughly nine by the road a vehicle has to take. It is seven and a half kilometres from Koviloor and about five from Kilavarai, which is in Tamil Nadu. The Forest Department’s own brochure lists “Stay at Kadavari” as one of four eco-tourism facilities here.

A temperate farm belt in Kerala

What Kadavari and its neighbours grow is not a Kerala crop list. Beans, potato, carrot, beetroot, cabbage, garlic and radish come off these terraces, because two thousand metres gives Kerala the only temperate growing season it has. The hillsides around Kottakamboor and Vattavada are cut into contour terraces from the valley floor to the plantation edge, and in the growing season the potato flowers turn whole slopes white — which is a private joke in a sanctuary notified for a blue one.

The harvest goes east rather than west. Kadavari’s produce is sold in Tamil Nadu, and it gets there on pack animals over a track: there is a photograph on Wikimedia Commons, uploaded by a contributor from this valley, of two loaded ponies and a man on the forest road above the village. The English record calls them horses and the Malayalam caption calls them mules. Either way it is a working freight system inside a protected area, which is not a sentence you write about many wildlife sanctuaries.

The road that stops

Kadavari is where it is because of a road that no longer works. The old Kodaikanal–Munnar road runs through this country — locally the Escape Road — and the section east of the village is carried on OpenStreetMap with access=no and the flat description “This road is closed for public”. You can drive to Kadavari from the Kerala side. You cannot go on. The fifty-five kilometres often quoted between Kadavari and Kodaikanal is a distance on a map; the drive you would actually have to make measures 115.8 km and takes the better part of four hours.

And the history the department admits to

The brochure is unusually frank about what this ground used to be. The sanctuary, it says, covers Kambakkallu and Kadavari, “formerly infamous for the cultivation of Ganja and narcotic trafficking”, and records that after the area was handed to the Forest Department and raided repeatedly the illicit activity was curbed. The naming has stuck: the fourth facility on the same page is a stay at Narco point.

All of which is why the boundary here has never been a line on the ground. Private holdings with legal title were excluded from the notified area from the start; the state has since appointed an IAS settlement officer to hear claims and fix the line, ordered a drone survey to separate titled land from forest, and told the Idukki collector to plan the clearance of the acacia and eucalyptus plantations across Vattavada, Kottakamboor, Kanthalloor, Marayur and Keezhanthur. The sanctuary’s own entrance board, photographed above Kadavari, stands in planted eucalyptus.