The name Kanan Devan is on the hills around Munnar and on tea-company signs. A popular tale says two guides, Kannan and Devan, lent their names to the place after showing newcomers through the high range. The timing of the documented plantation account makes that neat explanation uncertain.
The name enters the record early
Kerala Tourism’s history says John Daniel Munro identified the Kanan Devan hills as plantation land and then obtained a lease from the Poonjar royal family in 1877. Its account gives about 136,600 acres and records the annual rent and deposit. In that narrative, Kanan Devan is already the land’s name before the lease. The source does not identify a person named Kanan Devan or reproduce a signed deed that would settle the word’s origin.
That is the important distinction. The two-guide version may preserve a memory of Muthuvan help, but it cannot be promoted to a documented naming ceremony from these sources. The Muthuvan presence in the high ranges predates plantation development in Kerala Tourism’s account; it deserves more than a romantic anecdote attached to a European lease.
What the lease changed
The 1877 transaction opened a long plantation chapter. Kerala Tourism dates Munro’s North Travancore Land Planting and Agricultural Society to 1879 and the Kannan Devan Hills Produce Company to 1897. Those institutions carried an existing place name into commercial use and made it visible far beyond Munnar.
The story’s ending is an unanswered question rather than a reveal. The earliest account reviewed here shows the name in use before the tea company. It does not tell us whose name it was, or even whether it began as a personal name. A traveller looking over the estates can hold both facts: the name is older than the industry that made it famous, and its origin remains to be documented.
- Kerala Tourism: history of Munnar and the 1877 lease
- The tourism history summarises the lease; it does not provide a primary deed image or establish a named guide’s identity.