The British engineer whom Tamil farmers worship as a god lived and died arguing for this dam

The lake that every visitor to Thekkady rides a boat across was made by a man whose portrait hangs in farmhouse puja rooms two districts away, garlanded alongside images of deities. Colonel John Pennycuick (1841–1911) of the Madras Engineers drove the Mullaperiyar works through from May 1887 to their completion on 10 October 1895, and what happened in between — and what has happened to his memory since — is the strangest, best-documented devotional story in these hills.

The river that kept winning

The engineering problem was brutal in a way the finished dam hides. To build in the Periyar’s bed the river first had to be held back by temporary embankments and coffer dams — and the river kept destroying them. The first temporary dam, begun in the latter part of 1888, was washed away by unseasonable floods in March 1889, and losses of that kind repeated through the build; every monsoon the works flooded, and the labour camps in these malarial forests buried their dead as they went. What stands today is a gravity dam of lime-surkhi concrete holding back the west-flowing Periyar and sending it east through a tunnel in the ridge, into the Vaigai country of Theni and Madurai — water that would otherwise have run down through Kerala to the Arabian Sea.

The funding story has three versions

The story everyone in the Vaigai country tells is that when the British government withheld funds after the flood losses, Pennycuick went home and sold his wife’s jewellery to finish the dam. The documentary record is close but not identical: it says he went to England and sold his family property to raise the money. And there is a third layer, which honest telling requires: his own account of the works mentions no such sale at all, and family members consulted about the jewellery story consider it unlikely. What his own recorded sentence does say is worth keeping either way — that he was going to be here only once, and the deed should not be put off or ignored, since he was not going to be here again.

What the veneration actually looks like

Read that last row again. Kerala and Tamil Nadu have argued about this dam — its lease, its safety, its water level — through commissions, amendments and the Supreme Court for over a century. The two governments that cannot agree on the structure have twice agreed, jointly and formally, on the man who built it.

Seeing it from Kumily

The dam itself sits inside the reserve and general access is restricted — the reservoir you boat across from the Thekkady landing is Pennycuick’s lake, and the drowned trees that stand in it are the valley he closed. The PWD bust at the Thekkady inspection bungalow is on this side of the border ridge; Lower Camp and its memorial are down the Tamil Nadu road through Kumily. The lease behind all of it — 8,000 acres for the reservoir at five rupees an acre, signed 29 October 1886, its very duration disputed — is told properly on the town page’s own story; this page is about the man.