The heritage village at Pookode took ten years to open, and the exhibits are the residents

En Ooru means, roughly, "my village", and the name is doing real work. On a 25-acre hillock at Pookode, between Vythiri and Lakkidi, stands what was announced as the country’s first tribal heritage village of its kind — and the point of it, the thing that separates it from every craft emporium on the tourist road, is the pronoun. The people you meet there are not staff bussed in to perform heritage. They live there, they make what they sell, and the village is theirs.

A decade from foundation to gate

The project’s timeline is itself a story about how hard this kind of thing is to do properly. The foundation was laid in 2012, when Prasanth Nair was the sub-collector of the region. It then took ten years — through changes of administration, funding cycles and the pandemic — before the district collector, Geetha A., opened the village to the public and its beneficiaries on 4 June 2022. What was built in that decade, jointly by the Tourism and Scheduled Tribe Development departments at a reported cost of about ₹10 crore: ten prototype huts in the building styles of Wayanad’s tribal communities, a heritage pathway, a craft workshop, a tribal market, a shop introducing tribal medicine traditions, a cafeteria, an amphitheatre for art forms, and a children’s park.

The context that makes this matter is on the district’s own census sheet. Scheduled Tribes are 18.86 per cent of Wayanad’s population — the highest proportion of any district in Kerala — and the Paniya, whose traditions our town page sets out, are the largest single community among them. A district whose economy has swung hard to tourism has mostly employed its tribal communities at the margins of that economy or not at all. En Ooru’s stated purpose is to move some of that employment — the craft, the produce, the performance, the telling — into a place the communities run themselves.

The jeep is part of the design

The access arrangement is unusual enough that visitors regularly get it wrong, so here it is plainly. Private vehicles do not enter En Ooru. You park at the Pookode veterinary-college gate on the highway side — the Kerala Veterinary and Animal Sciences University’s campus is the village’s downhill neighbour — buy your ticket at the counter there, and ride the site’s own shared jeep up the hillock. The jeep is charged per head, with a full-jeep option for groups, and the last entry is in the late afternoon, ahead of the five o’clock close. The counters at the gate carry the current rates; they are revised, so we print none.

Once up, the right way to take the village is slowly. The huts are not dioramas — each one is built in the idiom of a different community, and the differences are the exhibit. The reed and bamboo work is done in front of you by people who learned it as a living, not as a demonstration; the market sells honey, spices and craft the residents produced; and when the amphitheatre has a programme, the performers are from the communities whose forms they perform. Buy at the village rather than photographing and leaving — the purchases are the mechanism by which the place works.