The River the Toda Hold Sacred: The Story of Pykara

A short drive north-west of Ooty, on the road towards Mysore, the crowded hill-station gives way to open country: rolling grassland, dark pockets of shola forest, and a river sliding quietly between them. This is Pykara—a river, a reservoir and a waterfall that share one name—and for the Toda, the pastoral people who have herded buffalo across these downs for centuries, its waters are sacred. Most visitors come for the boathouse and the falls, but Pykara is really the story of a single mountain river and everything the Nilgiris have asked of it.

From Mukurthi peak to the plateau’s edge

The Pykara River begins high on the Nilgiri plateau, rising near Mukurthi peak in the wildest, wettest corner of the range. From there it flows northwards through sholas and grassy meadows before turning west as it nears the edge of the plateau, where the land falls away and the river with it. Along the way its waters are gathered into a chain of reservoirs, the largest of which forms the calm sheet that visitors know simply as Pykara Lake. The stretch is prized for more than its scenery: this is well-protected country of fenced sholas, Toda settlements, broad grassy downs and good wildlife habitat, a surviving glimpse of what the whole plateau once looked like before the tea gardens spread.

A river the Toda hold sacred

To understand Pykara you have to begin with the Toda. Numbering only a few thousand, they are among the oldest inhabitants of the Nilgiris, a people whose life has long turned on buffalo, dairy temples and the high grasslands. The Pykara River is considered very sacred by the Toda, woven into their ritual world and their reverence for these downs, and their hamlets still stand among the sholas along its banks. It is a link worth treating with care rather than curiosity: the meadows a visitor photographs are, for the Toda, a living landscape of pasture and sanctity. Keeping that in mind changes how the place feels—less a scenic stop, more a corner of someone’s homeland that happens to be very beautiful.

The reservoir, the boathouse and the falls

Where the road meets the water, the Tamil Nadu Tourism Development Corporation runs a boathouse, and its motor and pedal boats are how most people first see Pykara—gliding out onto the still, cold reservoir with the shola hills mirrored in the surface. A few kilometres downstream the mood changes entirely. Here the river reaches the lip of the plateau and drops in stages as the Pykara Falls, the final two cascades measuring roughly 55 and 61 metres, thundering through a wooded gorge that draws crowds in the monsoon and the weeks after it. The combination of glassy lake above and roaring falls below, set among meadows, is exactly what has made Pykara a favourite backdrop for Tamil and other Indian film songs, and the downs here have appeared in more movies than anyone has counted.

One of South India’s oldest power stations

The same fall in the land that makes the waterfall spectacular also made the river valuable. In the early twentieth century engineers saw in the Pykara’s steep, reliable drop a chance to generate electricity, and the river was harnessed through a chain of dams—Mukurthi, Pykara and Glenmorgan—feeding a powerhouse below the plateau’s edge. The first unit, of about 6.65 MW, was commissioned in October 1932, making the Pykara station one of the oldest power plants in South India and a pioneer that inspired much of the hydroelectric development that followed across the Nilgiris. The scheme was later expanded and today generates in the order of 60 MW, and in 1997 the original plant was recognised as a heritage installation—a rare case of an industrial works old enough, and important enough, to be preserved as history in its own right.

Visiting Pykara

Pykara sits roughly 19 to 21 kilometres from Ooty on the road towards Mysore, an easy half-day outing that most people combine with other stops along the same route. The boathouse and the falls are the two set-piece attractions; the falls are at their fullest during and just after the south-west monsoon, though the paths can be slippery then, so sturdy shoes and caution near the water are wise. Because the surrounding sholas and downs are Toda country and protected habitat, it is best to stay on marked paths and carry your litter out. Many travellers pair Pykara with the quieter Avalanche Lake further into the hills for a fuller day among the grasslands. To see where Pykara fits among the region’s other cool retreats, read our /india/tamil-nadu/guides/tamil-nadu-hill-stations , and to build it into a longer trip up the mountain, see /india/tamil-nadu/guides/coimbatore-to-ooty-in-2-days .