Periyar National Park

Listen first. The forest here is never silent. There is a steady hum of insects. Water drips from broad leaves. Somewhere above you, a bird calls with a sound like a wooden knock. The air is cool and damp, and it smells of wet earth, moss, and faintly of spice from the plantations on the hills. You are standing in the Western Ghats, the long chain of mountains that runs down the western edge of India. This is Periyar.

Periyar lies in the hills of the Idukki district of Kerala. Most visitors arrive through the small town of Thekkady, close to the border with Tamil Nadu. The protected area is large, covering more than nine hundred square kilometres of evergreen forest, deciduous woodland, and open grassland. Much of it rises and falls over steep ridges. A heavily protected core sits at its centre. Around it lies a wider buffer zone, where villages, farms, and forest meet one another.

Here is the first surprise. The great lake at the heart of the park is not natural. It was made by people. In the late nineteenth century, British engineers built the Mullaperiyar Dam across the Periyar River. The dam was completed in 1895. Its purpose was to send water east, through a tunnel in the mountains, to the dry plains of Tamil Nadu. The rising water flooded the valleys. A forest became a lake.

Look out across the water, and you can still see what was lost. Grey, bare tree trunks stand up from the surface. Some lean. Some have broken off at the top. These are the remains of trees that were drowned when the valley filled, more than a century ago. Cormorants and darters often sit on them, spreading their wings to dry. The dead trunks give the lake its strange, quiet character. It looks less like a reservoir and more like a flooded memory.

The dam itself is still part of public life in this region. The engineer most closely linked with it is Colonel John Pennycuick. Across the border in Tamil Nadu, many farmers still honour his memory, because the water changed their land. In Kerala, the story is more complicated. The age and safety of the old dam have been debated for years between the two states. So the calm lake in front of you sits at the centre of a long and serious argument.

Protection of this forest began well before modern India. In 1934, the rulers of Travancore, the princely state that once governed this part of Kerala, created a game sanctuary here. After independence, the area grew into the Periyar Wildlife Sanctuary. In 1978, it became a tiger reserve under Project Tiger, India's national programme to protect its tigers. The core area was later declared a national park. Each step added a little more protection to the forest.

Now, about the tigers. They are here, but you will almost certainly not see one. Tigers in Periyar are few, shy, and spread across a huge area of thick forest. Most visitors who come hoping for a tiger leave with something else. And that something else is often wonderful. A herd of elephants at the water's edge. A family of gaur, the massive Indian wild cattle, grazing in a clearing. A sambar deer standing perfectly still among the trees.

Elephants are the animals most people remember. They come down to the lake to drink and bathe, especially in the drier months. From a boat, you may see them moving slowly along the shore, the young ones staying close to their mothers. Watch the edges of the water, not the middle. Animals use the shoreline as a corridor. A patch of grass that looks empty can suddenly fill with dark, moving shapes.

Look up as well as across. The canopy here holds animals that many visitors miss. The Nilgiri langur, a black monkey with a pale, golden cap of fur, moves through the high branches. The rare lion-tailed macaque, with its silver mane, lives in the evergreen forests of these hills. The Malabar giant squirrel is surprisingly large, with a long tail and fur of deep red and brown. Overhead, you may hear the heavy wingbeats of a hornbill, a sound like a breath pushed through a tunnel.

Here is the second surprise. Some of the people who guide walks here once lived from the forest in very different ways. Periyar became known for its community programmes, which brought local families, including people from forest-dwelling tribal communities, into conservation work. Some former poachers and illegal wood cutters became protectors and guides. They know the trails, the sounds, and the signs of animals better than anyone. Walking with them, you learn to read a broken branch or a fresh footprint in the mud.

The forest is also sacred ground. The famous hill shrine of Sabarimala, dedicated to the Hindu deity Ayyappan, lies within the wider tiger reserve. Each pilgrimage season, very large numbers of devotees walk through these hills, many of them dressed in black and barefoot. So this landscape holds wild animals, tribal homes, a working dam, and one of South India's great pilgrimages, all at once. It is a forest with many purposes, not an empty wilderness.

When you leave the park gates, the land around Thekkady and Kumily tells its own story. The hills are covered with cardamom and black pepper, two of the spices that made Kerala famous to traders for centuries. Cardamom grows in the shade of taller trees, so the plantations still feel partly like forest. In town, small shops sell spices, tea, and coffee. The smell of cardamom often hangs in the air along the main road.

Before you go, pause by the water for a moment. Notice the light on the lake, the silver trunks, the dark line of forest on the far shore. Listen again for that wooden knock of a bird, or the splash of something unseen. You may not have met a tiger today. But somewhere in those hills, one may have heard you. Walk out slowly, and let the forest keep its secrets.