The history of peoples settled in the Nilgiri hills has been recorded for several centuries. The Blue Mountains were likely named for the widespread blue
Strobilanthes flower or the smoky haze enveloping the area. This area was long occupied by the indigenous
tribal peoples of the
Toda,
Kota,
Kurumba,
Irula and
Badagas. The
Badagas were also indigenous to the district but were never a tribal group.
Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups PVTGs, the dominant land owners of the tribal district. The lower
Wayanad plateau in the west of the district had a different tribal population namely
Kattunaika and
Paniya. The Todas and Kota, who are similar in culture, language and genetic ancestry, were settled across the fringes of the Nilgiri plateau, as sentries to the Central district. They were the ancient agriculturists in the district, cultivating traditional crops such as
samai, vathm,
ragi. Under British influence they cultivated English vegetables and later moved on to tea. Unlike elsewhere in the country, no historical evidence is found of a state on the Nilgiris or that it was part of any ancient kingdom or empire. It seems always to have been a tribal land. The Toda had small hamlets ("mund") across most of the plateau. The Kota lived in seven dispersed villages ("kokal"). The Toda had only a few hamlets on the lower Wynaad plateau and in the nearby
Biligiriranga hills. These Indigenous tribes of Nilgiris speak some form of dravidian language. Since the turn of the 21st century, the Badaga have numbered about 135,000 (18% of the district population), the Toda are barely 1,500 and the Kota just over 2,000. (1854). Note that the taluks
Pandalur,
Gudalur, and
Kundah in present-day Nilgiris district were parts of
Wayanad Taluk in 1854. The
Taluks of Malabar were rearranged in 1860 and 1877. Beginning in 1819, the British colonial administration developed the hills rapidly and peaceably, for use as coffee and tea plantations, and summer residences. The 40 mud-forts in the area had been abandoned. During the
British Raj], Ooty (the popular name for Ootacamund) served as the
summer capital of the
Madras Presidency from 1870 onwards. District Gazetteers published by the government (1880, 1908, 1995) were reliable reports on the district, its economy, demography and culture. They with the support of political parties inimical to the natives of Nilgiris have been superseded by the
Encyclopaedia of the Nilgiri Hills (2012) authored by California-based researcher
Paul Hockings, who has been studying the Badagas for over sixty years. '' (blue gum) plantation According to a 1996 bibliography of publications of this district, it is probably the most heavily studied rural area anywhere in India, with close to 7,000 items in that list. It has been the subject of more than 120 doctoral and master's theses in the natural and human sciences. Indian and foreign scholars wrote these works, and only recently have local people published work about it. More than a dozen languages are spoken in the Nilgiris, but the indigenous people did not write or read them. After 1847 German and Swiss missionaries opened schools for boys and girls in some Badaga villages, teaching them literacy. Ten Dravidian languages are found only here, and they have been studied in great detail for decades by professional linguists. Local place names are derived mainly from the dominant
Badaga language, for example,
Doddabetta,
Coonoor,
Kotagiri,
Gudaluru, Kunda, etc.
Ootacamund is of Toda origin, and Udagamandalam is a very recent
Tamil-language version of this place. Before British-owned tea and coffee plantations were developed, the dominant landholders were the Badaga. A great deal of linguistic and other cultural evidence—based on unauthentic interpretation of ballads and stories collected from unverifiable individuals—indicates erroneously with a malicious intent that the Badaga non scheduled tribes have lived in nilgiris thousands and thousands of years ago. Supposedly unnamed Badaga elders have regularly recounted these baseless facts as oral history and cannot be relied upon. Though their language is very close to
Kannada, it is a mixture of almost all Dravidian languages and yet unique. The migration theory is now totally rejected by educated Badagas, as admittedly the land holdings of the district majorly indicates the Badagas as owners in almost all Taluks of the district. This land is the major resource amongst the Badagas, which even today most Badagas are ignorant about. The Badagas did not find any representation in independent India's Constituent Assembly; to deprive the unlettered Badaga of their land it was intentionally left out of the tribal list post independence. The result of this socio-economic engineering seems to be bearing fruit for the perpetrators of such engineering. The district has been intentionally underdeveloped as it is bereft of quality
healthcare facilities,
universities, environment-friendly industries, affordable quality
higher education and basic
infrastructure. This underdevelopment has ensured the Badagas need to go outside the district to survive. Certain vested interest have invested in researchers to bring about half-truths about the Badagas. Sadly, these half-truths are being relied on by the regime to deny the Badagas their rightful livelihood. During the early 17th century, the first European is recorded as entering the Nilgiri Hills, an Italian priest/explorer named Fenicio. He interviewed people who identified as Toda and Badega, the latter occupying three villages at that time. The British in India mostly ignored the Ghats for two centuries.
Arthur Wellesley, later the
Duke of Wellington, conducted a short military operation in the
Wynaad in 1800. During 1804–1818 several
East India Company personnel briefly visited parts of the district.
John Sullivan, then the collector of
Coimbatore, just south of the Nilgiris, sent two surveyors (W. Keys and C. McMahon) to make a comprehensive study of the hills. They reached the site of Ootacamund, but failed to see the complete plateau. In 1812 they were the first British to make a cursory survey of the Nilgiri plateau and produce a map. A more detailed exploration was done in the 1818 survey by J.C. Whish, N.W. Kindersley and Mohammed Rifash Obaidullah for the Madras Civil Service, who reported back that they had discovered "the existence of a tableland possessing a European climate." Collector Sullivan became the first European resident the next year, when he built a seasonal residence on the plateau. He reported to the Madras Government on the mildness of the climate. Europeans soon started settling here or using the plateau as a summer resort and homes for retirees. In 1870 the practice began of key government personnel moving to the hills to conduct business during summer months in this more temperate climate. By the end of the 19th century, the hills were completely accessible, as several Ghat roads and the railway line had been constructed. In the later 19th century, when the British
Straits Settlement shipped Chinese convicts to be jailed in India, some of these men were settled on the Nilgiri plateau near
Naduvattam. They married
Tamil Paraiyan women and had children with them. One Chinese gardener was critical to the district's future, for he worked with
Margaret B. L. Cockburn in Aruvenu, near Kotagiri, to develop Allport's, the first Nilgiri
tea plantation, which started operations in 1863. Her father, Montague D. Cockburn, had opened the first
coffee plantation there soon after 1830. ==Geography and climate==