Human Flower Project

Counting in Kurinji Years


The hills around Munnar, India, are turning blue, for the first time in a generation.


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Neelakurinji: See it now or wait till 2018

Photo: Ian Lockwood

The anticipation’s been building since 1994. Now all the tourist offices around Munnar are swelling to full holler. “The Neelakurinji flowers (Phelobophyllum Kunthanum) have picturesquely carpeted the entire hillside,” a phenomenon that only happens every twelve years in this mountainous region of Southern India.

The kurinji plants live along the slopes between Kerala and Tamil Nadu. According to Mohan Varghese, chairman of High Range Wild Life and Environment Association,  “About 30 percent of the flowers have already blossomed.” The rest will unfurl in the next two and a half months, covering 250 acres in all.

The kurinji is beloved, almost mythic, here. One blogger went nearly apoplectic with happiness upon seeing his first bloom last October. “I felt a sharp pulse of electric excitement: ‘Neelakurinji!’” Like seeing a comet streak overhead, the kurinji places us back in a larger, loftier design. And, metaphysics aside, the event is beautiful.

imageStamp commemorates the 2006 kurinji bloom

Photo: The Hindu

The kurinji’s limited range has been shrinking, due to competing tea and cardamom plantations and intensive timbering. Now, especially as they see the potential for tourist dollars, officials in Tamil Nadu and Kerala are cooperating on preservation efforts.  To mark the 2006 bloom, the Indian government issued a commemorative stamp, too.

Care to visit? This site gives directions to the kurinji fields of Kerala. If you’re within ogling distance, don’t miss it, for the kurinji blooms just once in a generation (Okay, “a generation” used to extend for 70 years, but apparently, that’s changed).

This excellent site provides intriguing “human/kurinji” associations, literary and otherwise. We’d heard of counting in dog time (7 X human years) , and now we learn “The Muduvar tribe, which inhabit the mountain ranges around Valparai (Tamil Nadu) and Munnar (Kerala) in the Western Ghats, calculates its age with blossoming of the Kurinji.” How fine, to be 4 1/2 again!



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