The Silent Valley National Park
The Silent Valley, a national park in Kerala, is one of the last undisturbed tracts of South Western Ghats montane rainforests in India. Located in the Nilgiri Hills in Kerala’s Palakkad district, it is part of the Western Ghats, a chain of mountains traversing six states and covering an area of 1,40,000 sq km, that is internationally recognized as a region of immense global importance for the conservation of biological diversity and designated as a World Heritage Site by UNESCO.
The Silent Valley national park has a core area of 89.52 sq km. A surrounding area of 148 sq km has been designated a buffer zone to protect the park’s rare flora and fauna. The park is home to 41 mammal, 211 bird, 49 reptile, 47 amphibian, 12 fish, 164 butterfly, and 400 moth species. Its most famous resident is the lion-tailed macaque (Macaca Silenus), a monkey endemic to the Western Ghats, that ranks among the rarest and most threatened primates in the world.
Other animals found here include the tiger, leopard cat, brown palm civet, small flying squirrel, Indian pangolin, and mouse deer. Rare birds spotted include the Nilgiri wood-pigeon, the great Indian hornbill, the Nilgiri flycatcher and the white-bellied shortwing.
The park is a roughly rectangular tableland closed on all sides, with high and continuous ridges along its entire east, north, and northeast borders and a somewhat lower ridge along the entire western and southern border. A perennial river named Kuntipuzha originates from the south-western edge of the Nilgiri mountain mass and flows through the western side of the park. Along its entire length, the plateau slopes toward the bed of the Kuntipuzha, which divides itinto two sectors. The valley is drained by five main tributaries of the Kuntipuzha that originate near the eastern border and flow westwards.
There are many legends about how the Silent Valley got its name. The most popular one is that this is a distorted or Anglicised version of its original name, Sairandhrivanam, literally ‘forest of Sairandhri’. Sairandhri or Draupadi was the wife of the Pandavas in the Mahabharata, and she and her husbands are believed to have hidden in this forest while escaping their cruel cousins, the Kauravas. Another version attributes the name to the unearthly silence of the valley due to the absence of cicadas, whose noisy, constant buzzing is a typical feature of normal rainforests.
The Silent Valley shot into the limelight in 1973 when the Kerala State Electricity Board initiated a hydroelectric project here that involved building a dam across the Kuntipuzha river, which in turn would flood 8.3 sq km of virgin rainforest and threaten the habitat of the lion-tailed macaque. The decision engendered a storm of protest as environmentalists and intellectuals joined the fray, bringing the matter to public attention at the international level.
Thus was born the Save Silent Valley movement, a high-profile campaign against the project that went on to become India’s fiercest environmental movement over the next two decades. Eventually the project was cancelled and the SilentValley was formally notified as a national park in 1984. The Silent Valley National Park was formally inaugurated on September 7, 1985.
