Why Coonoor & Co?
Coonoor is where it all came together.
During the long quiet of the lockdown years, this mist-laced hill station became the ground on which threads began to knot into coherence. The name Coonoor & Co honours that moment—when an idea took root, not in abstraction, but in the shelter of a real place, surrounded by mountains that had already shaped so much of what mattered.
But the journey began long before that. Over nine years of travelling, documenting, and listening across the Nilgiris culminated in Soul of the Nilgiris, a book born of reverence—for the landscape, its indigenous wisdoms, and the fragile, layered ecologies they continue to hold. That slow work of observation and kinship-making became the invisible scaffolding for what would eventually become Coonoor & Co.
In naming the project Coonoor & Co, the “& Co” speaks to those who have walked with us—the Toda women reviving an ancient art form, and the growing circle of collaborators and companions who continue to shape this work. It is not a brand. It is a gathering. A remembering. A continuation.
Coonoor, located at 1850m in Tamil Nadu’s Nilgiris district, is a place of gentler pace and quiet presence. It sits within a landscape that is as ecologically significant as it is visually striking. The Nilgiris form a distinct region within the Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve—India’s largest protected forest area and part of a UNESCO-designated biodiversity hotspot. This is a terrain of montane grasslands and shola forests, of beautiful seasons and astonishing biological richness.