Cities and Canopies

by Harini Nagendra

  In the first decade of the millennium, a number of Indians returned from various parts of the United States of America (USA), where they worked in the IT sector. They brought with them a preference for palms, which they associated with ideas of progress and upmarket living. Many IT companies also landscaped their campuses with palms, aiming to give their employees and foreign visitors a great visual experience. Palms quickly became widespread in luxury hotels, beach resorts, airports and gated layouts across large Indian cities. California imported palms from the tropics to get the exotic tropical climate look—India prefers to import palms from exotic foreign tropical locales to get the chic California look. And there we go around in circles, each location copying foreign trends to look cool rather than looking towards its own flora and what suits its native climate.

  A popular favourite is the royal palm, imported to many Indian cities in the past two decades. Pradip Krishen memorably describes it as ‘in danger of becoming a bit of a cliché’, so widespread is it in Delhi. This palm, a native of Central America and the Caribbean, is regal-looking as its name implies, with a smooth greyish trunk that bulges out midway, slimming down at both ends. Many residential layouts and apartment complexes built in the recent decades have marketed themselves around the royal palm, to the extent of having the word ‘palm’ in the suffix or prefix of their names. The palm is also a favourite of the technology and financial hubs that are springing up in cities across India. The glass-fronted buildings in these hubs that reflect the glare of the sun on a hot day also reflect the line of neatly planted royal palms. But people rarely pause to stand under the tree as it offers no shade.

  Another popular ornamental is the fishtail palm, which gets its name from the shape of its leaves that spread out and resemble the serrated tail of a fish. The palm is indeed aesthetically appealing, especially during the flowering season when bunches cascade down from the crown. Commonly found in Indian forests, the fishtail palm also has a range of uses as medicine, food and as a source of an alcoholic drink. However, in cities it usually serves only decorative purposes. This palm is also steadily disappearing across many regions, though it is preserved in some locations such as kaavus (sacred groves) in the town of Thrissur (Kerala).

  There are around 2600 species of palms (from the family Arecaceae) found across the world—some are climbers, others shrubs and stemless plants, and still others, like the royal palm and the coconut, are woody. India has a wide range of native palms, including the palmyra and the date palm. Most palms are found in warm tropical climates, but a few are also found in deserts and warm temperate areas. In the pre-industrial era, three families of plants—palms, cereal grasses and legumes—were believed to be of most use to humans, providing a number of products. Through time immemorial, wild palms have been carefully selected, domesticated and propagated for human use.

  The date palm, cultivated in the hot deserts of Mesopotamia in the fifth millennium BC, enabled human expansion across the Middle East. It is no surprise that palms are mentioned a number of times in the sacred texts of the old world, the Bible and the Koran.

  In ancient Greece and Rome, palm branches were symbols of victory, handed out in public to winning athletes and victorious warriors. In Christianity, the palm is associated with Palm Sunday, a week before Easter, commemorating the day that Jesus entered Jerusalem before the Last Supper.

  Palms are considered sacred in India as well. They are especially worshipped in Tamil Nadu, where the palmyra is also the state tree. Palms were royal emblems, used to crown kings. Panaiveriyamman, a Tamil tree goddess named after panai (palmyra), was worshipped for fertility. Palm leaves are used as thatch roofing for huts, the nongu (fleshy fruits) are eaten with relish, the sap is drunk fresh as neera (palm nectar) or fermented as toddy and palm sugar is used in cooking. The fibre is used to weave cots and make baskets, and the wood to build homes. The ancient Tamil poem ‘Tala Vilasam’, attributed to the eighth century CE, describes a mind-boggling 801 uses of the palmyra. Some scholars believe that palm leaves were the earliest materials used for writing in Sanskrit. In India, the leaves of the palmyra and talipot palm were in widespread use. Though writing on palm leaves is now largely a lost art in India, tens of thousands of manuscripts survive in various archives. Several of these are palm leaf books, which consist of a number of leaves bound together by a string, and are still used by fortune tellers.

  Palms were once a characteristic feature of the Indian coastline. For colonial visitors arriving from the cold shores of European countries, the sight of palms was the first thing that greeted them as their ships steamed into the Indian harbours. R.G. Wallace, in his 1824 memoir, wrote, ‘The coast on which Madras stands is lashed by a raging surf, over which the city appears to great advantage, and the numerous palms in its vicinity look charmingly green.’ Writing about Mumbai, James Douglas spoke of a palmyra tree ‘shooting up seventy or eighty feet high, the last of a family-group which once stood together and are laid down in the oldest charts of Bombay harbor, and which of yore gladdened the hearts of our sea-sick progenitors’.

  One of the most ubiquitous of palms, domesticated for its many uses and found in cities across India, is the coconut. Although the coconut has become such an integral part of Indian villages and cities, there has been much controversy about its origin. Some botanists believe the tree originated in South America, others think that it came from southern Asia. Most now believe that the coconut originated in Malesia, the region between Australasia and South East Asia. As humans moved across the region, they helped in the spread of the coconut, helping colonize a number of islands in the Pacific. Thus the coconut became a part of the food culture of many tropical countries, not just India.

  In fact, the use of the word ‘nut’ is a misnomer. The coconut is, in fact, a drupe—a fleshy or pulpy one-seeded fruit enclosed inside a hard stony covering, which is why drupes are also called stoned fruits. Wild coconuts were long, with a thick husk and shell, and very little water—a fruit that floated easily and spread across islands and coasts. Today’s domesticated coconut is of course adapted to human needs—it is much rounder, with a thinner shell and husk, and contains more water. ‘Cocos’ means ‘monkey face’, as to the early Spanish and Portuguese explorers who named the coconut, the three black dots on the nut resembled the face of a monkey. The Filipinos call it the ‘tree of life’ or ‘tree of heaven’, while in Indonesia it is the ‘tree of abundance’ or the ‘three generations tree’, and in Malay it is the ‘tree of thousand uses’.

  George Herbert, the priest and poet, described the many uses of the coconut in his poem ‘Providence’:

  Sometimes thou dost divide thy gifts to man,

  Sometimes unite. The Indian nut alone

  Is clothing, meat and trencher, drink and can

  Boat, cable, sail and needle, all in one.

  Given these myriad uses, for us in India, the coconut is the sriphala (the fruit of Sri, the goddess of prosperity). Despite coming from distant lands, the coconut has become an auspicious symbol, important for rituals across the country. One of the most common of Hindu religious symbols is the coconut placed on the mouth of a pot and decorated with mango leaves. Coastal communities especially revere the fruit. The fishing communities in Mumbai celebrate Nariyal Purnima. They offer coconuts to the sea god, seeking protection from untoward incidents, cook a variety of dishes with coconut, have competitions that involve breaking coconuts and plant coconut trees on this auspicious day. Similar festivals have been described in other coastal towns such as Porbandar.

  Coconut water, milk and the pulp are all ingredients in cooking. We often stop by coconut sellers with their carts in cities to quench our thirst on a hot summer day. Coconut water has proved to be life-saving in more dire situations too. During WWII, coconut water, believed to be sterile, was intravenously administered to wounded soldiers suffering from blood loss in the absence of the availability of blood plasma.

  Across the oceans, the coconut has been adopted
for cooking in unique ways. In the 1820s, coconut oil began to be exported from Sri Lanka to England and was used to make soaps. Those who bake are familiar with margarine, developed and promoted during the reign of Napoleon III as an affordable substitute for butter for the poor. By the end of the nineteenth century, the coconut also found its way into the making of margarine. Milk from the dairies of Britain were mixed with coconut fat. This margarine melted in the mouth and was tastier compared to the traditionally used ingredients of animal fat and tallow. Before WWI began, the coconut had established itself as the most important source of vegetable oil in the world, used to make candles, soaps and explosives—essential items in times of war. The demand for coconut oil was so vast that all regions of the world where coconut could thrive had been planted with the palm. The British experimented with other parts of the tree as well. In the book Culinary Jottings for Madras, written in the 1880s, a British officer said that if the young white stalks of the coconut flower could be steamed and covered with melted butter, they could be served exactly like asparagus.

  Apart from countryside plantations, coconut has also been a popular tree in many Indian cities, flourishing even in poor-quality soil. A second century CE cave inscription in Nashik talks of the grant of 32,000 coconut trees in a village north of Thane. Coconuts were planted on a large scale by the second century, so in all likelihood they must have been introduced much earlier. Soon, the palm had spread across the region. By the eighteenth century, Mahim, today a densely populated neighbourhood in Mumbai, was said to have as many as 70,000 coconut trees. The coconut was taxed, so it also gave income to the British government. In the early 1900s, over 1,00,000 coconuts and other palms were grown in an area covering 870 acres in Mumbai.

  But the coconut is very much a tree of southern India as well. The root of its name in the languages of Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil and Telugu is ten (south). Hence the coconut is called tenkai (nut of the south) and the tree the tengimara (tree belonging to the south). Groves of coconuts were scattered across coastal towns in southern India. Bengaluru was once called a metropolis of monkeys, with the native settlements dominated by the spiky coconut, populated by bonnet macaques, who climbed the trees to feast on the nuts with dexterity. The coconut is believed to be a lucky tree, bringing prosperity to those who plant it in their homes. There is a saying that the coconut palm is as good as an earning son for a poor, retired man. In cities where space is a luxury, trees are often axed to build or extend homes. But the coconut is often spared. Houses and shops in Bengaluru make space for the coconut tree, incorporating them into the design, where they can be seen growing through balconies and garages. The 1970s master plan of Chennai encouraged the planting of coconut orchards in a green belt around the city, with the idea of watering them using the city’s waste water.

  While the royal palm and other ornamental palms grow in popularity, many Indian and naturalized species of palm such as the palmyra, date palm and coconut are now being slowly squeezed out of cities. Once found in many small towns and cities, especially coastal and southern cities like Kanyakumari and Madurai, these palms were an important part of local diets and livelihoods. However, with modern concrete homes, the replacement of local drinks by bottled soft drinks and the advent of processed cane sugar, local palms are no longer as valued as they used to be. They are now being felled in high numbers.

  Ironically, many American cities, from New York to Los Angeles and Miami are beginning to move away from ornamental palms, while Indian cities continue to be obsessed by them. Palms are not ideal for semi-arid cities. The inside of the palm appears more like a grass than a tree, with soft spongy wood. Much of the weight of the tree is water. They grow fast, but transpire at high rates, placing a high demand on groundwater. The canopy covers a relatively small area in proportion to the height. Thus, palm canopies are less capable of providing important ecosystem services such as shade and the cleaning of polluted air. Also, many ornamental palms require regular maintenance to remove fronds, which becomes increasingly expensive and difficult as they grow taller.

  Also, exotic palms are often not deep-rooted enough to sustain the dizzy heights to which they grow, especially given the poor quality of most urban soils. Thus, after a few decades they become susceptible to falling in storms, causing substantial damage. Local palms, while they may be subject to many of the same constraints, provide many valuable benefits that outweigh the costs. Planting purely ornamental varieties of palm is a fad that is not only useless but possibly harmful as well, in cities plagued by heat islands, polluted air and depleting groundwater.

  As a woman traveller to India, Anne Katherine Elwood, eloquently described ‘the tall and airy cocoa, either singly dancing aloft in the air, or presenting, en masse, a continuous shade, the stems resembling the pillars of a gothic cathedral must always be interesting and nothing can exceed the beauty of the more youthful ones, just throwing out its branchy leaves, with a grateful coquettish air, like a young belle in the pride of her charms, claiming, and ready to receive the homage of mankind, to her light and wavy elegance’. It would be a pity if we could no longer find space in the city for the coconut, the date palm and the palmyra, the original superstars, whose fruit and fronds have been so intertwined with our daily lives and histories for centuries.

  Palms (Cocos nucifera and Roystonea regia)

  Description: Tall with greyish barks. Royal palm trunk is smooth with a faint bulge. Coconut palms are of different types from dwarf to tall, but all have a rough, ringed bark.

  Flowers: Both have creamish-yellow flowers. Royal palm flowers are tiny in dense bunches within a sheath. Flowers of the coconut are larger and more easily visible.

  Fruits: Royal palms have pea-sized fruits, green at first that turn reddish. Coconut is a fibrous drupe ovoid or ellipsoid in shape.

  Leaves: Leaves are known as fronds, appearing as large, thick feathery extensions at the tip of the trunk.

  Seasonality: Evergreen.

  Family: Arecaceae. Fruits in this family are usually drupes.

  Origin and distribution: Both are not native. Royal palm was introduced from Cuba while coconut comes from Malesia. Coconut is more widespread; cultivated and planted across the country. Royal palm is planted for ornamental purposes.

  Riddles and Proverbs about the Coconut

  Riddles:

  Indian

  He has three eyes but is not Shiva, he has long tresses but is not a hermit, perches at the top of a tree but is not a bird, gives milk but is not a cow.

  Hawaiian

  Three walls and you reach water.

  My sweet-water spring suspended in air.

  Proverbs:

  Hindi

  Nariyal mein paani, nahin jante khatta ki meetha (Water inside the coconut; no way of knowing if it is sour or sweet) refers to an unpredictable or doubtful situation.

  Bandar ke haath mein nariyal (A coconut in the hands of a monkey) refers to a fool who doesn’t understand the importance of a good discovery.

  Malayalam

  Chirattayil vellam urumbinu samudram (A coconut shell with water can seem as vast as the ocean to an ant), meaning that depending on your needs, what is insufficient for some can be plenty for others.

  Konkani

  Ordhea maddar choddun hat soddche nhoi (Don’t let go after climbing half-way up the coconut tree). It means you shouldn’t leave a job half-done.

  Barbados

  ‘Coconuts do not grow upon pumpkin vines’, which means that children will turn out like their parents.

  Folk Tale about How the Coconut Got Its Trunk

  Many of us have heard of the mythological story of Trishanku, the ruler of Ayodhya. There is an alternative folk version of the story, which describes how the coconut tree was formed. King Trishanku was seized by the desire to go to heaven alive. He sought the help of many sages, all of whom refused to help. Finally, the powerful sage Vishwamitra agreed to help him, by conducting a yagna. As the rituals proceeded, Trishanku’s body began
to rise towards heaven. But the gods, who would not accept this unusual route of approach, complained to Indra, who pushed him down. Pushed up by Vishwamitra and pushed down by Indra, the unfortunate Trishanku remained suspended for a while. Tired of holding him up with his magic powers, Vishwamitra propped him up with a long pole. The pole became the trunk of the coconut. Trishanku’s head is the fruit or the coconut. The fibre around the shell is his beard. When you remove it, you can see his face looking at you, with two black spots on top that are his eyes and a third black spot below that is his mouth.

  SEVEN

  FUN

  WITH TREES

  IN ART AND PLAY

  Before the advent of television and the Internet, school summer vacations were a time for playing amidst nature. Trees were a treasure trove of material. Different parts of trees—seeds and pods, flowers and leaves—were used in games and in craft.

  A common tree that is part of most games is the gulmohar, whose flowers and pods can provide hours of entertainment. The tree is also called the mayflower because it flowers in May, at the start of the summer. Each scarlet flower is surrounded by a ring of oval green sepals, just outside the petals. The sepals are red on the upper surface and light green on the underside. A favourite pastime for children is to peel the thin reddish layer away from the green underside of the sepal. If you do this carefully, the red top layer peels off at the base, exposing the gummy side. You can stick the gummy underside on to your fingernails. They make your nails look like fierce claws, green on top, scarlet tipped talons below, taking the place of long nails that children are not allowed to grow at school.