Cities and Canopies

by Harini Nagendra

  Most trees worshipped in India are native species, but this is not always true. A classic exception is the cannonball tree, also known as naga linga pushpa, so called because the flower (pushpa) resembles the hood of a snake (naga). The tree made its way from the West Indies or South America to India probably sometime before 1000 CE and was then absorbed into Hindu religious traditions. Interestingly, the tree is not worshipped in its original home.

  The frangipani, which came from Peru, is abundant around temples. The flowers are used for daily worship in many homes. The tree is also known as the kalki tree, planted by some Muslims over their graves to act as sentinels. The tree symbolizes immortality owing to its ability to produce flowers and leaves even after being uprooted. Its flowers adorn graves throughout the year. Great power is accorded to the seed of the tree as a cure for bites from the venomous cobra. Folk beliefs claim that the tree has no pods, as the cobras destroy them out of fear.

  The baobab is associated with Gorakhnath, a Hindu monk believed to have lived around the eleventh and thirteenth centuries CE and who is said to have preached under the tree. Hence it is sometimes called gorakh chinch or gorakh ambli. Native to west and central Africa, it is now found along the west coast of India and in the Deccan Plateau. The tree is commonly associated with the rule of the medieval Deccan sultanate. In the Deccan, executions were carried out under the tree, though why it was chosen for this grisly purpose is not really clear. Some say the tree was brought to India between the tenth and fourteenth centuries by Arab or Portuguese traders, while others say it was introduced by African slaves. A massive specimen known as the Hatiyan Ka Jhad (literally the elephant-sized tree) stands in the premises of the Naya Quila fort in Hyderabad. This tree is believed to be the biggest in India, around 475 years old, and is said to have been gifted to Quli Qutub Shah. The massive tree has a hollow trunk that is said to have hidden forty thieves evading royal armies.

  A number of old trees are similarly associated with saints. Adi Shankaracharya, the eighth-century philosopher and theologian, is said to have meditated under a mulberry tree in Jyotirmath. Some say this tree is the oldest mulberry in India, more than 1200 years. A khirni tree, said to be the oldest of its kind in New Delhi, stands in the dargah of Hazrat Nasiruddin Mahmud Roshan Chirag Dilli, the last of the Sufi saints of the Chisti order in Delhi. The dargah was built in 1356 CE. The tree is said to have been planted much before. What tales of the past these trees have witnessed and could tell us, if only they could speak.

  Less formal than the dargah or the fort are rudimentary shelters of dry branches tied together with twine to protect stones that are worshipped under trees such as mango, jamun, tamarind and ficus, and can be found across cities. In many parts of India and Nepal, raised platforms on which peepul and neem are planted are common. These have different names—ashwathkatte in Kannada, aalthara in Malayalam and chauthara in Nepali. These sacred platforms, often painted in stripes of red and white, can be found on the most congested of roads and in quiet temple compounds. The peepul and the neem, representing male and female trees, are planted alongside each other on these kattes. On auspicious days, a marriage ceremony is performed between the neem and peepul, and newly married couples offer their prayers.

  Snake stones are often kept at the base of these trees, donated by infertile couples seeking children. Women visit them, seeking the blessing of the gods by circumambulating the tree and tying threads or red cloth around the peepuls, for instance. But these platforms are also places for social meetings. Sometimes the kattes are just spaces for women to have a few moments to themselves or to engage in conversation with other women, away from the demands of home and families.

  Many small towns across India also have sacred groves. The kaavus of Kerala are managed by the government, temple trusts, local community, or even privately. In Thrissur, there are as many as 970 such kaavus in the district, of which 220 are in the heavily populated urban taluk of Thrissur. These kaavus are tiny oases rich in floral and faunal biodiversity, many less than an acre in area. They contain rare trees such as the south Indian kanak champa, which is categorized as vulnerable in the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. They also host a number of birds, bats, butterflies and insects. While there are presiding deities from mainstream Hinduism in these kaavus, the serpent god is popularly worshipped. Thus many of these groves are called sarpakaavu (sarpa meaning snake). A visit here can be a soul-stirring experience. To stand amidst the towering trees draped with creepers, allowing little sunlight even at noon, lit by a lone lamp under the snake shrine, can leave anyone with a sense of awe. The character of these kaavus are, however, changing. Some are being used as garbage dumps by city dwellers, while others are converted to modern temple structures with the trees eventually surrounded by concrete or even cut down.

  Some trees bring to mind the culture and heritage of an entire region. An example is the chinar in Jammu and Kashmir. The word chinar has its origins in Persian and translates into ‘what a fire!’ It describes the colour of the leaves, which turn red, yellow and amber—the various shades of fire—in autumn. The tree was a favourite of the Mughals who called it buen. They declared it to be a royal tree, protected it and planted it across Kashmir in groves and landscaped gardens. The Dogra kings who ruled Kashmir between 1847 and 1947 also protected the tree. The oldest chinar in Kashmir is believed to be over 700 years old. It was planted by the Sufi saint Syed Abdul Qasum Shah. The Hazratbal shrine, within the University of Kashmir campus, also has hundreds of chinar trees around it. Several of the other mosques and shrines in the Kashmir Valley have chinars, as do the temples dedicated to Goddess Bhavani. But the chinar is now threatened in Kashmir. Many trees have been cut down and the remaining are threatened by disease, pollution and road-widening. A ban on cutting them is the only hope for saving this sacred tree.

  Like the vanishing memories of the chinar, the memories of the heroes who took part in the Indian freedom struggle are also fading. In the premises of the Sabarmati Ashram in Ahmedabad is a dead neem tree, its white branches stretching towards the sky. This neem was planted over a century ago. Under its shade, Mahatma Gandhi introspected about his internal struggles and the direction the freedom struggle should take. Yet, visitors to the ashram pay attention to the buildings but ignore this tree that has witnessed so much.

  Consumed by our harried urban lives, we forget the past. Indian cities have been shaped over the centuries. The ecological landscape in the form of trees is as much a part of their centuries-old history as are the temples, mosques, dargahs and other spaces. The sacred beliefs that our ancestors associated with nature are important even today, not just because of our religious beliefs, but also because of the awe in which we hold the natural world. We need to reconnect with the heritage value of trees in our cities, for our own survival.

  This message is beautifully captured in the Malayalam saying kaavu vettiyal kulam vattum (if you cut a grove, the pond will dry). There are strong links between our sacred affinity for trees and the modern, urban way of life. The day that we fail to respect our trees and look at them solely in terms of utility will mark the end of nature in the cities—and perhaps the end of our survival too.

  TWELVE

  AMALTAS:

  GOLDEN

  CHANDELIERS

  WITH BUZZING BEES

  Have you seen the maps of our cities in urban master plans and vision documents? They show increasingly smaller and smaller patches of green, indicating the decreasing spaces for trees. Our cities are turning grey as the built area is increasing. But just by planting flowering trees along city avenues we can transform them into multicoloured places of beauty, and not just on paper. What better colour to include but the gold of the amaltas!

  Amaltas is a deciduous tree native to India. The tree is medium-sized and has a spreading, irregular-shaped canopy. It belongs to the legume family and is a relative of the familiar peanut and pea. The tree derives its fame from its spectacular golden blossoms that flower betwee
n April and June. The flowers are borne in bunches along both sides of a common stalk. The older flowers are at the base, with the smallest and newest buds at the end. In full bloom, the glorious bunches of golden-coloured flowers look like gracefully bending chandeliers that light up the tree. Sometimes the tree is so covered with flowers that the leaves and branches are completely hidden in a shower of gold. Often, fallen golden petals cover the grass or street below. It is a visual treat. Standing under the tree while the petals shower down upon you is an unforgettable experience. Small wonder that this deciduous forest tree has become a favourite ornamental species exported to different parts of the world, from South Africa to West Indies and from China to Brazil. Amaltas flowers are also edible. They can be made into pakoras or sautéed and ground with coconut and roasted Bengal gram into a chutney.

  Amaltas fruit are equally unusual-looking—long cylindrical pipe-like pods. From these pipes comes the scientific name of the tree, Cassia fistula (Cassia, or kassia, in Greek, indicates that this is an aromatic tree, while ‘fistula’ in Latin means pipe). The family Fabaceae was described as far back as the first century CE in De Materia Medica, the classic five-volume Greek encyclopedia on herbal medicines by physician and botanist Pedanius Dioscorides. The tree has also been used by Arab and Greek doctors to make herbal medicines for centuries. If you open the long pods, you will see a number of seeds inside, separated by sticky pulp. The amaltas is a popular tree across India and has several vernacular names. In Hindi and Bengali it is known as bandarlathi (monkey stick), because monkeys are supposed to like the sweet pulp of the pods.

  The tree is deeply embedded in Indian culture, from north to south. It is a key indicator of the forest landscape of Sangam literature, associated with romantic imagery of separation and waiting. In the epic Śilappadikāram, which dates back to somewhere between the fourth and sixth centuries CE, one of the flutes played by Krishna is said to have been made from the konrai or amaltas. Its flowers are believed to be an incarnation of Shiva and are often described as resembling his matted locks. On a survey around Mysore in 1800, Francis Buchanan found amaltas leaves burnt by the Bayda community, bee collectors, below hives of the rock bee, Apis dorsata. The acrid smoke of these leaves, along with those of another plant, drove the bees out of their hives, after which the tribe could safely collect the honey and wax. He also documented the worship of Ganesha in the form of a stake of the tree, cut and placed into the ground. Before sowing seeds, people offered milk and rice to the stake and prayed for the success of their crops.

  Amaltas is the national flower of Thailand, as well as the state flower of Kerala. The blossoms are very important for the festivities of Vishu, the Malayali new year. The festival itself is simple and held without much pomp. It is a time for the family to get together in their new clothes, burst a few fireworks at the crack of dawn and enjoy a feast. On this day, the auspicious sight of the Vishukkani (kani means something you see first in the morning) is believed to bring good fortune. The konnapoovu (amaltas flowers) is an essential part of Vishukkani. Without the konnapoovu that blooms during this time of the year, Vishu is incomplete. Keralites who stay in cities where the flower is not accessible substitute it with other yellow flowers. But nothing can match the beauty of the amaltas, which is why some even try to grow it in pots and encourage it to bloom before Vishu.

  The amaltas were painted beautifully by Marianne North, a remarkable woman—an artist, naturalist and traveller in the restrictive nineteenth-century Victorian era. Her autobiography, Recollections of a Happy Life, recounts her travels across the world, including in India. She describes the amaltas she sees in Lahore, then a part of British India as ‘a perfect mass of yellow, with flowers and pods more than a foot long’.

  The India Post would seem to agree with North about the beauty of this tree, releasing a number of stamps on the amaltas flowers. The Kerala circle of the India Post released a one-rupee stamp with the amaltas to commemorate the golden jubilee of the formation of the state in 2006. The India Post also released a stamp in 1981, as did the Department of Posts in 2000 and 2011. A special cover with commemorative and regular stamps was also produced by Rafi Ahmed Kidwai National Postal Academy in 2016.

  The amaltas is easy to spot in the dry and moist deciduous forests of India. Yet, for a long time, one of the greatest mysteries about the tree was how it reproduced in the wild. The mystery so intrigued a British forest officer, Robert Scott Troup, that he conducted a fascinating experiment at the Forest Research Institute in Dehradun in 1911. Troup collected ripe pods and buried them in two plots, leaving one unprotected and covering the second one with a mesh. Within a week, jackals discovered the pods buried in the unprotected plot. They broke the pods with their teeth to get to the sweetish pulp, scattering the seeds not just in the unprotected plot but also in other parts of the forest through their scat.

  Over time, the seeds in the unprotected plot germinated, while those in the protected plot rotted, or were eaten by ants, and did not sprout. Clearly, animals were crucial for the germination. Perhaps the seeds needed to get into the digestive tract and pass out in the scat to be activated. Later research showed that not just jackals, but monkeys, bears and pigs too could help in the spread of the tree. The amaltas that blooms in the Delhi Ridge is thought to have been aided in its spread by jackals.

  Artificial reproduction of the seeds is not an easy task, as any of us who have wanted to plant the tree in our gardens have found out. To begin, try extracting the seed from a fallen pod of the amaltas—it is an almost-impossible task as the pod is hard and difficult to break. The seeds too are very hard and may take several months to germinate. Troup suggested boiling the seeds in water for five minutes to aid early germination. Seeds from older pods germinate more successfully.

  The story of its pollination is even more fascinating. The amaltas is pollinated by bees and butterflies, but most pollination is by the carpenter bees (of the Xylocopa genus). Over countless generations that stretch way back into history, the carpenter bees and the amaltas flower have evolved together in a most well-matched way. The flower is essential for the bees, providing them with pollen. Similarly, the bee performs an essential service for the flower, as it takes the pollen to another flower to pollinate and fertilize, giving rise to seeds that ensure a new generation of plants. Pollen is essential for bees, which eat this protein-rich food to build their own muscles and use it to feed their larvae. The anthers of the flowers, which are the parts that contain pollen, are connected to small ejecting tubes that are closed at their entrance. These tubes have only a small hole—so small that insects cannot enter. How are they to get at the pollen then?

  The bees extract pollen through buzz pollination. Carpenter bees grab the amaltas flower and shake their flight muscles very fast. This produces a loud buzzing sound. The resulting vibrations shake out pollen grains from the flower. The size of the bee and the speed at which it shakes itself determines the frequency of the vibration. Specific flower species have co-evolved with specific bee species, so that, for the amaltas, the specific carpenter bee’s frequencies are the ones that dislodge its pollen.

  But it’s not as simple. The bee and the flower have opposing desires. The bee wants to collect all the pollen and use it as food. But the flower wants the pollen to land on the back of the bee, so that it can fall on to the next flower the bee visits and pollinate it. The flower wins by tricking the bee. Each flower contains different sets of stamens. The set on the top of the flower, which the bee sees first after landing on the flower, contains the pollen meant for it to harvest.

  Unknown to the bee, which is busy extracting pollen, focused on the upper rows of stamens, the lower stamens shoot out a jet of pollen. This pollen needs to reach the upper back of the bee, where it cannot see or remove it. Here, it is perfectly positioned to brush against the stigma of the next flower that the bee visits and pollinate it. But there is a catch. How can the pollen from the stamen, located below, reach the upper part of its back?
By using an ingenious process of repeated ricochets. The pollen jet shoots out from the anther when the bee shakes itself and hits a petal. The petal that receives the jet of pollen deflects it in another direction (much like a petal would deflect a ray of light). After a couple of ricochets (or more), the pollen jet is finally redirected where it needs to go and lands on the back of the bee. One study, in Brazil, found the bees to be so involved in collecting pollen from the upper stamens of the amaltas that they did not realize that much greater quantities of pollen were being deposited on their backs.

  Buzz pollination is a specific adaptation found in approximately one out of every eleven flowering plants, and as many as 15,000–20,000 plant species use this approach. The size of the flower, the location of the petals and the bee are well-matched by generations of co-evolution so that the pollen reaches the exact spot on the bee’s back where it needs to go. A true marvel of nature.

  Carpenter bees may be specialized pollinators, but they are not the only insects the amaltas supports. The flowers attract a large number of other insects, including bees, but also many butterflies. The leaves also attract other insects. A close inspection of the tree will show weaver ants and fruit flies lurking in the foliage for very different reasons, such as preying and mating: war and love in equal measure.

  In Delhi, the amaltas is a common and much-loved species lining several avenues. It was a favourite of the Mughal rulers who planted it in many of their famous gardens. As a nod to this, the iconic movie Mughal-e-Azam shows Prince Salim romancing Anarkali in a bower decorated with drooping amaltas chandeliers. The tree is found in Lutyens’ Delhi as well. Pradip Krishen, in his inimitable way, says it is, ‘in danger of becoming (like the peacock), so common that we stop noticing it’. But the blossoms, as bright as the noon sun, make one pause, even in the hot Delhi summer, to admire the tree’s beauty. Even the carpet of golden petals that fall on the roads only to be crushed under treading feet or moving vehicles is a pretty sight. A massive tree at Teen Murti Bhavan, planted by Sanjay Gandhi, is a spectacular sight in summer. This tree is an essential part of India’s history, commemorating times when the ashes of Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi were placed under the tree for visitors to pay their respects.