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GUEST POST: THE MEANING OF CERTAIN TREES


This is a Guest Post by Madhumita Mazumdar, who discovered an intriguing story behind the flowers and foliage planned for the city she lives in, Gandhinagar, Gujarat.

Photograph by Partha Chowdhury shows an avenue of Amaltas (Cassia Fistula) in Dwarka, Delhi

One of the many things I loved about Myshkin Chand Rozario, one of the enigmatic protagonists of Anuradha Roy’s novel All the Lives We Never Lived, was his job as Horticultural Superintendent in the small town of Muntazir in the foothills of the Himalayas. Though often derided as “glorified gardner” Myshkin took immense pride in what he believed was his precious bequest to the little town -- its rows of carefully planted sheltering and flowering trees along major roads and pathways. He knew well he where he had to plant the white and purple orchids, the flaming red Gulmohurs, the Amaltases, the brilliantly hued kachnars, the softer pastels of the resham ruis. The streets were colour coded around the images their names conjured -- some magical some mundane.

Myshkin’s story came back to me rather oddly as I read a curious bit of city news a couple of days ago. The title of the news story suggested that streets of Gandhinagar, Gujarat, were about to be saffronised. I reckoned it would be a Yogi-like project of pavements and buildings in saffron – a project through which the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, Yogi Adityanath, has been painting everything from buildings to toilets a bright Hindu saffron, even the Haj Building. But it turned out to be a little different. Civic authorities had decided to plant two of the busiest roads leading to the Secretariat with saffron-hued flowering trees. Apart from the gulmohur there would be the ‘kesuda’ and the ‘raktarag’. “We will plant new trees and shrubs according to the colour code of each road,” said Chief Conservator Forests, “but plant the Gulmohurs, Kesudas, and the Rugminis in a sequence of subtly varying saffron shades along a long and wide stretch of road with bougainvilleas along the dividers”.
Gulmohur (Delonix Regia) in bloom in Delhi
Myshkin planted his row of Gulmohurs and Amaltases on a road bearing the name of Begum Akhtar. He felt the flowers would reflect the “romance and intensity of the singer -- as a fireworks display of red and gold through the summer.” Far removed from the romantic world of Myshkin’s imagination, the Chief Conservator of Forests, Gujarat believes the flaming Gulmohurs along ‘Gh’ road and ‘Ch’ road in Gandhinagar would bloom and rear up in April and May close to the elections -- blazing our eyes and filling our minds with the many splendours of saffron!

I love Gulmohurs but this bit of news leaves me with a strange sense of unease.


Madhumita Mazumdar is at the Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information Communication Technology, Gandhinagar, Gujarat.

You might also want to read:
"As the billboards fall in Bengaluru, will citizens reclaim the city and its trees?" by T. R. Shankar Raman

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