“When a big tree falls, the earth shakes.” A former Indian prime minister had said this, infamously and insensitively, in reference to the anti-Sikh pogrom in the country after the assassination of his mother, also a prime minister.
A despatch from Delhi by one of the city’s chroniclers — his pen is reliable even though his archival eye is selective — suggests that the city recently witnessed the fall of one such tree. This time, though, mercifully, the earth did not shake; there were only minor tremors. Delhi was spared the horror of communal bloodshed that it had witnessed in 1984 — after all, what had fallen, in this instance, was only a tree, not a national leader. But there was despair, quite a bit of it, in select circles. The chronicler, for instance, wrote a moving obituary about the tree in a national daily in which he took care to mention that literary luminaries like Annie Ernaux and Anita Desai had posed on a bench under that tree’s spindly branches.
Indeed, the ‘Dead Tree’ in Delhi’s Lodhi Garden was more a cultural landmark, as iconic as its setting, than an arboreal presence. Countless visitors have been mesmerised by its dramatic persona: a pockmarked skeleton, the provider of not shade but shelter to birds and squirrels, its bare, chalky branches spreading out heavenwards, which, when dusk falls and the lights of the monuments are turned on, resemble the silhouette of a still sentinel guarding ancient tombs. Little wonder then that it has been photographed and documented — in image more than text — extensively.
This was the tree that fell, apparently of its own volition, this June.
As a frequent visitor to Lodhi Garden, what I found most interesting about this tree though transcended its aesthetic appeal and visual magnetism. Or the peculiar harmony of its spatial location — a deathly arborescent in the abode of death (one cannot, after all, be faulted for viewing Lodhi Garden as a mausoleum). But the Dead Tree’s real ability to haunt, in a manner of speaking, lay elsewhere. Despite its deceasedness, its spectrality, in it not being there, it had been nursed back to life, resurrected, as it were, in a city’s cultural imagination embossing its roots on Delhi’s identity. Quixotically, its extermination had effaced its lived history. None of Lodhi Garden’s denizens that I had spoken to on my many visits there had been able to recall a time when the tree had been alive; curiously, none seemed to know even what species the tree was; as if death had erased all records of the tree’s life. Yet, in death, it lived on, battling its way into the city’s collective consciousness that is known to be notoriously fickle.
The Dead Tree thus challenged one of the fundamental principles that is cited to explain humanity’s association with the arboreal world. Trees, in life, art and culture, are symbolic of shelter, protection, abundance: each of these abilities is contingent upon one primary condition — that the tree is alive to bestow these gifts. Living trees as a source of fecundity also underline — sharpen — humanity’s anthropomorphic instincts, letting communities bond with woods, thickets, copses and, of course, forests as kindred beings. In fact, collective mourning on the death of a tree is not an unheard of ritual in cultures around the world even in these times signified by humanity’s fraying connection with wilderness; in 2016, in the town of Basking Ridge in New Jersey, a memorial service had been held to honour the passing of a Great White Oak.
As opposed to the living, blooming trees, their deceased brethren have usually been frowned upon by human registers and iconography since they are potent representations of mortality, privation, suffering. Little wonder then that the exceptionally gloomy frames of the artist, Caspar David Friedrich, were lined with lifeless trees (Abbey among Oak Trees). Or that Vincent van Gogh’s attempts to depict sunflowers in their stage of decay have been interpreted as a representation of his own, inner descent into turmoil and insanity.
Then what explains the Dead Tree’s — any dead tree’s — hold over the sensitive and the artistic mind? Could it simply be a matter of individual disposition and sensibilities, which are broken and built by personal circumstances?
(Dead) trees were central to the works of the English artist, Paul Nash, one of the greatest landscape painters after John Constable. In his early life, a life that was wrecked by melancholia and illness, Nash turned to trees, not people, in his search for kinship. Later, in his bid to convey the ravages of war on man and nature, he would, once again, rely on trees — stumps, skeletons, leafless branches — to be his interlocutor.
In more recent times, the author, Sumana Roy, provided another, equally engaging, insight into the Dead Tree burrowing roots into the human consciousness. “Without realizing it, I had been photographing dead trees for nearly a decade… I wanted to find out why. What was it about bare trees, shorn and leafless, that attracted my eye?”
She answers the question thus: “… I had spent hours… moving around dead trees, looking for the perfect angle that would capture the beauty of… the geometry of a dead body. This beauty of bareness, I began to see later, as the beauty of barrenness… for in being shorn of flowers and leaves, these trees had managed to escape the burden and technology of reproduction.” This analysis does not merely posit the aesthetic to be complementary to the personal. It is also a call to recognise, reappraise, the Dead Tree as a presence with agency, an agency that is lopped off in a living tree on account of its obligations to ornamentation and nurturing.
This perception of the/a Dead Tree as an ecological, cultural and aesthetic outlier, an entity that resists easy coding and interpretation, is important because it could, in this unfolding moment of an environmental catastrophe, lead to curiosity which, in turn, can coalesce into a new appraisal of what constitutes ecological debris. Human industriousness — the very antithesis of anthropomorphism — has led to the categorisation of certain ecologies, especially intricate micro-ecological cosmoses, as nature’s detritus. This explains the pulverisation of, say, India’s grasslands; or, to cite other example, the decimation of the muddy surroundings organic to urban waterbodies — these patches are often cemented as part of beautification drives — and, of course, of wetlands — Calcutta has been gathering the blood of wetlands on its hands for years now.
By standing — speaking — up for all that is considered as waste, unproductive, dead, the Dead Tree could generate conversations and efforts to return life to some of India’s dying natural landscapes.
uddalak.mukherjee@abp.in