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The Felling of the Bunyan Tree- Dilip Chitre

The Felling of the Banyan Tree
Dilip Chitre
About the Author and Text
Dilip Chitre (1938-2009) was a teacher, painter, film-maker and magazine columnist. A winner of the Sahitya Akademi Award, Chitre lived and taught in Ethiopia and the USA. He was a bilingual writer, writing mostly in Marathi. His major translations from Marathi into English include the 1968 collection An Anthology of Marathi Poetry (1945-1965) and Says Tuka (1991). Travelling in a Cage (1980) was his first and only collection of English poetry. Exile, alienation, self-disintegration and death are major themes in Chitre's poetry. His poems reflect a cosmopolitan culture and urban sensibility, and use oblique expressions and ironic tones to explore the vicissitudes of urban life. This poem is about the cutting down of an ancient banyan tree that stood in the yard of the poet's ancestral house. The cutting down of the banyan seems to signify the cutting down of roots and the movement to a different and more modern atmosphere signified by the move to Bombay.

The Felling of the Banyan Tree
Dilip Chitre
My father told the tenants to leave
Who lived in the houses surrounding our house on the hill
One by one the structures were demolished
Only our own house remained and the trees
Trees are sacred my grandmother used to say
Felling them is a crime but he massacred them all
The sheoga, the oudumber, the neem were all cut down
But the huge banyan tree stood like a problem
Whose roots lay deeper than all our lives
My father ordered it to be removed
The banyan tree was three times as tall as our house
Its trunk had a circumference of fifty feet
Its scraggly aerial roots fell to the ground
From thirty feet or more so first they cut the branches
Sawing them off for seven days and the heap was huge
Insects and birds began to leave the tree
And then they came to its massive trunk
Fifty men with axes chopped and chopped
The great tree revealed its rings of two hundred years
We watched in terror and fascination this slaughter
As a raw mythology revealed to us its age
Soon afterwards we left Baroda for Bombay
Where there are no trees except the one
Which grows and seethes in one's dreams,
Its aerial roots looking for ground to strike.

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