The Trees of Our Land
Photo: Karan Madhok
Indians have long held a close respect for the rhythm of nature, working in close consort with the environment. But recent big-ticket government projects have ignored ecological concerns, threatening India’s rich biodiversity and causing severe damage to forest lands.
Indian trees have found their way into the writings and literature of people from ancient times. The Hindu epics talk of kings and princes being banished to the forests of the land, while the Rig Veda calls trees Vanaspati, the kings of the forests. The Buddha famously found enlightenment under the Bodhi tree. Indian culture since the earliest times has believed that that trees are sentient beings who feel emotions like pain and happiness the same way that humans do. Besides, the annual waxing and waning of their foliage became powerful symbols of birth, growth, death, and rebirth.
Tree worship, in forms of pagan devotion, has historically been a common religious practice in the country, with devotees offering leaves, flowers, fruits, and stems to propitiate the almighty. This identification with nature as personified by trees has persisted in the consciousness of people to this day, as best exemplified by Sumana Roy in her profound ode, How I Became a Tree (2017).
Around India, it’s common to see the number of peepul trees under which multitudes of people across the land lay their offerings. This love for trees transcends the social divide with people from all strata of society stepping up to the plate and expressing their concern.
India is blessed with trees. Despite rapid human-led deforestation in recent decades—even the past century or so—our country still boasts an impressive 24.36 per cent of its total area as forest land, making it the 10th most-forested country in the world. For generations, Indian people have lived off the land, taking what they could from the abundant forests around them, and farming on the clear, fertile regions.
India’s trees are diverse in range and variety, ranging from alpine varieties in the high Himalayas and deciduous evergreen trees in their foothills to tropical rainforests in the Western Ghats and mangroves along its extensive coastline.
Beyond being an integral part of the Indian landscape, trees but have also been inextricably linked with its history, religious traditions, and folklore. India’s trees are diverse in range and variety, ranging from alpine varieties in the high Himalayas and deciduous evergreen trees in their foothills to tropical rainforests in the Western Ghats and mangroves along its extensive coastline.
Among the extensive ranges, trees in India include deodars, oak, spruce, silver fur, rhododendron, pine, juniper, maple, poplar, chestnut, and many more in the Himalayan region, as well as banyan, neem, peepul, sal, teak, gulmohar, mango, guava, curry leaf, papaya, jackfruit, rubber tree, pomegranate, coconut, and the kikar tree found in the arid areas.
Like its people, culture, and traditions not all of India's trees and plants are indigenous. Many have been met with astounding success by people who came to India as travellers, pilgrims, and colonialists. Trees like eucalyptus, European and North American pine, wattle, gulmohar, and teak were introduced by the British to the Indian landmass and have gone on to become almost commonplace.
Indians in the past—and still in rural regions—have held a close respect for the rhythm of nature, working in close consort with the flora and fauna in the environment. But in recent years (and decades), reckless big-ticket government projects have ignored ecological concerns. India’s rich biodiversity is at risk on account of poorly thought-out infrastructure expansion projects, which end up causing severe damage to forest lands.
This disrupts the movement of animals and negatively impacts biodiversity and may even increase the chances of transmission of diseases from animals to humans. While development of infrastructure is necessary in a developing economy like India’s, extreme care should be taken to ensure that such projects should be in sync with conservation efforts. The very purpose of development will suffer by following a blitzkrieg approach to the implementation of infrastructure projects with little given to the long-term environmental and short-term local economic impact.
Take the case of the ₹250 crore ropeway project along the Katra-Vaishno Devi pilgrims’ traditional trekking route. Undertaking the arduous 12-kilometre trek is not only an age-old religious tradition, but also provides employment to shopkeepers, palanquin owners, pony operatotrs, and other local business owners. Naturally the residents of the town of Katra are aghast and are protesting the implementation of the project. What will such a ‘development’ project achieve other than sending ever greater numbers of people to the holy shrine located in an ecologically sensitive mountainous region. The tourist/pilgrim football far exceeds what the mountaintop shrine can comfortably accommodate. Such development runs contrary to the true purpose of the trek, which is to ensure that the pilgrims earned the much coveted ‘darshan’—instead of being handed a convenient package deal.
Another sacrilegious plan that one has heard of is the proposed 5.5 kilometre Dehradun-Mussoorie ropeway project, which will reduce the travel time between the valley and the mountain town to a mere 15 minutes from the one odd hour it takes now along the iconic serpentine road up to Mussoorie. This is supposed to be the “longest connectivity project between any two Indian cities. But to what end? Is nothing holy anymore? Perhaps one should instead try trekking up from Rajpur to Mussoorie along the Kipling trail, soak in the scenery, and think with a clear head.
The hills and forest speak to you if you have the ear to listen.
That trail is named for the famous British hunter, conservationist. and writer Rudyard Kipling, who based his stories on tracking down and hunting the big cats in the jungles of Garhwal and Kumaun. Kipling’s The Jungle Book was set in jungles inspired by the forests of what is now the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh. A closer contemporary is Ruskin Bond. the storyteller extraordinaire from Mussoorie, who named one of his most celebrated collections of semi-autobiographical short stories inspired by his childhood spent in the sylvan Doon Valley, Our Trees Still Grow in Dehra.
British architect Edwin Lutyens was responsible for designing and creating an imperial capital in New Delhi, as the crowning glory of the British Raj in India. He laid great emphasis on providing an immense canopy of green by planting thousands of stately trees along its broad avenues. These graceful tree-lined roads and streets of the region in the city referred to as Lutyens’ Delhi. Hyderabad, Mysore, Bengaluru and the Le Corbusier designed city of Chandigarh are other urban centres of India known for their extensive tree cover and graceful tree-lined roads, streets, and localities
The agitation in Mumbai over the felling of trees in the Aarey forest, the protection accorded to the Mangarbani sacred forest in Haryana, and the Supreme Court reining in the errant authorities with regard to the illegal felling of trees in the Delhi Ridge are all manifestations of this impulse. The trees of India have their saviours in the people of the land
By large, however, the British destroyed vast tracts of Indian forest land in their quest to open the land for commercial exploitation by creating tea and estates and rubber plantations. For instance, large parts of forest land were cleared in the Darjeeling area to make way for tea plantations. Similarly, the British replaced the native Indian rubber tree with an imported Brazilian one with greater yield in Kerala in the earliest 20th century. They also cut down trees to build sleepers for railway lines that they began to lay across the country so that they could transport the country’s natural resources to the ports for export. Like the Brazilian rubber, the British administration was responsible for introducing many types of trees from other parts of the world not really suited to local conditions. Their planting of pine trees to obtain resin in preference to the more locally suited native oak trees in the Himalayan region has created an ecological imbalance which often results in frequent forest fires in the region.
Ours is a nation that produced the Chipko Movement, a ‘tree hugging’ forest conversation movement that first emerged in the 1970s by the women in Garhwali villages to protest commercial logging and the government’s deforestation policies. Strands of such agitations and awareness campaigns continue today. In recent years, the agitation in Mumbai over the felling of trees in the Aarey forest, the protection accorded to the Mangarbani sacred forest in Haryana, and the Supreme Court reining in the errant authorities with regard to the illegal felling of trees in the Delhi Ridge are all manifestations of this impulse. The trees of India have their saviours in the people of the land.
The oldest banyan tree in India is reputedly the 800 years old Pillalamarri in Telangana’s Mahbubnagar district. That was in the time of the Nalanda University of yore and the mighty Vijaynagar Empire in the South of India! Look at what a journey we have traversed in that period. I wonder if there will a single tree from today’s times standing in 2825.
For those living in our urban landscapes, India’s immense treasure of immense tracts of forest land may not be immediately visible, but one will still find scores of quaint heavily wooded towns across the Himalayan region, the North Eastern parts of the country, Goa, and the Nilgiri mountain region. Going to these places, one realizes the bliss of living among nature. Everything from the sunlight and the air to the houses, streets, and avenues welcome the visitor like balm for their soul.
Sometimes, I imagine that this is where children should ideally experience the full joys of childhood-in the lap of luxuriant nature, protected by ample foliage, and serenaded by bird-song creating joyous memories for a lifetime. For example, there are quaint towns like Palampur where one could move with their family, nestled in the shadow of the mighty Dhualadhar mountain range in Himachal Pradesh, with its rolling tea gardens, meandering streams, salubrious climate, plentiful tree cover, and a relaxed, laid-back lifestyle.
But such fantasies are short-lived; if everybody were to move there, the town would soon become like most other places in the country, commercially over-exploited and environmentally damaged. Maybe we should stay where we are and make attempts to better the place in question. We could start by preserving the remaining tees and growing new ones hoping to set in place an environmentally virtuous, natural cycle of regeneration.
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Vipin Labroo is a content creator, author and PR consultant. A member of the Nonfiction Authors Association, he has years of corporate experience working with an eclectic range of clients, writing press releases, articles, blogs, white papers, research reports, website content, eBooks and so on across segments like technology, business & marketing, internet marketing, healthcare, fashion, real estate, travel and so on. You can find him on Twitter: @labroovipin and Instagram: @vipin_labroo.
