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Felling of the Banyan Tree
Dilip Chitre
About Dilip Chitre
Dilip Chitre (1938 - 2009) was one of the most important poets in post-independence India. He wrote in Marathi and English. Some of his best-known works include a translation of the poems of the Marathi Bhakti poet, Sant Tukaram, and the poetry collections, Shesha and As is Where is. He received the Sahitya Akademi Award for his collection of Marathi poems in 1994.
My father told the tenants to leave
Who lived on 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 scraggy 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 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 the ground to strike.
Available Answers
- 1.
Trees are sacred my grandmother used to say /Feeling them is a crime but he massacred them all
- Who is the speaker in the given lines? Who is the person referred to as 'he'?
- Name the trees that were cut down. Why are his actions referred to as a 'crime'?
- What else had this person done?
- What do you conclude about the speaker's feelings from the given lines?
- 2.
My father ordered it to be removed
- What does the word 'it' refer to? Describe it in your own words.
- What is 'it' compared to? Explain the figure of speech in your own words.
- How was it removed?
- What happened when it began to be 'removed'?
- 3.
We watched in terror and fascination this slaughter
- Why did the speaker experience the opposing feelings of 'terror' and 'fascination'?
- What did the 'slaughter' reveal?
- Why is the slaughter referred to as 'raw mythology'?
- Which other word in the poem, apart from mythology, suggests the special nature of the banyan tree?
- 4.
Where there are no trees except the one / Which grows and seethes in one's dreams
- Which place does the word 'where' refer to? Where did the poet's family originally stay?
- Which tree does the poet refer to in the given lines? Is it a real tree?
- What does the tree do? Explain the phrase 'grows and seethes in one's dreams'.
- 5.
Why do you think the poet's father asked the tenants to leave and had all the trees cut down?
- 6.
Why does the poet describe the felling of the tree as an act of violence? Which words in the poem suggest so?
3 more answer(s) available.