KU UG SEM4 UNIT 3: The Felling of the Banyan Tree (POEM)- DILIP CHITRE

 

KAKATIYA UNIVERSITY, WARNAGAL

ENGLISH FOR EXCELLENCE

UG CBCS SEMESTER-4 TEXTS

The Felling of the Banyan Tree (POEM)- DILIP CHITRE

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Dilip Chitre (1938-2009) was a teacher, painter, and magazine columnist. He lived. and taught in Ethiopia and the US, and was a bilingual writer. His major works are in Marathi, but he also wrote in English. Travelling in a Cage was his first and only book of English poems. He also translated from Marathi to English, the chief translations being An Anthology of Marathi Poetry and Says Tuka. Exile, alienation, self-disintegration and death are the major themes in Chitre's poetry. His poetry belongs to the Modernist Movement, reflecting an urban sensibility and cosmopolitan views. This poem is about the cutting down of the ancient banyan tree that stood in the yard in the poet's ancestral house. The act seems to signify the cutting down of roots and the movement to a different and more modern atmosphere, signified by the move to Bombay.

 

POEM:

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 the ground to strike.

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