The Major Oak of Sherwood forest, the only visible relic of the Robin Hood mythos and a pilgrimage destination for millions, has been declared dead, leaving us to ponder the memory of trees. The 1,200-year-old tree, whose massive trunk is believed to have concealed the bandit and his merry men at a sticky time, failed to produce foliage this spring. The Major Oak will fall one day, but its acorns have apparently been planted all over the world. Even a millennium after the prince of thieves lived and died―if he ever lived at all―his oak will keep his world alive.
No one knows if Robin had indeed hidden from the sheriff of Nottingham in that tree. And the tree’s offspring are growing far from home, their genealogy unauthenticated. But Robin’s legend does not rely on evidence, but on the compelling idea that he robbed the rich to give to the poor―a very early expression of the trickle-down effect, tweaked by the intervention of non-state actors. In an unfair, extractive world, the legend is powerful. But the oak? The authenticity of trees is a Ship of Theseus problem.
In popular culture, belief trumps facts. But trees are also heritage and religious objects. Is the Mahabodhi tree at Bodh Gaya authentic? The current avatar is not the tree beneath which Sakyamuni meditated. It was planted in 1881 by Alexander Cunningham, founder of the Archeological Survey of India. He used a cutting from the Jaya Shri Mahabodhi tree at Anuradhapura, Sri Lanka, which is the oldest verified human-planted tree.
In 236 BCE, Emperor Ashoka’s children Mahendra and Sanghamitra led a Buddhist mission from Sanchi to Sri Lanka, and planted a branch of the Bodh Gaya tree at Anuradhapura. In December 1964, 2,200 years later, Sri Lanka gifted a cutting of the Jaya Shri Mahabodhi tree to Pakistan President Ayub Khan on a State visit, and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, then foreign minister, planted it in the Taxila Museum.
The original Mahabodhi tree, under which the Buddha found enlightenment, was destroyed three times in antiquity alone, and its successors faced adversity, too. Cunningham was filling a void when he planted a cutting in 1881―the previous avatar of the tree had fallen in a storm in 1876. He planted another Bodhi tree for Hindu worshippers nearby. Tacitly, the second tree acknowledged even older cultures—Bodhi trees have figured in Indian faiths, in sacred groves, temples, ghats, squares and crossroads, from remote antiquity.
Mindful of past calamities, in 2010, the government planted an offspring of Cunningham’s Mahabodhi tree as a backup, in case the present avatar ever fails—like Robin’s oak now has. But then, to complicate matters, the Forest Research Institute at Dehradun conducted genetic tests which suggested that Cunningham’s tree for Hindus was of older stock than his tree for Buddhists. Age is a marker of authenticity.
So, what is the yardstick of authenticity? What does it mean with respect to the distant past? Does biological descent matter if it cannot be fully tested―if it is not falsifiable, in the language of science? Humans and bots are now spending aeons of time, terabytes of data and gigawatts of energy on the internet promoting exclusivist theories of nation, race, community, caste, colour―in short, identity politics.
These theories are hollow because they are immune to falsification. They are beliefs. And so is the idea of authenticity.
Consider the world’s most famous tree, which allegedly bore Newton’s apple. The façade of the Great Gate of Trinity College in Cambridge, UK, features a statue of its founder, King Henry VIII. In his time, it wielded a sceptre. But recalling his appetite for violence, generations of students have replaced his sceptre with the leg of a chair, a common weapon in classical English brawls. In contrast to this horrible royal legacy, right beside the gate are the lodgings of Isaac Newton, facing a little garden with an apple tree. In school, you may have learned of the importance of Newton’s apple tree in the history of science.
But this tree at Trinity does not bear the authentic patina of time. It was grafted in 1954 from the apple tree in Newton’s childhood home in Woolsthorpe Manor, Lincolnshire. Newton went home from Trinity in 1665 to escape the plague. There, a home-grown apple is said to have impinged upon his head and jolted open the doors of perception. His Principia was published 22 years later. It took time to appreciate that falling fruit obey the inverse square law, and that gravity is a fundamental force of the universe.
If the most famous trees are potentially inauthentic, Robin Hood’s oak is doubly so, because Robin himself is perhaps inauthentic. In the Sherwood forest area, of course, he is a living presence. People recall playing cops and robbers in his tree as children, before it was cordoned off as a heritage site.
But Robin’s depiction as a socialist revolutionary who forcefully redistributed wealth, like the guerrilla ascetics in Bankim Chandra’s Anandamath, has always been questioned, right from a passage in the 14th century poem, ‘Piers Plowman’. The ambivalence persists in the latest iteration of the legend, The Death of Robin Hood, whose theatre release is imminent. Michael Sarnoski presents Robin as a violent thug, with none of the saving graces of the myth.
As Chinua Achebe said, history will not be rewritten until the lions have their own historians. And trees, as well as legendary figures, are far more enigmatic than lions.
Pratik Kanjilal | SPEAKEASY | Senior Fellow, Henry J Leir Institute of Migration and Human Security, Fletcher School, Tufts University
(Views are personal)
(Tweets @pratik_k)