The air in many parts of India is sweet now with the scent of parijat, the night jasmine or coral jasmine, with its pure white petals and fiery orange stem. It’s called harsingar or God’s ornament in the Hindi belt and shiuli in Bengal. Its blooming heralds Durga Puja and Navratri, and it lasts until early December, before the season of Shishir, or severe cold, sets in. The parijat sheds its blooms on the ground at dawn, and is the only flower, in all of India’s bounteous flora, that can be picked up from the ground and offered in worship. No other ‘fallen flower’ has that privilege.
Stories in Indian theology attest not only to its special status but also add to how Indian faith is deeply married to the land through its mountains, rivers, lakes, sacred trees, herbs and flowers; its animals like elephants, bulls and cows, lions, tigers, monkeys and also mice; its birds like peacocks, eagles, parrots, crows, owls and doves; and even reptiles like snakes, lizards and geckos, not forgetting insects like the bees that ‘string Kamadeva’s bow’ in ancient poetry. Even the Indian squirrel finds a place of honour as God’s little helper at Ramsetu.
Thankfully, cockroaches, mosquitoes and bugs are not celebrated but wryly accepted as the flip side of this mysterious Creation, and exterminated when they intrude on dwellings and crops. The logic being that if there was no ‘bad’, how would we ever appreciate the ‘good’?
Other countries also have holy mountains, like Mount Demavand in Iran, sacred to Zoroastrians, and mythical creatures like the phoenix. Or a plant like the raihon, the Uzbek name for tulsi, which was described to me as the ‘Khuda plant’ or God’s plant.
Even in the United Kingdom, whose history affected us so deeply, certain native trees have deep roots in ancient folklore, Celtic mythology and pre-Christian spiritual traditions, and I found the following interesting. The yew, for one, was revered as a symbol of immortality, death and resurrection. Because of their extreme longevity, such as Scotland's Fortingall Yew, estimated at 2,000 to 5,000 years old, and the Ankerwycke Yew, pre-Christian Britons viewed them as sacred ‘trees of life’. This later led early Christians to build churches and plant graveyards directly around them.
The oak, known as the ‘king of the forest’, was sacred to gods like Thor, Jupiter and the Celtic pantheon. Druids held sacred rituals beneath them and cut ‘lucky’ mistletoe from their branches. They also hosted community gatherings and served as village boundary markers. A famous example is the Major Oak in Sherwood Forest, known to readers in India as the home of the legendary Robin Hood.
The hawthorn was considered a magic door to the ‘otherworld’. Folklore warned that great misfortune would befall anyone who harmed or cut down a sacred hawthorn. People plaited hawthorn crowns and left them out for fairies and angels.
People widely planted rowan and carried it as a talisman against witchcraft, evil spirits and enchantment. Twigs were bound with red thread into small protective crosses and placed above doors or sewn into coat linings.
The holly was the evergreen symbol of protection in winter. Druids and early Britons wore or displayed prickly holly leaves to ward off negative spirits during the dark winter months, and its presence still features in Christmas decorations in the Christian West.
But the old gods of the UK are dead. Except for the holly as a survivor of old beliefs, the UK’s sacred trees no longer seem to be honoured like the pipal and banyan still are in India. We cannot be thankful enough that our ancestors taught us how to cherish and celebrate the features, flora and fauna of our land. In fact, I cannot think of another living civilisation today that rejoices to our extent in deep, abiding physical-spiritual connection with its land of origin.
The parijat, too, has several stories attached to it. One is that a mortal princess called Parijata fell in love with Surya, the sun god, and was burnt when she went too near him. Out of pity, the gods turned her into the parijata tree, with the fiery coral flower stem immortalising her love for the sun.
Another story says the parijata was one of the treasures that arose from the Samudra Manthan, and Lord Indra took it to Devaloka. But Sri Krishna’s imperious wife, Satyabhama, badgered him to get it for her, and he did. The twist is that Princess Rukmini wanted it too, for its divine fragrance. So Krishna planted it on Satyabhama’s side of the garden, but the flowers fell on the other side of the wall, in Rukmini’s garden. Thus, both were satisfied: one, that she owned the tree, and the other, that she got the flowers. There’s a lesson there for us about who actually gets to enjoy what, beyond mere ownership. Have we acquired things we do not use or enjoy? Pre-Diwali is the ideal time to take stock and let go of what we don’t benefit from.
My favourite story goes that Sita Mata blessed Sri Hanuman that his presence would always be invoked under the divine parijat for his purity and nobility of character. Thus we have the beautiful line in the ‘Anjaneya Stotram’ that says ‘parijata taru moola vaasinam’, meaning ‘who abides beneath the parijat tree’. A fragrant instance of what’s what and who’s who in the love between a land and its people.
Renuka Narayanan | FAITHLINE | Senior journalist
(Views are personal)
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