The Banyan: a brief history

In the mid 1960s Roger Anger wanted to know the location of the geographical centre of the city to be. He brought a map to Mother and she indicated a spot. Roger took a jeep and, after crossing an expanse of sandy desert, he found a lone tree at the place which Mother had indicated. The Banyan.

Aurovilians like to believe that Auroville ‘discovered’ this tree and gave it a special significance, but this is not true. Ficus benghalensis is one of the sacred trees of India, and this tree had been planted some 40 – 50 years before the inauguration of Auroville, by a villager from Kottakarai in a votive offering to the god Murugan for a prayer answered. By 1968 it was already quite a large tree (as can be seen in the photo), and had served for many years as a place for travellers from Kaliveli on their way to Pondicherry to rest and drink water. To this day it is known locally as the ‘water-shade tree’.

But it also had a certain significance beyond that. A locally-born Aurovilian recalls that when someone was sick, a family member would take a hair from the sick person, tie it around a nail and put a nail in the tree, which was believed to help in the healing. “I still remember the tree full of nails!”

He also remembers that the tree had a more sinister significance. “The villagers believed that a spirit lived in the tree. They would never sit under it or go near it at noon or at midnight. And they would always go in groups of three or four because they believed the spirit would kill anyone who was alone.”

It is also not true that Aurovilians were the first to care for the tree. An old lady – Andhayee ‘Ammal’ – built a small hut by the tree, and she became its first protector, warding off goats and preventing people cutting the branches for firewood. She also began to provide water to thirsty travellers, which is why the tree also came to be called tannipandalamaram, ‘the tree where water is given’.

The locals believed she had special powers, and asked her to perform pujas under the tree to call for rain and to bless their crops. The story goes that when Aurovilians first came to survey the site for the future Matrimandir, she said, ‘So you have finally come to build the temple’. Apparently, she had been waiting for some time.

In 1975, in suspicious circumstances, Ammal’s hut was destroyed in a fire while she was in Pondicherry. She was very upset. She didn’t try to rebuild there but went to live on a plot of land closer to Kottakarai village, where she died at around the age of 90 years.

The tree, it seems, also had a special relationship with Mother. One evening, Mother reported that the spirit of the tree had visited her in distress. She immediately instructed a sadhak to go and check on it. He discovered that somebody had carelessly stuck a nail, knife or axe (the versions vary) in the trunk and immediately removed it.

However, if ‘Ammal’ was the first protector of the Banyan, it is true that it received professional care once the Aurovilians arrived. For Narad, the Banyan was one of the two most sacred trees in the world (the other was the Service Tree at the Samadhi). Narad and his helpers treated the rot and decay in some of the limbs, and allowed, for the first time, some of the aerial roots to take root in the earth (before that they had been nibbled by goats or broken by young cowherds swinging on them). He also stopped the practice of watering grass under the tree as this was weakening the Banyan.

Later, with the help of a professional tree surgeon who had joined Auroville, he would carefully prune diseased limbs, or those which would affect the stability of the tree, along with unnecessary aerial roots. He adopted the rule he had for the Service Tree in the Ashram: no power machinery was to be used on the tree. He was always careful to maintain the aesthetic balance between the size and shape of the tree and the neighbouring Matrimandir.

Over the years, the tree has been threatened not only by rot and fungus —which have been treated with potassium, magnesium and Bach flower remedies, among other remedies – but also by cyclones. In the most recent one, much of the crown was destroyed. However, it has always recovered, and become once again a favourite haunt of birds, monkeys and owls.

And of people. In India, people have traditionally meditated or held meetings under banyans (‘banian’ derives from banias, merchants who sat in the shade of the tree conducting business), and our Banyan is no exception. One of the most important meetings in Auroville’s early history, at a time when there was tension between and with office holders of the Sri Aurobindo Society, happened under the Banyan. Since then, Aurovilians have often come together here in silent meditation at times of communal stress or to remember the passing of a loved one.

Regarding the Matrimandir gardens, Mother once told Narad, “I would like you to begin with the Garden of Unity”. As the Garden of Unity was intended to surround the Banyan, the Banyan is, indeed, our tree of unity.