Palash: An Account of the Flame of the Forest

White-headed babbler-10, tailorbird-3, purple sunbird-2, house crow-2, black kite-5, feral rock pigeon-xx…

Going through the motions of a daily checklist on eBird (a citizen science database of birds) on a regular morning walk in an urban green space in the thick of a metropolitan city can be quite banal. The usual suspects. Eye scans of the copperpod, pongamia, eucalyptus, African tulip, neem, and occasional rosewood that line the roads yield nothing particularly interesting. A routine checklist on a routine morning walk to keep your heart healthy and your mind active.

Walks in February and March, however, are anything but routine. The Cantonment area I frequent is ablaze! The big guns are out: silk cotton and dhak/palash have begun to flower. White-eyes, plum-headed parakeets, rosy starlings, black drongos, rufous treepies, put on explosive aerial displays amplifying the fiery colour reflected back in my checklist. 

R.E.S.P.E.C.T. (find out what it means to me)

Butea monosperma (flame of the forest or palash), in particular, has captivated the minds of plenty of writers, the bellies of plenty of birds, and the tenacity of the eco-friendly product market. Nondescript for most of the year, this indigenous tree springs into spring, heralding a riot of birds as it blossoms. I once read somewhere that palash is “found in drier parts, often gregarious in forests, grasslands and wastelands”. Although an unusual adjective for a tree, gregarious encapsulates it perfectly, especially in springtime. Butein extracted from the flowers produces the characteristic “kesari” colour associated with Holi; this is also used to dye fabric and mark foreheads. The orangish-reddish-scarlet colour of the petals is so unique that in 1946 the Royal Horticultural Society declared it a special shade, “Indian-orange”, binding it tightly to the subcontinent. Prospective sons-in-law in tribal communities are tested on their skill to stitch together the leaves into plates, merging function with matters of the heart.

Belonging to the Fabaceae family, a large and agriculturally important one, palash flowers have a characteristic structure particular to the members. A fleshy cup-like calyx in front of which emerges a single standard petal, a pair of wing and a pair of keel petals. These, along with the staminal tube and pistil, make up the recurved flower that resembles the beak of a parrot. The avian similarities don’t end here because the palash is one of only 93 reported species in India that is ornithophilous, i.e., bird-pollinated.

While birds visit nectar-producing flowers to partake of the sweet treat, the palash does not freely offer it. It conceals its nectar in nectaries that are ensconced by the velvet olive-coloured calyx (outermost whorl of a flower) and keel petals. An indication that it doesn’t tolerate freeloaders. A 2003 study found that of all its avian visitors, the purple sunbird is the only one to agree respectfully to these T&Cs. Landing on the keel, sunbirds trigger the petals apart when their long, curved beak finds the hidden nectaries. This exposes the staminal tube and the pistil, which rub against the bird, leaving and picking up pollen, respectively.

But not everyone is as consenting. Bulbuls, drongos, and white-eyes do not have the right beak, and so they cheat by piercing the side of the calyx cup, bypassing the pollination mechanism completely. Rude. Interestingly, three-striped palm squirrels are quite respectful of the pollen tax. Unfortunately for the plant though, the squirrel forays lead to “geitonogamy”— a type of self-fertilisation where pollen exchange is between flowers of the same plant.

A time of fortune and a time of lac(k)

The fortune of the Jagat Seth was no small thing if history is to be believed. Elevated to this title of “banker of the world” by the Mughals, the Jagat Seth was as influential as they were wealthy in the 17th and 18th centuries. Like the palash trees that dotted the Chota Nagpur plateau, their credit enterprises flourished across the subcontinent. They soon gained the monopoly of minting coins in Bengal, one of India’s richest provinces, thus dominating the economy. But fortune is fickle, and influence can slip with one wrong move. And so, against the backdrop of the Seven Years’ War (1754-1763), when the title of Nawab of Bengal passed to Siraj-ud-Daulah, a young hot-head (and pro-French), the Jagat Seth and his allies made a decision that inadvertently laid the foundation for the British Empire in India.

In the village of Palashi on a balmy monsoon day in 1757, hundreds of palash trees that held the earth together witnessed the turning of fortunes of an entire country, including their own orchestrated by the Jagat Seth and a disgruntled Commander-in-Chief of the Nawab, Mir Jafar. Three thousand troops of the British East India Company funded by the Jagat Seth, led by an ambitious Englishman, Robert Clive, found themselves surrounded by the Nawab and his 50,000-strong Bengali army on the banks of the Bhagirathi. The Battle of Palashi or Plassey, as the British called it, would have been but a blip in our textbooks if not for the intervention of the rain and the wits of the Brits. As a monsoon storm broke out, the underdog, the British, had the foresight to cover their gunpowder with tarpaulins, which the Indian side did not. Perhaps fortune did favour the brave because this victory bequeathed us with 189 years of British occupation.

And what of the Jagat Seth and the palash trees? The East India Company moved the treasury and their installed puppet Nawab killed off several members of the former while the latter were dubbed ”bastard teak” and cleared to increase agricultural production in the early 1800s.

 

Centuries later, in the lands of the Baigas and Gonds, the bastard teak is turning fortunes again. This time, through the lac insect, Kerria lacca. On a safari at Kanha National Park, as we drove past leafless palash in foggy meadows, our driver Kamlesh Singh told us about the trees and his cousins in the tribal belt of Shahdol district a few hundred kilometres away. Butea monosperma, which makes up at least 20 per cent of trees in the district, is commonly used as firewood since it is abundant in degraded land and fields. But since 1999, tribal members who had small parcels of unirrigated, unproductive land turned to lac production by taking advantage of Kerria lacca’s host, their underutilised palash trees. The lac insect feeds on the phloem (plant tissue transporting nutrients) of its host and secretes a resinous pigment called lac, which is used in cosmetics, aeronautics, paper, paints and varnish. If you had grandparents born in the early 1900s, then you’ve probably come across sticks of red wax used for sealing letters and parcels. This sealing wax was made of lac. Turns out lac can make lakhpatis (millionaires), and numerous farmers, including Kamlesh’s cousins, have come out of poverty because of this tree-insect association. Proponents hail lac cultivation as a win for poor farmers and conservation of the tree.

With palash changing the fates of so many, it was only a matter of time before it changed mine. In February last year, as the military exercises of spring began, I spotted foraging among the flames of dhak, a noisy shade of iridescence: cacophonous flocks of hair-crested drongos previously unrecorded in my Hyderabad eBird checklists and uncommon to the city. If you’re wondering how that makes me fortunate? Well, then, you clearly aren’t a birder.

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