Felling of the Banyan Tree
Trees are sacred
Describe the father and the grandmother's belief, and the poet's critical tone.
Dilip Chitre's poem 'The Felling of the Banyan Tree' remembers his family's old house on a hilltop. One day his father tells the tenants who live around it to leave, and their houses are pulled down.
The poet's grandmother always used to say that trees are sacred, and that cutting them down is a crime.
But his father 'massacred' them all: the drumstick tree, the cluster fig, the neem.
Only the huge banyan remained, standing 'like a problem', its roots reaching deeper than the family's own lives.
Words like 'massacred', a word normally used for the killing of people, show that the poet sees the felling of the trees as killing.
The poem sets an old reverence for trees against a father's orders.
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