How?
You’re thinking—
How can there exist a manifesto of inflorescence? Manifestoes are nothing like flowers. They are loud, histrionic, didactic, ideological; they chronicle wrongs, they make revelations, tell truths, and turn discontent like red-hot iron from fiery forges into manifest proclamations about how things shall perforce be from now on. They have des ambitions démesurées: overweening ambitions. “Erect on the summit of the world, we hurl defiance to the stars!” declares Filippo Tommaso Marinetti in his 1909 Manifesto of Futurism, and his stance knocks a cornerstone of the world loose (while at his feet an Edelweiss bobs its head in the breeze). “I write a Manifesto and I want nothing” says Tristan Tzara’s Dada Manifesto in the wake of the first world war, but ‘wanting nothing’ is itself to throw disdain ironically at bourgeois ideas of political struggle.
Flowers have no place amidst such radical pronouncements, except maybe as celebratory confetti thrown superficially in the air of victory parades and left to fall on roads, their light vegetal scents lingering for long after. They have longing in place of discontent, or some inherent je ne sais quoi quality that the Victorians called “floriography”: a ‘language of flowers.’ But then flowers, too, want nothing—or they want only elemental things which already are: water, air, sunlight, sometimes not even the soil, but without irony and apparently without angst. Theirs is a botanical harmonization of form-function-fragrance, a call to pollinators, a natural poiesis to the manifesto’s rhetorical raging. The twisting forms of roots, trunks, vines can appear impassioned, hortatory, like they are wrestling or pleading—but flowers appear rather more quietly. You look at them, suddenly there, and say “ah!” rather than “a-haa!”: it is a revelatory moment of surprise and beauty, not one of logical comprehension. For flowers are not trying to convince you of anything. They aspire, but without ambition.
So these are irreconcilable “languages,” clearly. But we need both and speak both, or is it that they speak to different parts of ourselves? This is the age of disenchantment, declares the Manifesto; disenfranchisements, deracinations, dispossessions, disillusionments, make the world as it is. It’s time for anarchy, disruption, unschooling, unboxing, new forms of oppositional solidarity: we must do something. Flowers as the commonest signs of Nature call to something more individual and innate: this is about you. Fists flung into the air and hands sunk in soil, revolution and retreat, making and dreaming; both are the furies and passions of the present, though we know the one a great deal more than we are feeling for the other. Flowers have outlived a thousand revolutions and will outlive a thousand more. What is this path that they are following, to what does it lead?
There is a difference, as Walter Benjamin has so memorably observed, between not finding one’s way and losing oneself: “Not to find one’s way in a city may well be uninteresting and banal. It requires ignorance—nothing more. But to lose oneself in a city—as one loses oneself in a forest—that calls for quite a different schooling” (8).
Chart a course of action and proclaim it from rooftops as the Manifesto might: this way out of ignorance, this way to the future.
Flowers call for a different schooling. You get lost in them—as you might lose yourself in a forest, as the old vairagis or wandering saints once did, lost and even drowning as were the Tamil āḻvārs in the Truth of Visnu: in Ramanujan’s translation, āḻ [immersed, sunk] + vār [one who is].
Combine the two and the outcome is: this way, to lose yourself.
1) Find them
Finding flowers is neither as easy nor as difficult as you think. They are everywhere removed from the places of their birth and growth. At the florists’ they are held captive, plastic-wrapped and bow-tied, pleasure-giving. At temple markets and in the baskets of small vendors they fare somewhat better for being understood: Siva loves all flowers difficult and poisonous and wild, the lotus is a sign of Lakshmi, the white lily of rebirthing, there’s jasmine and jacaranda for your hair. As much as markets trade in meanings, they alienate flowers from their habitats, and us from their in situ lives. You know what they’re for, but not where they’re from. Their context doesn’t matter so much as ours does.
To go into their worlds, the garden is a bridge. Gardens, whether royal or public, were once a necessity of Indian life because they provided flowers, those ‘most essential items of decoration and toilet, used by the daughter of a recluse and the queen of an emperor’ (Singh 372). Pleasure gardens were once regarded as earthly paradises and were sites of ceremony and recreation: the word “paradise” comes from the Old Persian “pairidaeza,” referring to a walled enclosure of a park or garden. Guidance for laying out gardens is elaborated in any number of texts through the centuries, from Vatsyayana’s Kama Sutra and Kautilya’s Arthashastra (2nd-3rd c.), to Panini’s Ashtadhyayi (4th/6th c.), Someshwara’s 12th c. Manasollasa, the Upavana Vinoda in the 13th c. Śārṅgadhara-Paddhati, and even later the memoirs of Mughal Kings. There are guidelines for structure, orientation, care, the placement of mounds, tanks, vines and bowers, trees, but a flower-centred undisturbed enjoyment was a central objective. The Kāśika commentary on Pāṇini names four sports whose essential activity is picking flowers: uddālaka-puspabhañjikā and virana-puspapracāyittā, tālabhañjikā, and śālabhañjikā (Vogel 1929: 203, “The woman and tree or Śālabhañjikā in Indian literature and art.” Acta Orientalia 7: 201-31). That last, śālabhañjikā, is the only one left that we still understand—and though it has come to refer to the sculptural motif of women clutching tree branches, as the Buddha’s mother did when she birthed Him, its etymological allusion is to a festival of sal flower gathering and a day of merrymaking.
Now, Nandyarvattam, Gundu Malli, Tulsi, Hibiscus, and Kanakambaram are common house plants and flower picking is an activity assigned to girl-children while their mothers are otherwise occupied. If there’s room, there’s a Parijat tree. No room at all is still space enough for a climbing jasmine to ascend the height of a building. Like this, the poorest Indian home makes room to grow flowers and continues resolutely the old quests for ornament and offering.
Beyond are gradients of wasteland and wild. Weeds and thorny roadside thickets. Only the tiniest and most unassuming specs of pink and white, against all odds. But then also that one large gulmohar tree in full and resplendent bloom. Palasha that suddenly claws the sky in spring. Scraggly Tanner’s cassia, spreading across bouldered landscapes. Resolute, resilient erukkam. Lotuses reaching out luminously from the dark and murky waters of the village pond.
Speeding by, will you stop? Change your route, risk your marriage? Spend time with them, understand them in the places in which they see fit to grow—even the hyacinth choking the dirtiest waterway (but purifying it with an uptake of pollutants)? Finding flowers, really seeking them, is a lot like losing yourself in love. It means venturing beyond comfort into terrains unknown, with no real promise of returns.
Will you?
2) Know them
Then there is Meno’s paradox. How will you enquire into that which you do not know? asks Meno of Socrates. How will you seek flowers if you do not know them?
For there will be flowers like and unlike any you have hitherto seen—those that you can pick and tuck behind your ears and those that you cannot eat until you cook them and those that will exude a latex that shrivels your skin. There will be those that cool and those that fire, those that are cursed and others which are caressed, those which grow on trees and those which spread on stone. Guides may take you part way, they may even employ the Socratic method that was the answer to Meno’s riddle—but in the end this is a othai-adi paatham, a one-person path, wide enough only for a single foot to go in front of the other. You’re the only one who can really find the unscented flower’s scent and follow it.
Flowers in the friezes and niches of temple sculptures, in the baskets of vendors, only in this season and no other, only in this soil and no other; thrown over entire weddings, covering temple murtis, in the verses of plays and the Puranas, in paintings through ages, and even others ignored and trodden upon but represented in disparate knowledge systems—they are all not just there, awaiting understanding. They are there because they have already been understood, by Siddhars and singers and botanists and farmers and old village crones.
In the remarkably abundant imaginaries of Indian storytelling, the mango blossom shoots forth as the great floral arrow of Kamadeva in the jubilation of spring, scented Parijat flowers fall silently at night from a tree in Satyabama’s house into Rukmini’s courtyard (so the women can no longer argue over them), diminutive thumbai waits to fall to Siva’s feet, and the bright moon is no help in reuniting separated lovers, for it makes boulders strewn with fallen vēngai flowers look like big tiger cubs [Kurunthokai 47, Neduvennilavinār]. Sakuntala’s loving gaze at the youthful Vanajyotsna (jasmine creeper) embracing the mango tree with full-formed leaves—or King Pari’s gift of his chariot to perhaps the same Vanajyotsna that had clutched onto it—such tales fill your heart to its brim.
Meanwhile, the juice of agathi flowers binds a hepaprotective nannari mathirai and village women tie medicinal tussie-mussies, as the Victorians knew floral nosegays, to rafters at Sankranti, in anticipation of the vulnerability of the changing seasons: kaapu kattudal, protective tyings.
Anthropologists have a name for this investigative methodology: follow the thing. When you do that, suddenly the forest floor is strewn with signs. Crushed kundumani seed pods underfoot means: wait here for the yellow catkins. The ground suddenly squishy or a sweet bitterness in the air means: spread an old cotton sari to collect mahua and neem flowers as they fall. Some read the flowers as signs—for a floral phenology of the sort that allows communities in Tripura to anticipate the heaviness of coming rain by the manner and intensity of the parijat’s flowering. Similarly in Tamil country, konrai’s profuse blooms a month ahead of monsoons lead the poets to see in the dark clouds the form of Vishnu, coming at last for His impatient beloved. Poets of the Sangam era distinguished landscapes of love and longing with the aid of plants and flowers, showing just how what grows without is a map to what transpires within.
Follow it.
3) Pick them apart
Following, however, cannot be blind or the peris will certainly play distracting games. You’ll need eyes in the palms of your hands like those bestowed upon Vyāghrapāda, the tiger-footed one, so he could climb trees without slipping and find, in the darkest early morning hours, the purest floral offerings to Śiva, untouched even by insects and bees.
But you’ll use these eyes to come from the path of love to that of knowledge. Become the inquirer, investigator, analyser, and merciless anatomist that your child has forever been. Pull petals apart. Nibble them before your mother reaches out her anxious arm to prevent you. Press them between unbleached pages like in a botany class, labelling specimens that your daughters might discover, on hot summer holiday afternoons, in the dusty maadis of their grandfather’s homes where your books will be stored. Knot them with string from the banana stem. Form rings and chains by sticking the neck of one into the throat of the other. Drop them in water and fish them out again. Reassemble them. Draw them into the ambit of your creativity with a knowledge of their own.
In the science of such play you’ll find insights that the poets missed, like how the palasha’s claws don’t just scratch the sky but are also turned inwards on itself. You’ll revel in the pendulous papilionaceous form of the agathi flower and see that the crown of the erukkam is in fact a bead: thread-ready. Amaltas and Avaaram, so often confused, in fact each have their own tanmay, their internal character: the one is juicy, soft, hydrophilic, the other dry if not hydrophobic. In the thousand shades that comprise “yellow,” each flower takes one.
Like this, bit by bit, find their character for yourself.
4) Imbibe them
You’ve done this already—a child in the garden, picked the yellow trumpet-like flowers of ponnarali, the so-called yellow oleander/ Thevetia neriifolia, poisonous in every part except for the honey hidden in its tubular stem which only you and the birds know is there, and shoorp! Sucked it up. [And faced your mother’s irritation because that’s one less flower for Siva this evening.] But not all flowers offer libations; the nilotpala’s limpid centre is an enchantment and nothing more. Flowers that can be imbibed must be turned liquid first.
As with all arts, some are specialized—but don’t be fooled into thinking all are. Flowers hold on to nothing, not even really their own colors. Once palasha blossoms are disarmed, they turn water a charming, cooling yellow. The tiny, coral-colored corolla tubes of Parijat flowers produce the orange of monks’ robes: a poor man’s saffron, they say. Shankupushpam turns water a blue-so-blue it becomes Radha’s longing for her dark-skinned Krishna: so the flower is “Radha’s consciousness” in Pondicherry and made into a syrup by the same name. Likewise, red hibiscus signals shakti, the “power of consciousness,” and is sweetened and sold locally as “power syrup,” of course. The vivid purple of the bougainvillea slips lightly into water, for the asking. Blues (and blue-reds) are fragile, turning red (or redder) with any acid addition. Yellows are more stable. Combine them in the right light though, with ice rocks to slow their flow, and in your glass is iridescence. Not much taste, but glorious iridescence.
Catching the scents is harder, and a centuries-old craft perfected in places like Kannauj long before Grasse turned from leather-working to perfume-making. Jasmine refuses you its pure white coloration and teases with redolence instead. Paneer rose is reluctant to part with either unless coaxed for long with honey and sugar; Kannauj attar-makers funnel floral vapors into sandalwood oils instead. Sugar tricks don’t work for Ketaki viphala (male kewda flowers) either. The craft of extracting the essence of those is the preserve of communities in Odisha’s Ganjam district. The royals of Rajasthan once had darukhanas manufacturing rose liqueurs alongside Ayurvedic remedies; tribals in all the mahua-growing belts forage the fat flowers and not only for jams, like the Damascene rose gulkands of Pushkar.
Color-taste-scent-intoxications—you’re hardly the first one to discover these arts. But floral arts they are, all in that same iridescent spectrum of your chemists’ concoction. The whiffs and swigs transport you to fabled once-upon-a-times when sugar was sold in apothecaries alongside bitter potions and floral libations as medicaments for rejuvenation.
Make no mistake though, flowers are flowers no more after they’ve been so deconstructed and reduced. That is their hidden magic and their medicine, to be discovered and isolated and just not on the surface to see.
5) Become one with them
Going native in a botanical world is an alchemical process, like flowers are an instance of a plant’s monumental synthesis of minerals, waters, volatiles, mycelium whispers, blowing breezes, a longing for the sun—all transmuted into colors, curlicues, redolences, textures, a mathematically perfected whorl, a thrust for life so beautiful it cannot be just practical apparatus but simply must be more.
You come upon a “wide, undulating, encircling movement of ideas” accrued over centuries as you may be landed, after some difficult, dusty journey, into a vast swaying field of sunflowers. The quest for syntheses is an ancient one in this subcontinent, perhaps even a sign of Indian thought-systems—for what is Vedanta or Śārṅgadeva’s 13th c. Saṃgītaratnākara, or the Puranas, the Sutras or the various Ayurvedic Samhitas and so many other texts if not that? A gathering of threads, collection, compilation, harmonisation, organization, synthesis and re-synthesis of all the “great means and powers … through which the soul of man can directly approach and cast itself into the Eternal.”
Likewise, losing yourself in floral landscapes and coming to think with flowers means seeking out fresh and widely embracing syntheses befitting our times, but first with the material already here: the thick compost of this forest’s floor, this air, this water, with these roots boring deep, these leaves, and this angle of the sun, no matter how rich or despoiled any of it may now be.
Make garlands of flowers and the inflorescence of stories, ideas, creative expressions and inspirations they produce, tie them together with banana fibres in sequences that produce delight, place them around the necks of those to whom you must be wed—and thus claim for yourself without reserve this vast inheritance of flowers. Maybe you won’t find in them the vigorous movements of revolution, but they will always shower like glittering pollen on your brown skin, the steadfast conviction of light-seeking life.
Deepa Reddy is a cultural anthropologist with the University of Houston-Clear Lake. She’s got many scholarly works to her name, on topics like women’s activism and political Hinduism, but what she loves most is working with plants, leaves, stems, barks–and flowers. You can see her work (and sometimes catch glimpses of her at work) on https://www.paticheri.com and @paticheri
Translations and detailed descriptions are provided to give a better understanding of the story to people from different cultural backgrounds across the globe.
1 comment
I am an ardent fan of Deepa, I lost myself in the concoction of the article/ script or should I say the flowers!! It was a pleasure to read and learn and also see some flowers in their colourful form!!