With these words, Aparna Bidasaria conveys her response to the bargad or the banyan tree, the main theme of her acrylic on canvas works that were on display in the Capital recently. Cool, calm, relaxing — this is how it felt as one stepped into the Shridharani Art Gallery to see her show, titled Time and Being.
The Indore-based artist captures the beauty of the banyan tree using a fine blend of two styles of painting — pointillism and impressionism. She shows how breathtakingly beautiful and calming the banyan appears at different times of the day, if only we stop to see and learn.
The bargad also known as vata in Hindi and aal in Tamil is a unique tree, for it can grow up to 30 metres or more in height.
Owing to its aerial roots known as jatas, which grow on its branches and fall to the ground, giving it support and allowing it to grow more branches, the banyan can cover an area of around 10,000 metres, making a canopy of some 19,000 metres — this is the dimension of the world’s largest banyan tree in Anantapur district of Andhra Pradesh.
It was the British who gave this indigenous tree species its name ‘banyan’, for they would often see baniyas, traders, gather in its shade to conduct their business, write Nanditha Krishna and M Amrithalingam in Sacred Plants Of India.
Interestingly, the banyan was never high on the list of trees that horticulturists in the 1910s had made to line the avenues of the newly developed Lutyen’s Delhi. They thought it was ‘too overpowering’, ‘too big, too blocky’. The tree that is invoked by Hindus as the male consort of the peepul, seemed to them right only for large roundabouts, writes Pradip Kishen in Trees Of Delhi
But, it is because of these very reasons — its expanse and grand presence — that this evergreen, drought-resistant, long-lived tree, which is native to the Indian peninsula, has never gone out of public recall and can be spotted standing big and tall in parks or on roadsides, offering shade and succour to passersby.
“Trees give you life, a reason to be happy. The banyan just took root in me; it just grew on me. I find it very rejuvenating and so have been painting it for the last five years,” says Aparna. “There are many banyan trees in my city; there is a whole grove in the outskirts, in the Mhow Cantonment area, which is said to be more than 500 years old.”
The beauty of a tree is that you can look at the topmost part, its rustling leaves, and go down to the depths of its roots which have an infinite reach and see a being which nurtures, gives shelter and sustenance to so many forms of life around it. You are also looking at a tree that stands like a solitary sentinel, like all the greatest com-posers, philosophers, artists, and greatest individuals in the world, who have made solitary journeys.”
Did painting the banyan change Aparna’s perspective on trees? “Yes, now I observe them more keenly, how the light is falling on them, how more lyrical and beautiful they are becoming…,” says Aparna. She has begun to care for them.
I have now spotted a banyan right next to my office. Do I care what happens to it? I think I do. The tree, too, has begun to tell me how to just ‘be’. Standing amidst all the traffic and noise, it continues to look stately and calm, doing what comes to it naturally — give shade, oxygen, food and shelter to animals and birds around — a real mahayogi. The magic of the banyan is beginning to grow on me.
