The Felling of the Banyan tree is a famous poem written by Marathi Indian English writer, Dilip Chitre. The poem was originally published in 1980 in poet’s book “Travelling in Cage”.
The Felling of Banyan Tree Summary by Dilip Chitre
Summary of The Felling of the Banyan Tree By Dilip Chitre
The story of poem begins with poet who says, my father told our tenants leave the house, they used to live in those house which were build on mountains. Those were our houses and it were build around our houses on hills. My father ask tenants to leave the house as he decided to demolished the structure of these houses.
Maybe father had some future plants in his mind that’s is why he told tenants to leave house. As tenants leave houses, my father demolished all houses structure except our house and few trees around it. Trees were left which my grandmother used to call sacred. The trees are sacred and cutting them is big crime. But my father massacred all the trees. He cut all the trees. There were sheoga tree, oudumber , and the neem tree but my father cut all of them.
But out of all the trees biggest challenge and problem was Banyan tree as it was very large in size and its roots lay deeper than our lives. My father ordered to remove Banyan tree as well. The Banyan tree was bigger than our houses, the thickness of that tree was very amazing as it was around 50 feet thick.
The Banyan tree root was 30 feet long, so firstly they started cutting branches of tree and it takes them around 7 days to cut it. Now you can guess, how big that tree would be as it takes them 7 days just to cut branches. When they were cutting tree, it was looking like they are killing someone. That Banyan tree was not just tree, it was a home to many birds and insects.
When people started cutting tree, insects and birds leaves tree. After cutting the branches, they started cutting tree’s trunk, around fifty people were hitting chopped- chopped with their axes on that poor Banyan tree. When the great tree chopped down, it revealed its rings of two hundred years.
There is saying, by counting a trees rings you can guess its age. The Banyan tree had 200 rings on it which means it was 200 years old tree. We were looking at such thing which no one has seen before. We were looking a murder of tree. After some time, we left Baroda and goes to Bombay, a place where there were no real trees. Bombay is such place which has a trees of dream which doesn’t get land.
The central theme of poem is separation, separation from your native land where you were born and belong to. The separation from your own land is very painful whether it is for tree or human being or insects or birds.