Tree marriages: Peepal / Banyan marries Neem: Perhaps India is the only country where tree marriages are celebrated, and so also the marriage between boys or girls to trees. Tree marriages are still being held, though rarely, between peepal and neem, banyan and neem; banyan and peepal, or between mango and mahua. In the last few years, some such events were reported in the newspapers. Here a peepal/banyan / banyan tree and neem are planted close together and after about eighteen years a marriage ceremony is performed between the two trees growing together. In this ceremony, the peepal/banyan is treated as the bridegroom (being the symbol of Lord Vishnu or Siva) and neem is the bride (symbol of Devi). This marriage is to be conducted on Suklapaksha (waxing phase of moon) during utharayana period (January 15th to June 15th), avoiding the first, fourth, eighth and ninth phases of moon. There was a press report (Times of India, June 10, 2007, a report by TS Sreenivasa Raghavan ) about such a peepal – neem wedding that was celebrated in Palghat in Kerala. ‘The wedding was on May 27. Between 6:21 am and 7:21 am, the sacred thread was wound around the peepal tree. Later, in the auspicious shuba muhurat between 8:30 am and 9:30 am, he was married to the neem who is four years younger to him (the peepal). The bride was wrapped in a traditional Kancheepuram silk sari which cost Rs 20,000, and a gold mangalsutra. She looked innocent and elegant as she flushed with tender green leaves. He was in a silk veshti, angavasthram and sacred thread made of silver and gold. There was a sumptuous feast for the guests. In many north Indian communities, girls and boys are married to certain plants before the actual marriage, with the intention of averting any ill-luck that may arise from such a marriage. A widow can marry another man only after marrying a tree, and the same is the case with a man intending to marry a widow. The plants mainly used for such marriages are banana, mango tree, madhuka, sami and arka. Such marriages have taken place even among the elites. Incidentally, a girl ― tree marrying ceremony was depicted in a movie titled ‘Sati’ by Aparna Sen in which a mute 19-year old brahmin girl was forced to marry a tree and the ceremony was graphically described by Elisabeth Bumiller. The social evil of marrying girls to trees is very poignantly portrayed by Bharathi Mukherjee, the Indian diasporic novelist of America. Her book, Tree Bride, gives the story of how a five-year-old girl widow (her childhood husband died of snakebite) was married off to a sundari tree and how she lived as a tree bride for the rest of her life. Mukherjee recounted the story of this tree bride, by name Tara Lata, in her novel Desirable Daughters, a sequel to the Tree Bride. Let me quote a passage : “ Then it’s time for the shubha drishti, the rite of auspicious gaze when the bride gets her first glimpse of the face of the man she is marrying….The bridal veil is lifted. Tara Lata straightens her bowed head and raises her gaze slowly, very slowly. Her bridegroom is brave and steadfast. He has waited for her all night in the perilous wilderness. He has waited for her alone, unflinching, though deadly snakes slither out of the flooded holes at his feet, and leeches crawl across his toes, and crabs scuttle up his shins and predatory beasts gouge his solid stomach. The bridal gaze angles up his strong, slender torso as tall as a ship’s mast, and scales up, up, to where the tip of his head disappears in the night-black winter skies. She feels his arms, as strong as tree branches, brush against her, enfold her, shields her from life’s potential brutalities. The whispered lamentations were wrong. She is a woman cursed by a goddess and shunned like an outcast by her community. She takes her greedy fill of the auspicious glimpse. And now she recognizes her bridegroom. He is the god of the Shooder Bon,* the Beautiful Forest, come down to earth as a tree to save her from a lifetime of disgrace and misery” [* Sundari tree, also known as sundri and sunder; its scientific name is Heritiera fomes, shoe-flower family Malvaceae, (formerly included in Sterculiaceae). The name Sunderbans has its root in the name of this tree]. Even now among the Brahmins, a tree branch, often from a sami tree, is planted in the venue of the marriage (marriage pandal), which is representative of the cosmic tree or the axis mundi. Both the bridegroom and bride worship the pillar and hang a garland on it before the actual marriage ceremony. Sometimes both the groom and the bride were initially married to a tree before the actual marriage. Such customs are followed for averting any ill-luck that may befall on the man and woman”. Photos below show the tree marriage ceremony in progress and the bottom one shows the neem and peepal couple growing together happily.