Karnikara

Karnikara in Vrindavan

The tree’s name says it all: karnika is an ear-loop, an earring, and karnikara is the tree whose flower asks to be worn behind the ear. In Vraja that is exactly where it goes – behind Krishna’s ear. Describing how Krishna enters the forest in autumn, Shukadeva names this flower right after the peacock feather:

The flower behind the ear of the greatest of dancers

Srila Vishvanatha Chakravarti Thakur notices a grammatical oddity in this line: the flower, karnikara, stands in the singular, while the ears, karnayoh, are in the dual. One flower and two ears: it means Krishna kept shifting it from the left ear to the right, and this, the Thakur says, betrays “intoxication with youth”. Srila Jiva Goswami adds a note on the word bibhrat, “wore”: He did not merely wear the flower but ceaselessly displayed His beauty by it.

As for how the flower looks, Srila Sanatana Goswami and Srila Jiva Goswami write in the same words: karnikara is yellow and in shape resembles a lotus. Sanatana Goswami adds that in spring and autumn these flowers are especially many and the forest grows lovelier from them. In the “Krishna-lila-stava” the same Goswami bows to Him as “wearing karnikaras on His ears, dressed like a dancer, adorned with autumn flowers, enchanting in the autumn pastimes”¹ – the whole “Venu-gita” in one line of prayer.

Often the flower turns up on both ears at once. Srila Rupa Goswami in the “Bhakti-rasamrita-sindhu” paints Krishna in the whole fragrant forest – with a garland of gunja, in a crown of peacock feather, in the glow of yellow silk:

The karnikara grove and the tryst

Thickets of flowering karnikaras in Vraja are a secluded place for trysts. In Srila Rupa Goswami’s play “Vidagdha-madhava” Radhika calls her friend into the shade of such a grove as early as the first act, and later Paurnamasi gives an order: when Vishakha brings Krishna under the mango tree, let Lalita hide Radha among the karnikaras, apart from the other cowherd girls. So the earring-flower grows exactly where Radha and Krishna meet in secret.

And in the scene where Krishna and her friends dress Radha, the name itself is played upon. Vrindadevi holds out a bud: “Look, friend – this karnikara bud is just right for Your earring!” Here karnika, the earring, and karnikara, the tree, close into one word. Radhika notices that a bee, greedy for honey, has settled still on the fresh flower, and Krishna answers: this bee on the golden flower is “like the king of nectar himself, embodied, mounted upon a golden throne”⁴. The flower suits them both: Krishna wears karnikara behind His ear, and it becomes Radha too – no wonder Srila Prabodhananda Sarasvati paints the Queen of Vrindavan as well “adorned with karnikara earrings”.

Karnikara in separation

The moment Krishna leaves, the same flower turns into an instrument of longing. In Srila Rupa Goswami’s “Lalita-madhava” Radha wanders along the Yamuna, sees young karnikaras on the bank and recognises them:

Worship

Karnikara is offered to the Lord as well. Srila Sanatana Goswami in the “Hari-bhakti-vilasa”, sorting out with which flowers Vishnu is to be honoured, cites a verse from the Puranas:

Beyond Vraja

Karnikara occurs in the shastras beyond the Vrindavan stories too. In the Fourth Canto of the “Bhagavatam” Lord Vishnu appears at Daksha’s sacrifice with eight golden arms, a weapon in each. The verse says that with these arms He was like a flowering karnikara tree⁵, and the commentary unfolds the image: the eight arms are like eight golden petals around the whorl.

The whorl of the lotus

The name has a second sense as well. Karnika is not only an earring but also the whorl of a lotus, that seat in the centre of the flower where the seeds sit. The dictionaries give karnikara in both senses at once: the tree and this very whorl – and from the second the commentators derive the tree’s name itself.

Hence the cosmic image too. When Brahma in the “Brahma-samhita” describes the supreme abode as a thousand-petalled lotus by the name of Gokula, he calls the whorl of that lotus karnikara – the dhama of the Lord⁶. Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu repeats the same image in the “Chaitanya-charitamrita”: above the countless Vaikunthas, Krishnaloka is like the karnikara, the heart of the universal flower. So the name of the flower behind Krishna’s ear turned out to be the name of the whorl of that lotus which is His eternal home.

Folk medicine

In karnikara it is above all the flowers that are used: from them a tonic is prepared with which inflammations, ulcers, tumours, “diseases of the blood” and leprosy are treated. The downy underside of the leaf is used to stop bleeding from wounds, and the bark and leaves are applied in smallpox. The tree is considered non-poisonous.

Botany

In Vraja karnikara is Pterospermum acerifolium, a tree of the mallow family, kanak champa in Hindi, “the golden champaka”, or muchkund, and in Marathi it is simply karnikar. Its leaf is up to thirty centimetres long and twenty wide, palmately veined, dark green above and covered with rusty felt beneath. It is for this that the tree is called the dinnerplate tree in English: the leaves really do serve as plates and as wrapping. The species name acerifolium means “maple-leaved”: the leaf can also be lobed, like a maple’s. The generic name Pterospermum, “winged seed”, was given for the angular woody capsules: when ripe they blacken, split into five valves and release seeds with a wing.

But with the flower itself the ends do not quite meet. The Goswamis describe the karnikara flower as yellow and lotus-like, the “Hari-bhakti-vilasa” calls these flowers shining like gold, and the Sanskrit dictionary finishes the portrait: the petals are turned inwards so that the flower resembles a saucer, and the stamens stick out of it “like wicks from an oil lamp” – and it says in the same breath that the flower has no scent. In Pterospermum acerifolium the flower is cream-white and smells so strongly that at night moths and bats gather to it. The sources, though, disagree about the scent among themselves as well: the Sanskrit commentary on the “Govinda-lilamrita” calls karnikaras “special flowers with the scent of a lotus” – and that is already closer to the living tree than to the dictionary entry.

The name itself is not given to one tree alone. Monier-Williams and the “Shabda-sagara” give karnikara two owners at once – Pterospermum acerifolium and Cassia fistula, that is the amaltas, the “golden shower”, whose racemes are golden indeed. The commentator of the “Bhagavatam” Vamshidhara Pandit gives the same gloss, quoting the “Medini” dictionary: karnikara means both the aragvadha tree, that is the amaltas, and the “tree lotus”⁷. In Vraja the name is fixed to the first – to the one whose flower is not golden.