Punnaga

The Tree in Vrindavan

The night of the rasa-lila has ended, and Krishna has vanished. The gopis, maddened by separation, wander the forest and, finding no trace of the Beloved, begin to ask the trees themselves. The ashvattha, the plaksha and the banyan do not answer – and then the girls turn to those that stand in flower; the commentators call these trees openhearted: they give nectar to their guests, the bees.

The Five Arrows of the God of Love

The choice of trees is not accidental. Narayana Bhatta Gosvami calls these five trees – the kurabaka, the ashoka, the nagakeshara, the punnaga and the champaka – the five arrows of the god of love directly, and Vallabhacharya explains why the gopis ask precisely these: Kama takes the flowers of these trees for his bow, and whoever breathes in their fragrance loses his head. And Vamshidhara Pandita singles out the punnaga among the five: it is tuṅga, “tall”, it sees further than the rest – so it is for it to answer. But the gopis find fault even with the names: “naga” means “snake” or “elephant”, and “punnaga” is that very “elephant among men”, in the commentaries even a “bull-elephant”; the names are frightening, ill-omened¹.

So the punnaga enters the memory of Vraja as a tree called upon in longing. And it is also called the favourite tree of Krishna. In the play Vidagdha-Madhava of Srila Rupa Gosvami the elder guide Paurnamasi speaks up for the girls before Him: “Why are Radha and the gopis now criminals? They will only steal a few flowers from Your favourite punnaga tree”². Behind the jest the second meaning already glimmers – the flowers plucked “from the punnaga” are plucked from Him Himself.

And in the poems of the Gosvamis the whole of Vrindavan is planted with punnaga. Its rows, the punnāga-vīthī, stretch along the path that leads from the slope of Govardhan to the Yamuna³, bowers of punnaga stand on the bank of the river, and in the kunjas, where trees and vines grow in pairs, embracing one another, the punnaga is given a flowering vine for its pair – the madhavi or the malati⁴.

A Name with a Double Bottom

Punnāga is both a flowering tree and “the best of men”, the puruṣottama, that is, Krishna. On this consonance, the śleṣa, a whole layer of the poetry of Vraja rests, and Srila Jiva Gosvami with Vishvanatha Chakravarti unfold it in their commentary on the Ujjvala-nilamani. There a friend of Radha, sending away an insistent vine, speaks with a hint:

The Play That Fills the Poetry

“The punnaga,” explains Vishvanatha Chakravarti, “is both the tree and Krishna, the best of men. And then Krishna appears: ‘O sakhi, I have heard your wish – come, I will show you the punnaga tree,’ – takes her by the hand and leads her to a bed of punnaga flowers.”

The Govinda-lilamrita of Srila Krishnadasa Kaviraja Gosvami is full of the same play. Now Radha seems to reach for a bud on a punnaga branch, while in fact she embraces Krishna. Now Lalita drops an ambiguity: it befits the madhavi vine to entwine the punnaga tree, the best of men, and not the other way round – it is the vine that holds to the tree⁵. And at last the vine and the tree are named outright:

Worship

The flowers of the punnaga are brought to the altar as well. The instruction to meditate on Vrindavan, which Srila Sanatana Gosvami quotes in the Hari-bhakti-vilasa, opens its list of the sacred trees of the abode with the punnaga precisely: “let him contemplate Vrindavan with the trees punnaga, naga, panasa, kanchana, bakula, bilva…”⁷ And in the list of flowers with which Hari is honoured, the punnaga stands beside the mallika, the malati, the jati, the ashoka and the champaka: whoever offers them with love is credited with the merit of giving ten gold coins for each flower⁸. And in Goloka itself, as Sanatana Gosvami paints it, the cowherd friends weave garlands for Krishna in which, among the flowers, are the naga, the punnaga and the champaka, and He puts them on and gives them out to His friends⁹.

Beyond Vraja

The punnaga grows on Vaikuntha itself as well. When the four Kumara sages enter the spiritual kingdom, they see there gardens of these same trees: mandara and kunda, kurabaka and champaka, punnaga, nagakeshara, bakula, parijata. All of them are fragrant, and yet they glorify not themselves but the tulasi – she whose garland the Lord wears upon His chest:

Ayurveda

Ayurveda knows the punnaga as a tree of coolness. Its taste (rasa) is astringent and sweet, its qualities light and dry, its potency (vīrya) cooling, its aftertaste (vipāka) sweet; by this it pacifies pitta and kapha.

The punnaga is taken for skin ailments and disorders of the blood, for burning and inflammations, for diarrhoea and dysentery, and the oil of the seeds is rubbed in for joint pain; a decoction of the bark, a powder and the oil are used. The classical compendia know it too: the Kaiyadeva-nighantu in the section on medicinal plants, the Raja-nighantu in the chapter named after the karavira.

Botany

The punnaga is Calophyllum inophyllum, a relative of the nagakeshara. It grows on stony and sandy sea shores, just above the tide line, and bears both brackish groundwater and salt wind well. The tree branches low and grows slowly, its crown is broad and irregular, its foliage dense and glossy. The stamens in the flower are many, sitting in four bundles, and for their fragrance these flowers go into perfume. The fruit is a round green drupe, wrinkled at ripeness, from yellow to brownish red, with a single large seed from which tamanu oil is pressed. In the south of India the tree is called punnai, ponna, honne.

And here a qualification is needed. The Sanskrit lexicons under the name punnāga name in the first place not this tree but one “from whose flowers a yellow dye is made”, and give it the name Rottleria tinctoria (the Shabda-sagara, the same in Benfey). The name is an old one: in botany it was written Rottlera tinctoria and has fallen out of use, while the present POWO checklist counts it a synonym of Mallotus philippensis – a tree of the spurge family that grows all over India, including the Himalayas, and yields the orange-red kamala dye.

Monier-Williams gives both identifications at once: “a plant (Rottleria tinctoria or Calophyllum inophyllum)”. For the calophyllum speak the southern names of the tree and the Ayurvedic compendia; against it, that it is strictly maritime and in India keeps to the southern coasts, while Vraja lies far from the sea. Which of the two trees stands in the verse of the gopis, botany does not decide.