Apr 07, 2025 06:24 AM IST
A monumental bargad tree in Malcha Marg, Delhi, features massive, intertwined aerial roots and serves as a striking landmark amidst urban life.
Dozens of roots are suspended in mid-air, hanging down the bargad tree. Grained and hued like pale wood, the texture of these aerial roots exude resilience, as if toughened by time and climate. On touching it, the coarsened root does feel like wood. The roots are anyway tightly fused with one another. Impossible to disentangle one from its neighbour. The roots in fact seem to constitute the entire trunk of the tree, something common to bargads.
Anyhow, the trunk is massive. No photo can convey a true sense of its great bulk. You have to see it in real.
The extraordinary bargad stands at Malcha Marg Market. The sleepy Central Delhi place overlooks the residences of the capital’s super-privileged set. Its plazas host some of Delhi’s most scenic bargads and peepals. Not one of these trees however comes even close to the monumental scope of this roadside tree.
This afternoon, the ground around the bargad’s trunk is littered over with yellowing leaves. The tree stands on the footpath, close to a fancy restaurant with glass walls. The lunch-hour diners inside are clearly visible, manoeuvring their knives and forks.
The fused roots about the trunk recalls the jatas of Naga sadhus, their matted hair. A bargad’s aerial root begins like cotton threads that thicken after reaching down to the ground. Once anchored, the roots grow fast, merging together, virtually forming a secondary trunk—like this Malcha Marg bargad. It is huge, yet lilliputian when compared to certain bargads elsewhere in India. A 500-year-old bargad in Andhra Pradesh’s Anantapur is so massive that it is said to have a capacity of sheltering 20,000 people simultaneously under its shade.
Within Delhi, a few other places with impressive banyans include a stretch in CR Park, a back-lane in Kailash Colony, and an alley close to Gurugram railway station. Some stately bargads stand in the zoo as well, in a patch of land close to where the crocodiles are. As for the Malcha Marg bargad, a large traffic police banner is nailed on to the wrinkled trunk, declaring the shaded spot to be a tow away zone— “no parking no waiting no halting.” Soon, a white cab halts under the bargad.
