There are places that one associates with Calcutta — or Kolkata — but in reality they are not situated in the city. Take Howrah Station, for example. The red-brick train terminus lies across the River Hooghly in the district of Howrah, and is connected to the city by the iconic Howrah Bridge. Then there is the historic botanical garden — named after Jagadish Chandra Bose as recently as in 2009 — which also lies across the river in Howrah.
The garden dates back to the time when the British were still traders in India. It was set up in 1787 — thirty years after Robert Clive won the Battle of Plassey and consolidated East India Company’s hold over Bengal — by Robert Kyd, a lieutenant-colonel in the British Army who was known to have a personal interest in horticulture. In creating the garden he was driven not so much by nature as by the idea of commercial gain: he wanted to grow plants that would bring money to the company.
A botanist’s delight
Kyd died in 1793, aged 47. He had wanted the garden, which had over 4,000 plants by now, to be his final resting place but he was instead buried in Calcutta, at the South Park Street Cemetery. Over the years, the garden grew into a botanist’s delight with trees from all corners of the world taking root here.
Today, the botanical garden is counting ‘dead bodies’. On May 20, Cyclone Amphan tore through its 273-acre spread — containing 15,000 plants belonging to 1,300 species — felling hundreds of trees.
“There are so many dead bodies you can’t imagine. It is a painful sight. Until the other day these trees were with us, but now they are gone,” says Dr. Kanad Das, the garden’s joint director and head of office.
Only a botanist — or sensitive souls who consider plants as living beings — will refer to a fallen tree as a dead body. They recognise that trees take time to grow. People who plant a sapling don’t always live to see it fully grown. And the longer a tree lives, it becomes like the planet’s ‘family gold’, passed on from generation to generation. The demise of a tree that is a century or two old is, therefore, no less than catastrophic. And in the botanical garden, dozens of them, that had withstood countless storms, were toppled by Amphan.
The Great Banyan
Had the cyclone been slightly longer in duration and stronger in force, it would also have wiped out the garden’s biggest asset: the Great Banyan, which predates the establishment of the garden. It survived two cyclones in the 19th century and in 1925, its decayed main trunk was removed, but it continued to grow. According to Dr. Das, 15 to 20% of the tree was damaged by Amphan. “We may be able to salvage 5% of the part that is damaged.”
But many of its contemporaries are gone for good. Like the African baobab, brought from Madagascar. The tree has a lifespan of 6,000 years and can hold up to 500 litres of water. Then the numerous mahogany trees, some of them brought from the West Indies in 1795 by William Roxburgh, the botanist who, after Kyd’s death, moved from Madras to take charge of the garden as its first full-time superintendent.
The mahogany trees, when they fell, also crushed several species of bamboo. Amphan’s other victims include the ‘mad tree’, whose leaves were differently shaped from one another, and a mountain rose from Venezuela. “The cyclone has done to the garden what COVID-19 has done to Italy and Spain,” says Dr. Das.
More ‘bodies’ are likely to be discovered once the damage-assessment takes place in full swing. The garden, which comes under the Ministry of Environment and Forests, is short of staff at the moment because the area around it has been declared a containment zone due to the spread of COVID-19. “It won’t be proper on my part to ask them (staff) to join duty when restrictions are in place,” says Dr. Das. As of now, two small teams are examining the extent of damage. They are at a loss because they are unable to figure out where to begin: Everybody is in a state of daze. “It’s a hotchpotch at the moment,” says Dr. Das. Lucky are those who have ticked the garden in their list of must-visit places. For when it reopens, it will no longer look the same. It’s like the botanical equivalent of the Taj Mahal being wiped off the face of earth. For it to look the way it did until May 20, it could take another 200 years.
