Tulasi, Peepal, Banana Plantain

Three botanical altars of the Hindu home, and the sciences quietly catching up to each one

The Hindu home does not stop at its walls. Three plants extend the altar into the courtyard, the threshold, and the wedding mandap. A small basil bush at the centre of a square pedestal. A heart-shaped fig leaf rustling at the temple gate. A green banana stalk lashed to the doorway on the morning of a wedding. Each is named in scripture, encoded in ritual, and now confirmed by botany the modern world is rediscovering one species at a time.

The Tulasi at the Centre of the Courtyard

In a small house in Madurai, sometime around 1994, a six-year-old girl is following her paati through the front door at five in the morning. The street is dark. The Meenakshi temple is half a kilometre away and its first bells have not yet rung. The paati is carrying a small brass uddharani, a tiny ladle of water, and a pinch of kumkum in her right palm. They walk the four steps to the centre of the courtyard, where a square stone pedestal stands waist-high. On top of the pedestal, in a clay pot, a small bushy plant with deep green leaves and tiny purple-tipped stalks is just beginning to catch the first light.

The paati pours the water at the base of the plant. She presses the kumkum to the trunk. She circles the plant three times, her right shoulder always toward it, her lips moving in something the girl cannot yet hear. She does not say it is Tulasi Maharani. She does not say the Padma Purana calls this plant the wife of Vishnu. She says only, "Always go round to the right. Never break a leaf without asking. The plant is older than the house."

Twenty-five years later, the same girl will see a "Holy Basil Indoor Wellness Plant" at a Whole Foods garden section in Toronto for forty-five Canadian dollars. The label will say "adaptogenic" and "stress-relieving." It will not say Tulasi. The girl will recognise the plant immediately. She had been circling it before she could read.

This lesson is about three plants the Hindu home treats as altars. Tulasi, the household basil that sits at the centre of the courtyard. Peepal, the Ficus religiosa that grows at the temple wall and the village square. Kadali, the banana plantain lashed to the wedding doorway. Each is named in scripture. Each carries a daily, weekly, or seasonal ritual. Each has now been quietly studied by modern botany and confirmed as ecologically and pharmacologically active in exactly the way the tradition suggested.