What makes humans throw flowers at another? What must have begun as a tic has now solidified into a ritual — we are throwing fresh flowers at gods and goddesses, at people during their weddings, at dead bodies on their way to the crematorium. The list of flower-throwing occasions grows with each day, with inventions of social occasions to fit the capitalist calendar.

It’s a peculiar conundrum. Flowers, chosen for their obvious attractiveness to the eye, are thrown at the feet, often faces, of gods during worship. For many of us, that was our anaemic childhood rebellion against religion — aiming the flowers at different parts of the idols of worship, turning the statues into dartboards. A similar exercise at weddings of uncles, aunts and cousins, the sense of blasphemy and sacrilege replaced by mischief — the aim was to hit the faces of the bride and the groom. The joy of both these acts of flower-throwing is replaced by curiosity and second-hand sadness when watching the anonymous throw flowers at the hearse of the famous dead, the celebrity tag accompanying the departed till the end of life, like a surname. After the first flush of naiveté — did the deceased feel the (need for) flowers? — I began to wonder what it was that this was meant to do.

To arrange for bouquets to be delivered is one thing, to arrange for a proxy flower-thrower is quite another. But it is true that sometimes the task of throwing flowers is outsourced. ‘Baharo phool barsao, mera mehboob aaya hai ...’ sings Rajendra Kumar in the film Suraj (1966). Not humans but ‘nature’, the season and its offerings, must throw flowers on the lover. Unsure about whether ‘nature’ gets his verbal instructions, Kumar throws a flower at Vyjayanthimala. Taking a cue, nature, with a little help from the florist and the art director, begins throwing flowers at the actress, who is literally untouched — and unhurt — by those.

Why is the contact of flowers with the body important to humans? Is it the uncertainty, the locus of where the flowers might fall, that makes this a ritual common and attractive to all cultures? In these too are the hierarchies of the body — the flowers are meant to be thrown at two ends of the body, not in between. Not the chest, not the belly, not the knees or thighs, and certainly not the genitalia. Only the head and feet, no matter whether god or human. (No flowers are thrown at animals, not pets, not those in the wild. The beauty of flowers, their obvious glamour and their fragrance, must be reserved for the higher form — the human and his gods.)

The Renaissance literature of England is strewn — yes, I couldn’t resist using the word — with examples of flower-throwing: not just humans but ‘nature’, in some odd examples of pathetic fallacy, throws flowers. That they don’t hurt must be one of the reasons why flowers are thrown. Or we might have been throwing fruits at each other, like they do in Spain’s La Tomatina festival. I say fruits only because I am imagining that throwing animals and people as a mark of appreciation might only be slightly more cumbersome than throwing flowers. Leaves are thrown too, alone or along with flowers, as in Hindu worship. Throwing flowers must count as one of the most non-utilitarian of human habits — for the arts, music and literature might be discounted grudgingly on the utilitarian scale as having aesthetic value but throwing flowers? What value could it have?

Banksy, the England-based graffiti artist, turned the act into a political statement with his image of a protester throwing flowers. It’s been called by various names — ‘Rage, Flower Thrower’; ‘Flower Bomber’; ‘Protester Throwing Flowers’. Featured prominently in Banksy’s book Wall and Peace (2005), it shows a man, his face half-hidden behind a scarf, his body resembling the angle of a catapult, about to release a bomb or an equivalent from his grasp. It’s an architecture of violence that’s been handed down to us from our visual conditioning of watching wars — students, protesters, amateurs fighting professional soldiers. Banksy is said to have been inspired by Judyth Hill’s poem, ‘Wage Peace’ in creating this image: ‘Wage peace with your breath,’ the poem begins; then this line — ‘Remember your tools: flower seeds, clothes pins, clean rivers’. Wage peace, not war. Throw flowers, not bombs.

‘Breathe in confusion and breathe out maple trees.’ As I read this line from Hill’s poem I find myself thinking of the chinar trees in Kashmir, often likened to the maple for its outrageous range of colours in autumn, and I wonder, with an unaccountable mix of hope and nervousness, how it might have been had flowers been thrown instead of pellets. Kashmir ki Kali.

( Treelogy is a monthly column about plant life, aesthetics, politics, and memory )

Sumana Roy , author of How I Became a Tree, writes from Siliguri; @SumanaSiliguri

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