A gnarly champa

I sat on an extremely comfortable stone bench on the porch of Hampi’s Vitthala temple. It was just past noon, and the day had got really warm. But a cool breeze blew through the porch. I didn’t feel like getting up. In the courtyard in front of me a gnarly champa tree had been planted too close to the temple, and had grown out at an angle before reaching out for sunlight. The almost bare tree made a pretty picture in the afternoon, and I craned to catch the tree and its shadow together.

This was the Plumeria obtusa, once a native of the Caribbean, but now so well established in Asia that you will surprise most people if you tell them that it is not native to this continent. This particular tree was probably very young; they grow fast. But I wondered whether the Vijayanagara kingdom ever saw the Champa. It could not have come here before Europeans landed in the Caribbeans. But who brought it to India? The history of southern India is so much more complex, gnarly, and branched than that of the north. It could have come from the west, carried by the Portuguese, or even before them by the Arabs. Or it could have come from the East, carried to China first and then diffusing through the continent. In the months after I took these photos I’ve searched on and off for the answer, without finding any. If you have some snippets of information it’ll be great if you leave a comment.