Four stories and Pirandai Saadam

Let me tell you the story of Chinna Ponnu first, or how I got a pirandai plant.

I met Chinna Ponnu on one of Auroville’s main thoroughfares one day, while searching around for a pirandai plant that I had seen growing wild in one particular location. But when I got there to take a cutting, I found it was gone. Two old village paatis [grandmothers] nearby were observing my movements keenly. They volunteered that the plant had all been taken by someone else. Then they told me where to find more.

I thanked them and walked in the specified direction–but found no wild pirandai, only houses with neatly tended and fenced gardens. I looked back in the direction of the paatis, who were now gesturing energetically towards a nearby house–in whose garden, behind a high fence, indeed, was a vigorously climbing pirandai vine.

I realized only then that I’d been put up to a bit of theft by two village mischief-makers, but, like a petty felon too far gone, I pinched a segment off the pirandai vine and walked as casually away from there as I could.

Back on the safety and deniability of the road, I was ready to scold the ladies, but one of the two paatis lost no time demanding recompense for having, after all, helped me to accomplish my task: a lift, in the direction we were headed, after all. Well, then. Embarrassed and a touch annoyed at the little escapade the two had set up for me, “wear your mask,” I growled. The paati obliged, shuffled into the back seat and we chatted about this-that until it was time to drop her off.

“What is your name, ‘mma?” I asked, the familiarity begot by our short shared car-ride having cut through my irritation.

You have to imagine the woman’s face at this moment because I had no camera and it was not a moment for a photograph anyway. Village paati in an old, crumpled soft cotton sari; dull gold earrings and a large-ish nose ring with what were likely imitation stones. Greying hair pulled tightly back into a characteristic knot; dark, wrinkled skin, and a countenance that now broke wide into a gleaming-white-and-betel-red-stained grin, like she knew already the punchline of the joke she was about to crack: Chinna ponnu, she said. Small girl.

We both burst out laughing at the obvious incongruity. Small girl she was not but ever would be because someone called her that in her younger days and nobody ever stopped. And small girl involved in petty pirandai theft she certainly had been, making me one of her kind, too.

I’ve thought of the pirandai in my garden as “chinna ponnu” ever since.

TWO: What’s this pirandai anyway?

Pirandai [பிரண்டை, but colloquially pronounced perandai] is Cissus quadrangularis L., the adamant creeper, square-stalked vine, Devil’s backbone, veldt grape, hadjod in Hindi, vajravalli and asthisamharaka in Sanskrit–this is one of those ultra-local ingredients that defies the boundaries of food and medicine. Or asserts that there isn’t one. Its known medicinal properties are a formidable range with bone setting, fracture healing and the treatment of osteopathic disorders being the foremost on a list that also includes treating inflammatory swelling and arthritic and rheumatic pains, gastric disorders (particularly flatulence–it’s a carminative–and heartburn), piles and hemorrhoids and buttressing intestinal health as a whole; relief from low back pain during menses, preventing arterial build-up and promoting heart health. And weight loss! Everything but fixing the kitchen sink?

There is a saying, attributed to Bogar, which many Tamilians will readily quote: “வைரம் பிரண்டை சாற்றில் பொடியாகும் என்று போகர் கூறினார்” [vairam pirandai chaattril podiyaagum, yendru Bogar choorinaar]: in the juice of pirandai, diamonds become powder, said Bogar. While scientists at lab benches figure out the precise mechanism by which pirandai mineralizes and stimulates osteoblastic activity, we know from the ancient alchemists that consuming it makes your bones hard and unbreakable, like diamond. This also the origin of the name vajravalli—diamond creeper–and possibly also the reason why pirandai is called the “Devil’s backbone,” for the unbreakable strength it confers. Incidentally, it’s also calcium rich and a source of immune boosting ascorbic acid (vitamin C).

Aside: Who was this Bogar, you’re wondering? Those are fascinating tales unto themselves. Bogar or Siddhar Boganathar is said to have lived between the 3rd and 5th centuries and “is today worshipped at that site in the Palani Hills of Tamil Nadu where he is said to have practiced and taught alchemy. Traditions concerning Bogar cast him either as a Chinese philosopher who came to India for the study of medicine, traveling first to Patna and Bodhgaya before taking up residence in Madras; or as a south Indian Sittar, who traveled to China and taught alchemy to a ruler named Kong (his disciple Konganar, according to Sittar tradition) before returning to south India” [White, 1996].

Pirandai’s properties are an impressive array, and so is the plant itself not just one thing. The most common variety is of course gives the plant its name: quadrangularis, for the 4 angles of its stem. In Tamil, கிருட்டி kirutti, the square-stalked, is synonymous with pirandai. But there are others: patta pirandai [the name indicates a flatter variety], uruta/urundai pirandai [a rounder variety], muppirandai [a 3-angled variety], kalipirandai, theempirandai, puli pirandai, olai pirandai [also a rounded variety], sathura pirandai, vaalai pirandai, inipu pirandai [a sweeter variety], and possibly many more. [I have some doubts about whether these names overlap, with uruta~ and olai~ being the same plant, and patta~ and mu~ possibly being the same, too.] Of these, olai pirandai and muppirandai are prized for medicinal potency and found more in hillier areas, though it’s the kirutti or common pirandai that is, well, most common and with the most wide growing area in almost all Indian states.

Below are images of the kirutti/common pirandai [courtesy Chinna Ponnu] and what I believe is ஓலைப்பிரண்டை, olai pirandai [courtesy a farmer in Madurai], both now happily growing in my garden:

The “veldt grape” name had me though: it’s so very Afrikaans, but we use the name liberally without once asking what African local knowledge or histories might be therein contained. The “grape” part is easily explained: the vine’s fruits are small and grape-like, down to the deep burgundy they turn when ripe. But for knowledge from the veldt [Afrikaans for grassland, loosely], I hunted about, asked others who typically know about these things [in particular Marie Viljoen and Ozoz Sokoh], but we all hit dead-ends fairly fast. The most I found was that the veldt grape ranks among the most popular plants used to control cattle ticks in Limpopo province and the semi-arid areas of Zimbabwe [it’s malongekanye in Tshivenḓa], for wound healing and skin diseases in South Africa, and that “Cissus quadrangularis L., which is known as Ogbakiiki among the Yoruba and called Da’ddori among the Hausa both in Nigeria, West Africa, is one effective herb used in reducing inflammation and fracture pain with considerable healing capacity” [Source]. In India, too, topical uses of pirandai are well-known: pastes of the stems used as compresses for joint pains and fracture-healing [Source]. Also, Harisha RP recounts: “My father had discovered another therapeutic property of narale [as pirandai is called in Kannada]. He would boil its old stems along with pepper seeds, garlic, red chilies and a pinch of asafoetida, and grind them into a paste. He would then mix the paste with water in 1:2 ratio and feed the concoction to the cattle to cure leptospirosis disease” [Source]. So there’s some overlap between South/West African and Indian understandings, at least, even if this knowledge seems more lost than extant in those African regions.

If anyone reading this has access to People’s Plants: A guide to useful plants of Southern Africa and can look up Cissus quadrangularis in it for me–I’d be over the moon.

THREE: The Doctrine of Signatures

Those of you who speak Indian languages will have noted already that the properties of pirandai are conveyed in its given names: hadjod, bone-joiner; vajravalli, diamond creeper; asthisamharaka, that which saves bones from destruction. Common descriptions of pirandai likewise often note the resemblance of the pirandai’s segments and joints to animal bones and joints–and then read those morphological signs as the plant’s method of communicating its utility.

Back up a bit. Can we do that, really? Read a plant’s physical form and attributes as signs of its properties? Even further, can we presume that the siddhars and other ancients knew as they did about the plant world by simply reading plants as though they were semiotic assemblages?

It is an old belief, with origins more Christian and Greek than Indic, that “form recapitulates function” (Bennett 2007) or that plants carry God’s “signatures” as clues to their curative properties: the famously asserted and criticised “doctrine of signatures.” Pirandai is a classic example of this, but there are others offered. Vallarai keerai/ brahmi/ Centella asiatica leaves resemble a brain, so the plant delivers jnana shakti or memory power. The yellow flowers/yellow decoction of குமட்டிக்காய்/தும்மட்டிக்காய் [kummati or thummati-kai] /bitter apple/Citrullus colocynthis, used to treat jaundice or manja kamalai [literally, yellow loss of interest (in food): kamam illai] in India [Source, fn. 22, 27, 119]. And all this harmonizing with the Gujarati belief that patients with jaundice must be fed yellow foods like jalebis and chana dal [my thanks to Sheetal Bhatt for the insight].

“Modern herbals, pharmacopoeias, textbooks, and peer—reviewed literature are nearly universal
in condemning DOS,” says Bennett, examining the historical criticisms of the doctrine of signatures in a 2007 essay–and “fewer scholars interpret DOS in a positive light.” His approach is less dismissive, however. He asks a few questions, and evaluates each.

1. Does the doctrine of signatures truly help in the rediscovery of new medicinal plants? (Not really. Plants with heart shaped leaves are “no more likely to be used [in the treatment of cardiac conditions] than an arbitrarily selected one.”
2. What about post-hoc signature attribution? (Many signatures were attributed after the plant’s medicinal value was already known. Even Ganesh Babu who likens Centella asiatica‘s leaf shape to the brain says this: “Our ancestors gave  local names to plants after a lot of thought.”)
3. Aren’t the signatures themselves rather subjective? They’re what the beholder sees, after all, and therefore also elastic, inconsistent, and, indeed, fanciful. (I’m thinking here of the post-hoc attribution of the botanical name Clitoria ternatea for the beautiful butterfly pea or shanku pushpam, the vast distance between that somewhat sexualized interpretation and our entirely different Indian ones, and feeling rather grateful the shape of the flower wasn’t read by those assigning its Latin name as anything more than descriptive).
4. And finally, Bennett’s concluding proposition: whether the DOS wasn’t in fact a “mnemonic distillate of what must have been considerable experience”–and practically, a memory tool “essential to the viability of knowledge transmission.”

That last rings true: once a Hindi-speaker knows pirandai as hadjod, s/he’s likely never to forget its value in bone setting. Pirandai’s morphology didn’t tell us anything, but once we knew its value, we used the limb-like structure of the plant to pin its properties. Same with vajravalli, naming as a pinning of meaning, except that there’s nothing physically diamond-like about the plant at all!

FOUR: Why Pirandai Sadam?

There are of course many things one could do to get pirandai on the table and into everyday diets. A thuvaiyal or chutney would be the easiest option, especially if there’s not much pirandai. Pirandai rasam is another favorite. Old applam or pappad-making traditions often made use of pirandai juice, ensuring that miniscule doses of the vine would be routinely included in daily meals by way of the obligatory applam. Pirandai uppu (technically, an ash prepared out of pirandai) is also popular, but that is more strictly as medicine—more on that later. And then there is pirandai sadam.

Pirandai saadam is a kalanda sadam or a “mixed rice” variety made by combining what is essentially a pirandai thuvaiyal with rice, It is the traditional naivedhyam at the Tirumeeyachur Lalithambika temple near Mayiladudurai.

There it is Shiva as Lord Meghanatha who is the presiding diety, but it is Lalithambika who is more sought and worshipped. She is who destroys the demon Pandasura but resides here in the regal but softer form of Durga known as Manonmani. From Her have come the vak devatas or vasinis–dieties of words, who first recited the Lalitha Sahasranamam, and when the sage Agastya and his wife Lopamudra sought audience with the Goddess via a Lalitha Sahasranama recital, She appeared in the form of the Navarathna or nine gems. So it has become customary to recite the Lalitha Sahasranamam here, or to visit the temple before commencing to learn it.

Tirumeechayur is also the birth place of Garuda [Vishnu’s mount], Aruna [the charioteer of Sun], the monkey kings Vali and Sugriva, Saneeswara and–what concerns us here most–Yama. For it is said that the deity of death himself brought pirandai to earth from heaven and made the first offering to Shiva Meghanatha of pirandai sadam on a lotus leaf–a practice devotees follow to this day, in search of health and longevity. It is as though mimicking the devotional gestures of the lord of death wards off his arrival just that much longer.

For pirandai brought in Yama’s hands acquires a remarkable stubbornness: the plant can remain, without soil and water, for weeks on end. It is quite literally an adamant creeper. It wants to live, to endure. It clings to life. It just does not die.

Prepping pirandai & making kalanda sadam

“It costs just Rs.20 for a pirandai kattu [bunch] here,” I remarked to the lady who helps out with daily cooking (but who balks at pirandai because the oxalate concentration in its nodes and corners causes contact dermatitis). I am cutting out the nodes and peeling corners and skin from bunches of pirandai freshly bought from the market, my hands liberally smeared with coconut oil to protect against contact.

“It costs just Rs. 20 for a pirandai kattu which is so good for you, but Rs. 700 and up for a pizza which really isn’t.”

“Where you’re standing pirandai used to grow wild,” she replies, referring to the land as it had been this side of Pondicherry town before Tsunami quarters and apartment buildings mushroomed. “But nobody used it. And nobody taught us how to use it.”

“You’re taking care to eat these things regularly,” she continued, “My patis would also say it’s good to eat. But they’d want meen kuzhambu [fish gravies] in the end.”

The distance between what you know, what you know you should do, and what you actually (are able to) do is always that wide. What does it take to bridge it?

For me it’s coconut oil and time stolen away from a hundred other things, but a kind of measured pause that I’ve come to quite enjoy–call it procrastination if you like, but it keeps me closer to how I want to live. Especially at this edge of 50, pirandai feels like something I need, and it promises such all-in-one restoration, the fact that it takes an hour of my morning just to prepare is something I can hardly complain about.

Pirandai sadam is essentially a thuvaiyal-like-chutney that’s mixed with rice, so the thuvaiyal can simply be eaten on its own or leftovers can be revived by mixing with rice. Since I was trying to mimic the temple naivedyam, however, I’ve written the recipe below to be made fresh but this is a versatile prep. Add coconut or not, depending on how long you want the rice to keep (temple preparations wouldn’t have any to ward against spoilage). I have also used kudampuli or “naattu puli” [Malabar tamarind, Garcinia Cambogia, sourced from here] just because that’s a traditional alternative to tamarind in this dish, but it can be made with ordinary tamarind, too.

However you decide to make it, think of Chinna ponnu and village life and all the simple carefree mischief there once was in the lands now overcrowded not with so many varieties of wild pirandai but with tenements and parking lots and IT jobs. Think of how your mother carried you, or you’ve carried your young children on your hip all around gardens full of beautiful distractions, feeding you balls of soft rice mashed with dal and maybe a little something else for taste, saying “Amma mudda, Nanna mudda, Avva mudda….”–one morsel in the name of each family member. Think of the bone-like nodes and dendrite branching of pirandai and plant mnemonics that help us remember their multiple properties. Think of temple legends that extol the offerings even of the God of Death as invaluable to health and life. Stick a cutting in a pot and see how perfectly easily pirandai grows just about wherever you could place it. Could you do that? Think of the life the pirandai calls you to lead.

Sources

1. Bennett, Bradley C. 2007. “Doctrine of Signatures: An Explanation of Medicinal Plant Discovery or Dissemination of Knowledge?” Economic Botany 61(3): 246-255.
2. van Wyk, Ben-Erik and Michael Wink. 2004. Medicinal Plants of the World: An illustrated scientific guide to important medicinal plants and their uses. Boston MA: CABI
3. White, David Gordon. 1996. The Alchemical Body: Siddha traditions in medieval India. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.