Virupakshi Bananas & Pazhani Panchamrutham

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While I’m on the subject of bananas, here’s another beloved variety: the virupakshi/virupatchi vazhai, Musa Sapidisiaca, more commonly known just as mala-pazham or “hills banana” owing to the fact that it is native to and grows wholly in the lower Palani hills of Dindigul district, Tamil Nadu, at elevations of several thousand feet. It got its name “Virupakshi” from the town where banana growers would once bring their banana stalks to market. It’s a rain-fed banana, grown as a shade tree for coffee plantations, but providing a substantial income for farmers nonetheless: virupakshi is among the more special and expensive of banana varieties.

The virupakshi is a thick-skinned, slender and sometimes almost angular banana that looks like it may never ripen, but even barely yellow-green skins give way to a firm, sweet, and flavorful little fruit. Among the many banana types that my father would always bring home from the market, or bring to us on visits to Pondicherry was the virupakshi banana. Therefore, too, I suppose, my fondness for the mala-pazham.

The virupakshi was GI-tagged in 2008, but there are at least two other reasons this banana is special. Most folks will know that this specific banana is the key ingredient in the famous “Palani [or Pazhani] Panchamrutam,” for reasons I’ll get to shortly. Far fewer will know that this banana was once saved by science.

Tissue Cultured Virupakshi

From cultivation over an area of some 18,000 hectares in the 1950s, Virupakshi planting areas reduced nearly 90% in the 1990s thanks to the Banana Bunchy Top Disease or BBTD, transmitted by the banana aphid [Pentalonia nigronervosa]. The virus causes new banana leaf growth to be narrower than normal, more yellowed and flatter, causing a “bunching” appearance at the top of each plant. Leaves become spotted and dashed, as though over-written with morse code, and fruit is deformed.

The disease was first identified in Fiji in 1879, and has spread many ways since, being enough of a concern in Africa to prompt the formation of the Alliance for Banana Bunchy Top Disease Control. In the Palani hills, the virupakshi banana is said to have been on the verge of extinction in the 1990s, BBTD being controlled only by applications of kerosene on diseased banana mats.

Enter the Tamil Nadu Hill Banana Growers’ Federation or TNHBGF [a farmers’ association], the Indian Council for Agricultural Research-National Research Centre for Banana/ICAR-NRCB in Trichy, the Tamil Nadu Agricultural University/TNAU and other state agencies, who, with the support of Jain Irrigation R&D [a company many locals here will know just as “Jain pipes”] developed a tissue culture protocol for the regeneration of healthy banana plants as part of the “Hills banana rejuvenation project.” Two methods were apparently used, though there appears some scientific disagreement on which is the more efficient: sword suckers came from virus-free and true-to-type mala-pazham plants from the germplasm of Jain R&D farms (Karule et al 2016), and “embryogenic cell suspensions (ECS) [were] developed from immature male flower[s]” (Selvarajan and Uma n.d.). From these, explants were prepped, sterilized and transferred to multiplication media, and monitored for the emergence of regenerated plantlets. Farmers were incentivized to remove infected banana mats, and free, virus-free plants were distributed en masse. So it was that the virupakshi was slowly returned to “more than 10,000 acres in the valleys and hills of the Palani range” [though numbers sometimes vary depending on sources].

The TNHBHF was awarded the Plant Genome Savior Community Award 2010-11 for this rejuvenation effort and for their initiatives to get the Virupakshi and its ecotype cousin, the Sirumalai. Shaker Nagarajan, president of the TNHBHF, tells us of the importance of location to the fruit produced there: “a Virupakshi banana plant grown in the Sirumalai Hills will produce only a Sirumalai variety of banana, and one grown in the Shevaroy Hills will produce only a Ladan banana, which is a big fruit, not very sweet, and fetches only a third of the price of a Virupakshi. The Sirumalai banana is sweet and its pulp juicy, and the price compares well with that of the Virupakshi” [Source]. 

I’m admittedly often skeptical of the interventions of science to develop disease-resistant and high-yielding strains that appear, in the long history of rice anyway, to have done little more than line the pockets of big-agro companies, create wide-open nitrogen cycles, contribute to soil degradation and snip ties with many older farming practices. The Virupakshi rejuvenation collaboration, however, appears to have followed a different model, not least because it also involved growers, and therefore to hold greater promise. A similar approach is apparently being used now to rescue two other niche banana varieties: the Karuvazhai and Numaran, grown in homesteads by Kolli-Malai tribals. The problems there are compound: in addition to bunchy top, also fusarium wilt [the dreaded Panama wilt] and more [Source].

Pazhani Panchamrutam

The other reason for the special-ness and value of the virupakshi banana? Pazhani [or Palani] Panchamrutam, of course: the Tamil பழனி is transliterated both ways. This is an uncooked mixed-with-fingers jam-like preparation famously used to perform the abhisekam, or ritual bathing of consecrated statues, at the Dhandayuthapani Swamy Murugan temple in Pazhani, central Tamil Nadu situated around where the Western Ghats begin and where the Virupakshi is traditionally grown. The temple is one of the Āṟupadai veedu or six abodes of Murugan. Its abhishekam is usually made of the following specific ingredients: virupatchi bananas, Khandasari (or kandasani) sugar from the Kangeyam area near Coimbatore, honey, dates, rock candy (kalkandu), raisins, and finally cardamom or camphor and cow ghee. The bananas and then the other ingredients are ideally mashed by hand—clean hands and a clean heart, and no utensils used.

The flavor of the virupakshi banana, its characteristic sweetness, and its somewhat dry character and long shelf-life are each critical, both to conferring taste as well as to ensuring longer preservation. Use a sirumalai or a karpooravalli in place of the virupakshi, and the panchamrutam will spoil much faster as those are “jucier” bananas by far. When you’re making a temple offering that needs to keep and be distributed to devotees who then may carry it long distances, a longer keeping time is an important feature!

Ingredient proportions are also important to preservation and storage. The temple proportions for this prasadam are as follows:

1. Plantains 100 numbers
2. Kandasani sugar 10 kgs
3. Dates 1 kg
4. Sugar candy 500 giris
5. Kismis (raisins) 500 giris
6. Ghee 250 giris
7. Cardamom 25 giris

Note the proportion of khandasri sugar to the actual bananas — even 10 bananas should take, therefore, 1 kg of sugar, suggesting that it’s not as much the banana acting as preservative but the sugar. Both the consistency of the panchamrutam and this use of sugars as preservatives likely lead to its being thought of as a “jam,” though the use of that descriptor is probably a much more modern addition.

Note also that the temple recipe doesn’t use camphor but cardamom. I would think though that the addition of a small pinch of edible cardamom in home-preparations imparts a certain “temple flavor,” which I rather enjoy.

Legend has it that the presiding deity at the Pazhani temple was crafted by Boga Siddhar—a goldsmith, pharmacognocist of the 3rd-5th centuries BCE “today worshipped at that site in the Palani Hills of Tamil Nadu where he is said to have practiced and taught alchemy”—out of 9 poisons or navapashanam, distilled from a few thousand herbs. The belief is that when this panchamrutam is poured together with milk over the Murugan idol, the mixture dissolves trace elements of the “navapashana,” making the resulting prasadam distributed to devotees a potent antidote to diseases old and new.

[Bogar or Siddhar Boganathar also characterized pirandai and is thought to be either 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 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].]

Pazhani panchamrutam is only the second temple prasadam after the famous Tirupati laddoos to receive a GI-tag, so specific are its constituent ingredients, proportions, method of preparation, and purported healing qualities. Though I suppose it must be the only GI-tagged food to use itself a GI-tagged key ingredient! And it, too, owes the certainty of its continued existence to the farmers of the Palani hills and the scientists who tissue cultured the virupakshi banana back to its present health.

Sources

1. Karule P., Dalvi V., Kadu A., Chaudhari R., Subramaniam V. R.*, and Patil A.B. 2016. “A commercial micropropagation protocol for virupakshi (AAB) banana via apical meristem.” African Journal of Biotechnology 15/11: 401-407.
2. Selvarajan R. and Uma, S. n.d. “REJUVENATION OF HILL BANANA (VIRUPAKSHI; GI-124) FROM BANANA BUNCHY TOP VIRUS IN TAMIL NADU“
3. White, David Gordon. 1996. The Alchemical Body: Siddha traditions in medieval India. Chicago: University of Chicago Press