The Pala Tree and the Sundal Tree

In a previous post, 'Cracking the Sundal Tree Code,' published on 8/5/2013, I stated that the Sundal Harum Malam from Malay folklore was without doubt the Chempaka tree - Michelia champaca or Magnolia champaca. The Sundal Tree achieved notoriety by being associated with the pontianak; a female vampire (the pontianak is always female) who seeks shelter among its branches.

Apparently, I spoke (or wrote) too soon. A Facebook friend, Nadine Gregory, originally from the state of Kerala in India (she also lived in Kuala Lumpur for a number of years), informed me about a tree which grew in Kerala called the Pala tree. This tree bore night blooming flowers and had the reputation for being the abode of evil spirits and children were warned to stay away from the tree at night.

Alstonia scholaris, The Pala Tree

I thought, "Interesting, but the Pala is probably endemic to southern India."

I looked it up on Wikipedia and found out that the Pala, is also known as Ezhilam pala, Sharada, Yakshi pala, Daiva pala, Saptha parna in Sanskrit, and of all things, Devil tree in English!

More importantly, the plant is found throughout India and the Indomalaya region - all the way to Southern China (Hoa Sua), the Philippines and Queensland, Australia. In Thailand it is known as Phya Sattabahn. The scientific name is Alstonia scholaris. A member of the dogbane family, the milky sap of the tree is saturated with poisonous alkaloids.

The tree grows to a respectable 20 to 30 metres in height and bears masses of night blooming flowers, twice a year. The small greenish-white flowers give off a very strong fragrance, similar to that of Cestrum nocturnum, the Night Jessamine or Raat Ki Rani, which was my initial suspect for the title of The Sundal Tree. I had to discard this idea because C. nocturnum originates from South America.

According to Nadine, the fragrance of the Pala blooms is strong enough to produce headaches in susceptible people. Nadine Gregory's story: "Ezhilam paala. A seemingly innocuous tree with such a heady fragrance when in bloom at night that it invariably gave me a headache. It never helped that I'd heard hundreds of stories about beautiful long haired women in white who'd lurk under these trees asking young men for a match to light a beedi. Yes, you read it right. Beedi smoking femme fatale who'd morph into a vampire and suck young men's blood = yakshi. Women were always safe. Thank you, Malayalam movies for scarring me so deeply..." 
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I thought, 'This is it!' The local name of the tree itself, Yakshi pala, conjures up images of a blood thirsty seductress! In southern India, the yakshi is envisaged as an alluringly beautiful young woman who lure men to their death.

Blooms of  Pala/Sundal tree?

The traditional version of the story:
A man (usually from the upper castes) walking home at dusk, sees an extraordinarily beautiful woman who asks him for help. To add to her allure, the heady scent of a strange exotic flower fills the air around her. She is alone and afraid to walk home by herself. The man gallantly offers to escort her home. When they reach her house, which looks quite well appointed, the woman offers him a betel quid and asks for lime. They chew a betel quid each and enter her home. Once inside, the man is shocked to see her transform into a red-eyed fiend with claws and long nails. Even more terrifying, the house has disappeared and he is actually on the branches of a Pala tree (in some cases, palm tree, but I dismiss that idea offhand). In the morning, passersby are shocked to find teeth, nails and hair, all that is left of the man, on the ground below the tree, plus shoes and blood soaked clothes, of course.
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Does the story sound familiar? Exactly like the pontianak tales known throughout Malaysia a, Singapore and probably Indonesia too - just replace the yakshi with the pontianak and the Pala with the Sundal Tree. The yakshi from Kerala is a vengeful spirit of a woman who has been wronged, probably by an upper caste man, and who probably died before marriage or before childbirth. The pontianak is the vengeful spirit of a woman who died during childbirth. In more modern times, she is the vengeful spirit of a woman who has been through a tragic love affair. However, the pontianak, being a vampire, only drains the blood of men (in olden times, they feast on the afterbirth) while the yakshi actually devours them whole... Only one creature in folklore has an appetite like that, the wendingo of Native American folklore.

A Yakshi on the gateway to the Sanchi Stupa

However, we should note that in northern India, yakshi and yaksha (the male counterpart) are envisaged as nature sprites or tree spirits, closer to forest elves and dryads than to malevolent bloodthirsty vampires. They are fertility symbols and described as the 'fragrance under the bark or in the blossoms of flowers,' and completely vegetarian of course. Yakshas and Yakshis can even confer boons and blessings on the humans they favour...

Another Yakshi from Sanchi, this one is housed in the British Museum

So why is there such a discrepancy in the yakshi of the south and the north? Another Facebook friend, Jeeks Raj, mentioned the pisacha (literally 'eater of raw flesh'); a demon sometimes associated with night-blooming trees. This creature of the night is described as the vilest and most malignant order of malevolent beings. The pisacha haunts charnal grounds and cross-roads and feeds on human flesh and blood.  Is it possible that the yakshi of south India is in fact a pisacha, disguised as a yakshi?

Finally, is there any way to defeat or should we say, vanquish the yakshi/pisacha? Apparently they are undone by iron. An iron dagger or even a nail, will render them powerless, if not kill them outright. Oddly enough, there are folklore in Malaysia, that an iron nail, embedded into the nape of the neck of a pontianak will turn the vampire into an ordinary woman.

So is Alstonia scholaris the Sundal tree of folklore? Very likely...

The Pontianak, the Vampire and... the Sundal Tree

I admit to a long-standing fascination with vampire lore, which first started from childhood stories and movies about the pontianak. Back then, nothing could be more terrifying than a pontianak; but now, they seem to be sad creatures. According to old Malay folklore, women who die during childbirth were thought to turn into pontianaks if the proper rites and rituals were not observed. The modern variant of the pontianak folklore however maintains that they are the vengeful spirits of women who have been spurned in love and have taken their own life or women who have been murdered by their spurned lovers.

I vaguely remember that one of these funerary rites involved keeping an overnight wake to make sure that no cats (especially black ones) came anywhere near the body to awaken the spirit! The worst thing that could happen is for a cat to jump over the body as that will cause it to raise and walk among the living as one of the undead (in cultures as far-flung as Ancient Egypt and Thailand and also the Slavic countries, cats are thought to carry the spirit of the dead).

Available at http://www.mphonline.com

Not surprisingly, pontianaks are attracted to houses where a woman is about to give birth. They apparently feed on the blood and after-birth. To thwart the pontianak, it was common practice in the past to scatter thorns, nails and anything sharp on the ground below the houses (in the past, wooden houses were built above the ground on stilts). The modern-day pontianak however, prey mostly on men - as they seek out those who wronged them in life!

Another point to note is that pontianaks are said to be attracted to the sundal tree; a tree which bears white, heavily-scented night-blooming flowers. Pontianaks are thought to roost or seek shelter on sundal trees while waiting for a victim to pass by! Interestingly enough, the word sundal also refers to a woman of easy virtue. But what is a sundal tree? I'm asking this question because the sundal tree plays a role in my book, The Jugra Chronicles : Miyah and the Forest Demon.  Check out the review by Brigitte Rozario: http://parenthots.com/parents_corner/book_reviews/Wonderful-storytelling-in-Sarawak-tale.aspx
After an extensive internet search (and several false leads), it seems that the sundal could be one of the following trees:



the Frangipani/Champa/Bunga Kemboja

the frangipani (Plumeria sp), also known as champa in Laos and India, and bunga kemboja in Malaysia. This seems to be the ideal candidate as the frangipani is thought to be haunted by ghosts and demons in local folklore and often planted in cemetaries. But it is also known as the Temple Tree in Sri Lanka and often planted around Buddhist and Hindu temples. But the spanner in the works is that the Plumeria supposed to have originated in the New World! Apart from that, it has large sparse leaves - hardly a place for a creature of the night to hide. We had a large frangapani tree growing in the front yard of the house when we were living in Federal Hill, Kuala Lumpur but I never felt any supernatural energy from the plant!


Night Jessamine/Sundal tree?

The next candidate is the night jessamine (Cestrum nocturnum) also known as the Queen of the Night. The night jessamine seemed to have all the right attributes - a tree bearing large quantities of small white flowers which produce an overwhelming sickly sweet frangrance at night. But then again, it turns out to be a New World plant. Also the night jessamine is more of a large bush than a tree.

Parijat/Harsingar/Sundal?

The third candidate is the parijata or harsingar; other names for this flower are coral jasmine and night flowering jasmine. Nyctanthes arbor-tristis is also known as the sad tree or the tree of sorrow as its flowers are shed like tears, at the first light of dawn. The parijat is the only flower which can be picked from the ground to be given as offerings at temples; all other flowers have to be hand-picked from the plant. The parijat is also the state flower of Bengal. But the parijata is pure and unlikely to be the sundal tree

The fragrant tanjung blossoms are thought to be the tears of a faerie

Another flowering tree of note which is found throughout tropical Asia and Southeast Asia is Mimusops elengi. Known as the tanjung tree in Malaysia/Singapore and bakul/vakul tree in India. The tanjung flower or bunga tanjung appears frequently in Malay folklore, sometimes to represent a lost lover. There is an enchanting folktale about the tanjung flower, which like the parijat, is sweet-scented, blooms at night and is shed at the first light of dawn. According to the folktale, the flowers are actually the tears of a faerie, who was stranded in the forest because she was unable to find her magic selendang (a long scarf) which allowed her to return home. Similar folklore of stranded faeries (usually because someone has hidden her magic cloak) appears in many Asian cultures, from India to Japan. There is a re-telling of the Tanjung Blossom Faerie in my book, Timeless Tales of Malaysia. But the tanjung or vakul is the exact opposite of the sundal in folklore. It is considered as sacred by the Hindus and its frangrant 'flowers of paradise' are offered to both Vishnu and Siva as offerings. The flowers are also said to chase away evil spirits, unlike the sundal which is supposed to attract ghostly spirits!

My knowledge of Western vampire lore initially came from old Dracula movies played so menancingly well by Christopher Lee. But I admit to watching only one or two of those - there was just too much blood and the plot/story lacked finesse. I think Stephen King wrote a couple of books on vampires but his premise didn't make sense either - what was the point of turning an entire town into vampires if your main source of food happened to be living humans? Talk about eating yourself out of house and home!
It was Anne Rice and the movie that resulted from her book, Interview with a Vampire, who got me well and truly hooked into the genre. Finally, vampire lore that made sense - a small and very secret group who achieved immortality through an ancient bloodline; a vampire king and queen from ancient Egypt (see Queen of the Damned starring the tragic Aaliyah and the gorgeous Stuart Townsend).
However, my favourite vampire movie to date is Van Helsing; Peta Wilson also plays an extraordinary vampire in the role of Minnie Harker (a character from Bram Stoker's book Dracula) in the movie, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. But what got my pulse racing was the discovery that Count Dracula, a character created by Bram Stoker in his book Dracula (published in 1897) was actually based on a real person. Vlad Teppes or Vlad the Impaler, from Transylvania (in modern Rumania) whose father took the family name 'Dracul' which means 'dragon'. This information also triggered another memory... Malaysia's very own legend of Raja Bersiong or the Fanged King (for more info on Vlad Dracula and the Fanged King refer to the post on Raja Bersiong).