Neem Dreams

  by Inez Baranay

Published by Rupa (India) in 2003.  | ORDER YOUR COPY NOW |

Neem Dreams is a novel set in southern India in 1995. Four characters are linked through the neem, India's "miracle tree" and the issues of development, local and international, in the knowledge and uses of neem. 

Andy is an Englishman, a young lawyer, whose lover has recently died; he brings the ashes to the Ganges; he is seeking a cure for HIV and has heard that neem might be effective. Huge changes in his life are accelerated when he meets Pandora, an Australian eco-scientist, who has come to write an article on an exemplary village-based neem-planting women's development project. Author and co-ordinator of the project is Meenakshi, a young Indian woman, well-traveled and educated abroad, recently married to an idealistic young man who has taken over his family's small neem factory, which becomes the centre of both hindutva fundamentalist agitation and the plans of the trans-national cooperation that has the most neem patents. And Jade, an Australian working in New York, has come to buy neem skin care products to sell exclusively at a SoHo store. 

The past passions each of the four brings to their meeting in India are revealed in a web-like plot, with the neem tree acting as a kind of crucible for each as the novel draws to a startling climax. 

Recently the world has seen the emergence of a network of people concerned over the effects of globalization. The meaning of globalization and its opposition are widely debated and the patents on neem often cited. Neem Dreams is a novel that gives voice to this concern.

India's neem tree is known there as the blessed tree because of its remarkable versatility. Its bark, leaves and seeds are used to treat a wide range of diseases, its oil is a potent insecticide, its twigs are used by millions as an antiseptic toothbrush, its timber is chemically resistant to termites. Now US and Japanese firms have taken out more than a dozen patents on neem-based formulas, angering Indian scientists and farmers, who fear centuries of indigenous experimentation and research will be effectively expropriated. 

The Ecologist, November-December, 1994