By Ritambhara
Surapala’s kunapajala tree manure is the best-known recipe in his Vrikshayurveda, a Sanskrit verse treatise on the care of trees and garden plants. The text runs to 325 verses and deals with about 170 species. One of its chapters explains how to brew a fermented liquid feed from animal remains and pour it around the roots of trees.
Little is known of the author. In the final verse Surapala calls himself a physician at the court of a ruler named Bhimapala, whose identity is uncertain. Scholars place the work around the 10th or 11th century CE. A manuscript survives in the Bodleian Library at Oxford. Nalini Sadhale translated it into English for the Asian Agri-History Foundation in Secunderabad in 1996, with scientific commentaries by K L Mehra, S M Virmani and Y L Nene.
A physician’s method for sick trees
Surapala treats plants the way an Ayurvedic doctor treats patients. He sorts tree diseases into internal disorders, caused by imbalances of vata, pitta and kapha, and external damage from insects, cold and smothering creepers. Each kind has its own remedy. For insect attack he prescribes a week of cold-water irrigation, water mixed with oil cake, and dustings of ash or brick powder. Trees with yellowing leaves receive water mixed with barley, wheat, honey and milk for seven days. These remedies follow chapters on soil types, seed treatment, spacing and transplanting, so the book reads as a working manual for gardeners.
How the kunapajala recipe works
Kunapa means a corpse in Sanskrit, and the recipe uses what its name suggests. Surapala lists the dung, fat, flesh, marrow, brain and blood of a boar, mixed with water and kept underground for about a fortnight. The mixture is then boiled and enriched with sesame oil cake, honey, soaked black gram and ghee before use. He describes the result as highly nourishing for trees and recommends it for several disorders. Later Sanskrit works on gardening, including Sarangadhara’s Upavanavinoda of the 13th century, give versions of the same method.
What laboratory tests have found
Researchers have analysed modern batches made to the classical pattern. In a 2018 study in the Journal of Ayurveda and Integrative Medicine, Gireesh Ankad and colleagues brewed kunapajala from goat, chicken and fish for 30 days. It contained 1.82 per cent nitrogen and 0.90 per cent potassium, more than three times the levels they measured in farmyard manure. Ashwagandha seeds treated with it germinated at 82.7 per cent. That came close to the 84 per cent recorded under chemical NPK fertiliser and stood well above the 72.5 per cent of untreated seeds.
The soil it was meant to feed
India’s farmland now lacks the organic matter that Surapala’s recipe returned to the soil. The Centre for Science and Environment analysed government Soil Health Card data in a 2025 report. It found that 48.5 per cent of samples tested in 2023-25 were low in organic carbon. Organic carbon helps soil retain water and nutrients, and it feeds the microbes that release those nutrients to roots.
Surapala’s recipe turned animal waste into food for plants. His treatise asks farmers and planners today to treat such waste as a resource for depleted soil, and to test old methods with the same care he gave to sick trees.
