With tail-fans spread, and undulating wings
With whose vibrating pulse the air now sings,
Their voices lifted and their beaks stretched wide,
Treading the rhythmic dance from side to side,
Eyeing the raincloud’s dark, majestic hue,
Richer in colour than their own throats’ blue,
With necks upraised, to which their tails advance,
Now in the rains the screaming peacocks dance.
Subandhu6 (late sixth century AD) in his Vasavadatta is exuberant in his welcome of the monsoon:
The rainy season had arrived. Rivers overflowed their banks. Peacocks danced at eventide. The rain quelled the expanse of dust as a great ascetic quells the tide of passion. The chataka birds were happy. Lightning shown like a bejewelled boat of love in the pleasure-pool of the sky; it was like a garland for the gate of the palace of paradise; like a lustrous girdle for some heavenly beauty; like a row of nailmarks left upon the cloud by its lover, the departing day.
The rain was like a chess player, while yellow and green frogs were like chessmen jumping in the enclosures of the irrigated fields. Hailstones flashed like pearls from the necklaces of heavenly birds. By and by, the rainy season yielded to autumn, the season of bright dawns; of parrots rummaging among rice-stalks; of fugitive clouds. In autumn the lakes echoed with the sound of herons. The frogs were silent and the snakes shrivelled up. At night the stars were unusually bright and the moon was like a pale beauty.
Poet Vidyapati7 (1352–1448) of Mithila in the eastern state of Bihar used nature to highlight erotic scenes of love-making between Krishna and Radha. Of these many are set in the monsoon (page 57, verse 18):
How the rain falls
In deadly darkness!
O gentle girl, the rain
Pours on your path
And roaming spirits straddle the wet night.
She is afraid
Of loving for the first time.
O Madhava,
Cover her with sweetness.
How will she cross the fearful river
In her path?
Enraptured with love,
Beloved Radha is careless of the rest.
Knowing so much,
O shameless one,
How can you be cold towards her?
Whoever saw
Honey fly to the bee?
In another verse Vidyapati describes an empty house during the rainy season (page 100, verse 61):
Roaring the clouds break
And rain falls.
The earth becomes a sea
In a far land, my darling
Can think of nothing
But his latest love.
I do not think
That he will now return
The god of love rejects me.
A night of rain,
An empty house
And I a woman and alone
The streams grow to great rivers.
The fields lie deep in water.
Travellers cannot now reach home.
To all, the ways are barred.
May that god without a body
Strip me of my body too.
Says Vidyapati:
When he remembers, Krishna will return.
The prolonged monsoon can become tiresome for some people. Vidyapati writes about their predicament (page 110, verse 7):
Clouds break.
Arrows of water fall
Like the last blows
That end the world.
The night is thick
With lamp-black for the eyes.
Who keeps so late a tryst?
The earth is a pool of mud
With dreaded snakes at large.
Darkness is everywhere,
Save where your feet
Flash with lightning.
But all said and done, the season of rains is one of exultation (page 126, verse 87):
Clouds with lightning,
Lightning with the clouds
Whisper and roar.
Branches in blossom
Shower in joy
And peacocks loudly chant
For both of you.
Another body of literature where many references to monsoons can be found are Barahmasa (twelve months) composed by poets of northern India. We are not sure when the tradition of composing Barahmasa came into vogue but by the sixteenth century it had become well established and most poets tried their hand at describing the changing panorama of nature through the year. The Sikh’s holy scripture, the Guru Granth Sahib, has two Barahmasa (Punjabi version of Barahmasa) of which the one composed by the founder of the faith, Guru Nanak8 (1469–1539), Raga Tukhari9 has some memorable depictions of the weather.
Since the monsoons in Punjab break sometimes after mid-July Nanak first describes the summer’s heat in his verse on Asadh (June–July):
In Asadh the sun scorches
Skies are hot
The earth burns like an oven
Waters give up their vapours
It burns and scorches relentlessly
Thus the landfalls not
To fulfil its destiny
The sun’s chariot passes the mountain tops;
Long shadows stretch across the land
And the cicada calls from the glades.
The beloved seeks the cool of the evening.
If the comfort she seeks be in falsehood,
There will be sorrow in store for her.
If it be in truth,
Hers will be a life of joy everlasting.
Since monsoon is trysting time for lovers and thus engrossed they tend to forget their Maker, Nanak admonishes them in his verse of Bhadon (August–September):
In the month of Bhadon
I lose myself in a maze of falsehood
I waste my wanton youth
River and land are one endless expanse of water
For it is the monsoon the season of merry-making.
It rains,
The nights are dark,
What comfort is it to the wife left alone?
Frogs croak
Peacocks scream
The papeeha calls peeoh, peeoh’,
The fangs of serpents that crawl,
The stings of mosquitoes that fly are full of venom.
The seas have burst their bounds in the ecstasy of fulfillment.
Without the Lord I alone am bereft of joy
Whither shall I go?
Says Nanak, ask the guru the way
He knoweth the path which leads to the Lord.
The poetic tradition has continued to the present time. India’s only Nobel Laureate in literature, Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941), has two beautiful pieces in his most celebrated work, Gitanjali10 (page 11, verse 18 and page 14, verse 23):
Clouds heap upon clouds and it darkens
Ah, love, why dost thou let me wait outside at the door all alone?
In the busy moments of the noontide work I am with the crowd,
But on this dark lonely day it is only for thee I hope
If thou showest me not thy face, if thou leavest me wholly aside, I know not how I am to pass these long, rainy hours.
I keep gazing on the far-away gloom of the sky and my heart wanders wailing with the restless wind.
Art thou abroad on this stormy night on the journey of love, my friend? The sky groans like one in despair.
I have no sleep tonight.
Ever and again I open my door and look out on the darkness, my friend!
I can see nothing before me,
I wonder where lies thy path!
By what dim shore of the ink-blackriver, by what far edge of the frowning forest,
Through what mazy depth of gloom art thou treading the course to come to me my friend?
These are but a few examples from Sanskrit and languages of northern India illustrating the impact the monsoons make on sensitive minds of poets and men of letters. Similar examples are available from all other languages a
nd dialects spoken in the rest of the country.
The Monsoon Described by
English Poets and Novelists
Many foreign writers have given vivid descriptions of the monsoon. Of these there is a memorable one by L.H. Niblett in his India in Fable, Verse and Story,11 published in 1938:
The sky was grey and leaden: the Moon was dull and pale;
Suspended high, the dust-clouds, in canopying veil,
O’erlooked wide fields and hamlets of India’s arid plains—
Sun-baked and scorch’d and yellow—athirsting for the Rains.
The atmosphere was stifling; the air was still as death,
As the parched jheels emitted their foul and charnel breath.
Stormclouded the horizon: a flash across the sky,
A boom of far-off thunder, and a breeze like a distant sigh:
‘Tis the dirge of a dying summer: the music of the gods;
Dead leaves rise up and caper: the Melantolia nods:
Tall trees to life awaken: the top-most branches sway
And the long grass is waving along the zephyr way.
A mantle of red shadow envelops all around—
The trees, the grass, the hamlets, as the storm-clouds forward bound.
Of a sudden, comes a whirlwind, dancing, spinning rapidly;
Then gust on gust bursts quick, incessant, mad, rushing furiously.
A crash—and the Monsoon’s on us, in torrents everywhere,
With the bellowing roar of thunder, and lightning, flare on flare.
The tempest’s now abated; a hush falls o’er the scene;
Then myriad birds start chatt’ring and the grass again is green,
The fields like vast, still mirrors, in sheets of water He,
The frogs, in droning chorus, sing hoarse their lullaby,
Each tank and pool is flooded, great rivers burst their banks,
King Summer’s reign is ended, the Monsoon sovereign ranks.
E.M. Forster, the celebrated author of A Passage to India, has an equally vivid portrayal of the rainy season in his The Hill of Devi.12
The first shower was smelly and undramatic. Now there is a new India—damp and grey, and but for the unusual animals I might think myself in England. The full monsoon broke violently and upon my undefended form. I was under a little shelter in the garden, sowing seeds in boxes with the assistance of two aged men and a little boy. I saw black clouds and felt some spots of rain. This went on for a quarter of an hour, so that I got accustomed to it, and then a wheel of water swept horizontally over the ground. The aged men clung to each other for support, I don’t know what happened to the boy. I bowed this way and that as the torrent veered, wet, through of course, but anxious not to be blown away like the roof of palm leaves over our head. When the storm decreased or rather became perpendicular, I set out for the Palace, large boats of mud forming on either foot. A rescue expedition, consisting of an umbrella and a servant, set out to meet me, but the umbrella blew inside out and the servant fell down.
Since then there have been some more fine storms, with lightning very ornamental and close. The birds fly about with large pieces of paper in their mouths. They are late, like everyone else, in their preparations against the rough weather, and hope to make a nest straight off but the wind blows the paper round their heads like a shawl, and they grow alarmed and drop it. The temperature is now variable, becomes very hot between the storms, but on the whole things have improved. I feel much more alert and able to concentrate. The heat made me feel so stupid and sleepy, though I kept perfectly well.
It is strange that the monsoon did not exercise the minds of foreign writers as much as it did of the Indians. A large majority of them were birds of passage who did not stay long enough in the country to share the emotional response of the Indians. During British rule, in most government offices English officers with their families moved up to hill stations like Simla, Mussoorie, Darjeeling and Ooty from where they administered the country or went on holidays to Kashmir and so escaped the intense heat that enveloped the plains; consequently they were unable to sense the relief and the joy that came with the monsoon. In any event, they could not rid themselves of their inborn aversion to rain which spoiled their fun at home; for them monsoons were just a succession of rainy days.
The Monsoon in Folk Literature
A substantial portion of the folk literature of all of India’s fourteen languages is devoted to the monsoons. What was observed in the changes of climate, formation of clouds, flora and fauna was put in doggerel or made into proverbs. And every village has its sabjantawallah (Mr Know-it-all) who could predict when the monsoon would break and how bountiful it would be.
Portents
In every part of India peasants have their own way of predicting the monsoon. There is a general belief that the more intense the heat during April, May and June, the heavier will be the rains that follow. In northern India some varieties of thorny bushes like the karwand and heever break into tiny leaf a month before the rains break. The papeeha is loudest during the hot days and its cry is interpreted in Marathi as ‘paos ala, paos ala’ meaning ‘the rains are coming’. The peasants are also familiar with the monsoon bird (pied crested cuckoo, the Clamator Jacobinus), also known as megha papeeha—the song-bird of the clouds. Its natural habitat is in East Africa. Taking advantage of the monsoon winds, it flies across the Indian Ocean and the Arabian Sea to arrive on the western coast of India a day or so ahead of the rain-bearing clouds. It is rightly regarded as the monsoon herald. It flies at a more leisurely pace inland and is usually sighted in Delhi about fifteen days after the monsoon has broken over the Western Ghats.13
Village Soothsayers
Indians divide the few months of the summer monsoon into eight periods of thirteen to fourteen days each, depending on the signs of the zodiac known as nakshatras.
Of the twenty-seven nakshatras the fifteenth known as svati (late October) is considered the most auspicious. According to poets, the mythical bird Chatrik drinks only of the svati rain. And it is only the drops of the svati rain that turn to pearls when they fall into oysters. The svati falling on bamboo trees produces vanslocham, a precious medicament of Ayurveda, the indigenous Hindu system of medicine.
All Indian languages have innumerable proverbs stressing the importance of rains in their particular regions. For instance, the test of a good monsoon in Maharashtra is when the gunny sacks peasants drape over their heads and shoulders as they go out in the rain remain damp long enough to breed insects. For Punjab, comprehensive compilation has been made (thirteen). They are largely variations of the single theme ‘if the rains are good, there will be no famine’. There are also proverbs about distribution of rains during the year:14
Four months do not need even a rain of gold: (mid-November to mid-December), chaitra (mid-March to mid-April), vaisakha (mid-April to mid-May) and jyestha (mid-May to mid-June). Except for these four months, rain is desirable in all the other months of the year.
For some unknown reason people expect the monsoons to break over Bombay by the tenth of June. The onset of winter rain is calculated as following a hundred days after the end of the summer monsoon.
Despite the summer rains being the real monsoon, it is the short winter rains that the Punjabi farmer prizes more. ‘Winter rain is gold, hadha (June–July) rains, silver, and sawan-bhadon (July–September), mere copper,’ says a proverb. ‘If there is a spell of rain in margasirsa (mid-November to mid-December) the wheat will have healthy colour’. There are parallel proverbs instructing farmers what to do during the winter monsoon months: ‘If you do not plough your land in hadha you will be like a dry sawan and a child who learnt nothing at school.’ ‘If it rains on Diwali (the festival of lamps that falls early in November) the sluggard will be as well off as a conscientious tiller except that the tiller’s crop will be more abundant.’
Monsoon Proverbs in Hindi
Most of these are ascribed to Ghagh (seventeenth century), a lear
ned Brahmin poet-astrologer and his even more learned wife, Bhaddari, a low-caste girl he married because of her learning. Says Bhaddari:
When clouds appear like partridge feathers and are spread across the sky, they will not go without shedding rain.
A similar proverb in Punjabi says exactly the opposite. Ghagh predicts:
When lightning flashes in the northern sky and the wind blows from the east, bring oxen under shelter because it is sure to rain.
When water in the pitcher does not cool, when sparrows bathe in dust and the ants take their eggs to a safer place, you can be sure of a heavy downpour.
If the southern wind flows in the months of magha and pausa (i.e. January and February), the summer monsoon is bound to be good.
Dark clouds in the sky may thunder without shedding a drop; where white clouds may be pregnant with rain.
However, some of their proverbs seemed to have been designed to keep hope alive. ‘If the clouds appear on Friday and stay till Saturday,’ Ghagh tells Bhaddari, ‘be sure that it will rain.’
Ghagh-Bhaddari proverbs are on the lips of peasant folk in the Hindi-speaking belt stretching from Haryana and Rajasthan across Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh to eastern boundaries of Bihar. Variations of the same proverbs exist in Bengal and Maharashtra.
April in Delhi (From Nature Watch)
Delhi’s short spring is over; summer is yet to come. Mornings and evenings are cool, the day at times unpleasantly warm. March flowers begin to wilt under the heat of the sun; summer blossoms are ready to take their place.
April inherits some of its unpredictability from the preceding month. All Fools Day is almost 12 hours long; to be precise, 12.26 hours. Baisakhi, thirteen days later, is 22 minutes longer. Both days can be equally unpredictable. I have known them to be as chilly as some in winter and I have known Baisakhi to be uncomfortably hot outdoors. I have also recorded Baisakhi celebrations at Majnoon da Tula Gurdwara along the upper reaches of the Yamuna in north Delhi being washed out by unseasonal rain. The Bard was correct in comparing the vagaries of a new love affair with the eccentric weather of April:
Not a Nice Man to Know Page 22