Between thunder and yearning, science and song, the Indian monsoon pulses like a message: ancestral, intimate, and unpredictable. As the climate shifts and memory falters, the question lingers in the air: has the rain forgotten us, or have we forgotten how to listen?
Bhakti poets such as Mirabai, Kabir, and Surdas drenched themselves in viraha, separation that sweetens love with realisation of oneness. Even after centuries the land longs for the rain, tired from the heat, and the monsoon comes to rescue each time. As if yearning and union, meeting, and parting are not only the affairs of lovers but also the seasons. Who are we in relation to these relations of the natural world?
Priyanka Singh Parihar
Do seasons have memories of their own?
There is a switch within the bodies of humans, plants and animals. It turns on and off in relation to the stories and experiences of their ancestors. It’s passed genetically. We follow what is familiar, and so does monsoon.
A study published by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), Germany, indicates how monsoons might have a memory. Researchers found that the atmosphere itself can remember turning on and off in relation to the memory of past moisture levels, triggering the behaviour of rain. Anders Levermann, one of the lead scientists of this study, says, “We’ve long known that systems like the ocean or the massive ice sheets have some sort of memory. But the atmosphere? That was thought impossible.”
But somewhere between possible and impossible, the lightning ignites grey clouds, cracking and roaring. It’s only the millions of tiny ice particles that could yield thunder. Massiveness summoned by minuscule. What lingers on the verge of natural and supernatural? Who gets to decide? The data of scientists, or the experience of the sentient beings? Meanwhile, the big current continues bursting into flashes, growing like a branch, a nerve, or a stream of a river, pulsing between the sky and the earth. It’s monsoon in India.
I can smell it; the sweet scent of a wet landscape—is it the doing of the plants? You must give up your busyness and look at the rain falling, blooming into flowers. Is monsoon a season or a relation? Between bodies of land and water, between plants and people they feed.
“We’ve long known that systems like the ocean or the massive ice sheets have some sort of memory. But the atmosphere? That was thought impossible.”
Anders Levermann
In the past, Indian literature interpreted the monsoon as a season of eroticism. Fervently lingering between yearning and union. The psyche and the physical landscape were indistinguishably interwoven with intimacy. In the Sanskrit poem Meghadūta (मेघदूत), or Cloud Messenger, written by Kalidas in the 4th–5th century CE, metaphors are woven that now have a scientific life of their own. Yaska, a nature spirit after being exiled in central India, convinces the monsoon clouds to convey his message of love to his wife in the Himalayas. He vividly describes the beauty of the landscape, rivers and cities that the cloud will encounter on his journey, promising it will be worth taking his message. He delves into yearning and union with a faith that one day he will meet his beloved. The monsoon clouds indeed travel from central India towards the Himalayas. Perhaps the poet knew what scientists had to discover.
Whether it’s union and longing for a lover or the divine, monsoon carries the language of spiritual devotion. Bhakti poets such as Mirabai, Kabir, and Surdas drenched themselves in viraha, separation that sweetens love with realisation of oneness. Even after centuries the land longs for the rain, tired from the heat, and the monsoon comes to rescue each time. As if yearning and union, meeting, and parting are not only the affairs of lovers but also the seasons. Who are we in relation to these relations of the natural world?
As of today, in India there are 800 million people who depend on the monsoon for their livelihoods through agriculture. The well-being of many farmers is dependent on the rain; a good season will keep them away from debt, but a bad season could take an emotional toll. We have built dams, we have dug the ground deeper for water, and yet we are dependent on the whims of the season. Like most lovers, the monsoon is known to be fickle; we can’t predict its behaviour, as the climate tears the cycles of seasons apart. Both the longing for the monsoon and the catastrophe from its flood are intensifying. Climate-related incidents are at a peak in India, Pakistan and neighbouring countries. What used to be the season of love is now a season of havoc.
Indian novelist Khushwant Singh observed that the monsoon had vanished from Indian literature, that it “no longer stirs the imagination of the poet or the novelist with the same intensity.” Where are the poems? The message-bearing clouds? Where is the sweet longing of union and separation? What have we forgotten? Has the monsoon forgotten us too?
What if the clouds don’t recognise people and people fear the clouds? How can we remember to speak to nature once again? I too yearn for this union.
My uncle is a farmer. I ask him to tell me something about the monsoon; he smiles and says it’s auspicious. Farmers keep transplanting paddy with their hands; the ground is filled with water, reflecting the sky above, and clouds watch over them. Perhaps, the people who cultivate the land listen to the Earth through the seeds they sow. A memory will soon enter our body; we will be fed but the question is, will we remember? Who are we in relation to the natural world?
