Reading 4: The Monsoon and Deforestation
(The following selections are abstracted from Chasing the Monsoon: A Modern Pilgrimage Through India, Alexander Frater, Now York: Alfred Knopf Inc., 1992, p.63-65.)

Since childhood, Alexander Frater has been fascinated with the sound of rain. He spent his childhood staring at a photograph entitled "Cherrapunji, Assam: The Wettest Place on Earth. 'It is in Cherrapunji that the Indian monsoon produced the world's heaviest rains. In 1987, he decided to "chase the monsoon "from Kerala in southern India to Cherrapunji in Assam, a south to north journey

I met Kamal Das in her rambling, comfortable house, the sounds of the dripping gardens audible through the open shutters.

"The monsoon's arrival is quite magnificent. It comes towards you like an orchestra and, not surprisingly, has inspired some of our loveliest music, ragas, which evoke distant thunder and falling rain. For centuries our artists have painted monsoon pictures and our poets have serenaded the monsoon; I am simply in that tradition." She smiled and said, "What I would really like to talk about, however, is the forests - or, rather, the lack of them. The problem is inextricably linked with the monsoon so it should be relevant to your researches. You may find it an unreliable, even treacherous, companion. These days it has become very elusive. It is often late. Deforestation is one of the reasons for this. Trees help to make rain. Forests seed the passing clouds. Before they cut them down the monsoon was always on time. My grandmother planned everything around it - washing the clothes, drying the grain, visiting relatives - in the certain expectation that it would arrive on the appointed day. The rains were heavier then. Within minutes of the burst small rivers had formed around our houses in which we children sailed paper boats. The monsoon was part of our lives, like sleep. We watched the world being reborn around us while the rain seeped into the house's foundations, making it creak and wobble. In the last two weeks in July we picked ten sacred herbs that grew in the puddles, took them inside and blessed them."

Mrs. Das's anti-deforestation committee arrived, and put the problem into perspective for me.

They said India was once a forested country. When Alexander the Great invaded in 327 B.C. he encountered dense, almost impenetrable forests. But peasants were already pursuing a slash-and-burn policy and, after the Emperor Ashoka came to power, the reforms proposed included planting 'useful trees' along roads and on military camping grounds.

Trees play a crucial role in the monsoon cycle. By seeding clouds that encourage the rain to fall; by trapping it they help recharge the aquifers and hold groundwater in store for the common good. Some water, rising with the cell sap, is returned to the sky by transpiration through the leaves. A well-stocked teak forest gives off the equivalent of 1,000 nun of precipitation. Great rain forests act on the atmosphere like tropical seas; they supply it with water vapor and help replenish the rains.

By and large India is a natural tree-bearing country. Though it has 5 million hectares of eternal snow, most of its soil groups will support something - oaks, conifers, sandalwood, rosewood, bamboos, etc. Many Indians, though, have never visited a forest and are perhaps unaware that ever widening man-made gaps in the canopy will allow heavy rains to wash away the herbs, grasses and leaf-mould carpeting the floor. Then the soil itself is washed away leaving the underlying rock exposed. Silting and flooding follow. Some of India's most tragic floods have been caused by denudation of forests so thick that tigers lived in them.

How does/has the monsoon affect life for people in South Asia?