Reading 6: The Monsoon: Music and Poetry
(The following selections are abstracted from Chasing the Monsoon: A Modern Pilgrimage Through India, Alexander Frater, Now York: Alfred Knopf Inc., 1992, p.155-56.)

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

The purest way of invoking rain is by song. The ancient rain-making ragas, sung by masters, could even move the gods - especially Indra who, riding a white elephant with four tusks, is charged with dispensing or withholding the rains. Two powerful ragas are still cited today. The first, Deepak, generated such heat that it burned the throat of the singer and caused every candle in his vicinity spontaneously to burst into flame. The second, Malhar, cooled the singer's throat and brought rains strong enough to extinguish the candles and water the crops.

I met with T.V.A. Seshan a man who now acts as temple consultant to Hindu communities in North America and Australia.

"You are interested in rain and you probably wish to know if a devout, temple-going congregation is more likely to invoke heavy showers than a lazy, shiftless one. The answer is yes. Take Kerala, for example, where the people are extremely devout and, as a consequence, very, very good at rain. They achieve it through patient chanting and the lighting of cloud-seeding fires; you will see them in villages all over the place. At Kanniyakumari they can even do mantras that reverse floods! By contrast the citizens of Madras town, who are not so devout, haven't seen a drop for five years."

I asked him to describe his own experience.

He paused. "I sang Raining Nectar, a famous precipitation raga... I began beneath a perfectly clear blue sky. After a while clouds appeared from nowhere and gathered above our heads. I was astonished, of course, but managed to sing on. Then, moments later, it happened."

"You made rain?"

"I made a full-blooded thunderstorm... I must admit I walked around for the next few days feeling very proud of myself..."

The poetry of Kamala Das was moving and very fine, with the monsoon as a recurring symbol. In 'The Time of the Drought' she had written:

When every night my littlest child awakes and
Limpets to my side, I am heavy with unshed tears,
I am the grey monsoon sky
Just before the rain...

And, in 'A Souvenir of Bone':

How often
Have I wished as a child to peel the night like old
Wallpaper and burn it, to hold at monsoon time
The wounded wind in my arms, to lull it back to sleep.

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