A Season Unsettled: The Monsoon on the Indian Subcontinent
Version originale en anglais
“Mausam, mausam, lovely mausam” sing the young lovers from a 1980s hit Hindi film as they prance and dance through misty green hills. Dark rainclouds gather behind them as they embrace on a swing suspended from a tree. “Chalo ghul jaayen mausam main hum.” Let us dissolve and become one with this mausam, this lovely mausam.
What is this mausam? Why does it bring forth this gush of romantic feeling? What’s so lovely about grey skies and swirling mist? To know this, to feel this, you have to understand the place of the monsoon on the Indian subcontinent.
Mausam is the Hindustani word for ‘weather’ or ‘season’, derived from the Arabic mawsim, or appropriate time. Since ancient times, sailors from West Asia used this term to denote the period when favourable winds would speed them across the Arabian Sea to the Indian subcontinent. In the 16th century, Dutch seafarers spoke of the monsoon, and the Portuguese of the monção. English explorers encountered these winds as they sailed east and called them Monsoon: seasonal rainbearing winds that advance and retreat. As colonial science collected data from around the world, meteorologists found that regions in West Africa, Australia and the Americas also have monsoons. Yet it is in Asia—and especially on the Indian subcontinent—that the monsoon is a season above all others.
Imagine the months of scorching heat that make summer in the subcontinent a test of endurance. From late March to June, the land is baked brown and dry. Rivers shrivel and streams become a trickle. Plants, birds, and animals nurse their energy, barely stirring to stay alive, to find water and food. People shelter indoors, out of the fury of the sun and the dustladen loo winds that scour the northern plains. Life slows to a standstill.
And then comes the Monsoon. From the month of June, winds that have gathered moisture from the Indian Ocean move north-eastwards. Masses of clouds make landfall in Kerala on the southern tip of the subcontinent, bringing summer to a sudden end. Over the next three months, they roll northeast, rumbling onwards in the sky like majestic herds of elephants, showering the land with longed-for rain. When this grey phalanx reaches the Himalayan mountain ranges, it turns west moving along their foothills towards my city of Delhi. As the rain sets in and the plants on my balcony burst out with tender green leaves, I sip ginger tea and dip hot potato and onion fritters into coriander chutney, and I hum to myself, “Mausam mausam, lovely mausam.”
***
The monsoon is a strange sort of season. A season suggests constancy, an established schedule of arrival and departure. Yet there is a whirl of contingency surrounding the monsoon that makes it hard to predict. Far-away phenomena such as the El Niño Southern Oscillation in the Pacific Ocean affect the monsoon. So do more proximate patterns such as the movement around the equator of the doldrums, the Intertropical Convergence Zone, caused by the spinning of the earth. Ocean currents and winds interact with the land. The temperature of the ocean relative to that of the continental mass, and the heating of the Tibetan plateau, are among the variables that shape South Asia’s yearly tryst with the monsoon. When the rains will come, how plentiful or meagre they will be, whether steady or scattered: on the monsoon’s annual caprice rests the fortunes of the subcontinent.
In South Asia, eighty per cent of all the rain in the year comes during the monsoon. It replenishes rivers, lakes, and aquifers. It moistens the soil and makes plants and animals thrive. In a region where agriculture sustains a majority of the population, the monsoon crop—kharif ki fasal—is the staple of the economy. Good rains mean that farmers are flush with funds; trade and industry surge and flourish. Not enough or too much rain brings hard times, hunger and disease, having to search for a living elsewhere. Even in areas with irrigation, people deal with this roll of the dice from year to year. They pray and perform rituals, implore the heavens, for they know that the monsoon is no mere meteorological phenomenon. It is the work of a larger divinity. Its power over life and death comes from gods who cannot be fathomed, from fates that one cannot outrun.
For centuries, the mystery of the monsoon has been attributed to the agency of gods or a Nature imperfectly understood. In more recent times, we have come to realise that a part of this variability is entirely manmade.
We live in the Anthropocene, a new geological epoch in which human actions have profoundly changed the earth, its ecosystems, and its climate. Much of the change in climate is caused by global warming, as greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and synthetic fluorinated gases accumulate in the atmosphere and trap heat. Since industrialization started, but most especially since the Great Acceleration of the 1950s, the increasing rate of burning coal, oil, petroleum, and natural gas, has made the planet hotter. Warmer air, oceans, and lands together create longer and hotter heat waves, more frequent droughts and wildfires, more powerful storms, and more erratic rainfall.
These severe forces of weather —The Elements: heat, wind, cold and rain— have always been with us. Over millennia, we have learned to live with their power and to endure their extreme agency. Global history recounts past catastrophic natural events like floods, droughts, fires, ice ages, and plagues that cascaded into human crises1. These extreme events reconfigured how people lived, worked, worshipped, and organised themselves. Taking this long view, the Anthropocene can be regarded as just another era of the earth unfolding, a cosmic blink of the eye. Yet what is unprecedented about this particular climate crisis is that it is anthropogenic. Not only has our capitalist system accelerated global warming by burning fossil fuels as if there were no tomorrow, it has shaped our ability to adapt to new conditions. Who among us survives and thrives in this strange new world and who suffers and dies is not accidental but ordained by the actuarial calculus of the Capitalocene.
This is the working of History on a planetary scale. The agency of the elements combines with and against our technologies, economic and political arrangements, and modes of thinking. Think of the Monsoon and ships sailing across the Arabian Sea carrying spices and silks, science and religion. Recall the European trade wars and territorial conquest of a land made fertile by the Monsoon. Imagine the imperial exercise of aiming to predict the Monsoon and improve revenues for Britain. Look at the gigantic dams — ‘temples of modern India’— built by the Indian state to free the country from its dependence on the Monsoon2. Remember the people they displaced and dispossessed, the forests and fields they drowned. Listen to the chug-chugging of tubewells as they pump groundwater to irrigate crops, a guarantee underwriting the Green Revolution against the uncertain Monsoon3. I could go on and on, tracing these entangled threads but never managing to unravel them. So for the rest of this essay, let me focus on one little snarly knot in this vast web of life that is urban north India, especially the metropolis of Delhi where I live. Because it is the capital of India, Delhi’s 33 million people inhabit a city that gets the most government attention and money. Yet, despite this favoured status, most residents— and especially working-class migrants—live without decent housing, sanitation, and drinking water4. Everyone is not an equal citizen of the city; India’s enduring inequalities of caste, class, religious and ethnic differences are reflected in different standards of living and possibilities for the future. The injustice lies in plain sight. On Delhi’s streets, luxury SUVs honk impatiently at cycle-rickshaws to get out of their way. In its affluent tree-lined neighbourhoods, the gracious lives of the well-to-do would grind to a halt without the labour of domestic workers who dwell in makeshift shanty towns. During the ‘riots’ that break out regularly in Muslim- dominated areas, the police play a decidedly one-sided role. All these are facets of a fractured citizenry in an unequal country, united by a common striving to secure a better life for oneself and one’s children.
Each place is particular. Great global forces may affect them all but always in ways that are distinctively local and conjunctural, situated in specific histories and geographies. My story of the Monsoon in Delhi is one among many. So I will not attempt to generalize. But I do hope that you may find evidence and arguments that resonate with other places and peoples.
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The Monsoon is not the same across South Asia. People in Kerala in south India, and those who live along the western coast, face the first full force of that cumulonimbus cloudburst as a thick velvet curtain that descends across the landscape in June, closing off everything except itself. For them, the monsoon is a total immersive experience. In the city of Mumbai on the western coast, caught between two wetnesses—torrential rains and a surging Arabian Sea—they scoff at us north Indians and the smaller showers that come our way in July. What do you know of the Monsoon, they say. But I have seen the worry in the eyes of farmers in central India as they look up to the skies, searching for those telltale hints of cloud, the first showers that will allow them to sow crops, grow food, fill the stomachs of their families5. The rains matter to them like nothing else. And for those of us in north India who have undergone the rigours of the dry, hot summer, far more intense than anything in the south or west, the rains are our reward. We deserve them, we have earned them through our tapasya, our period of sere austerity And that is why we celebrate them, more intensely, more joyfully.
North Indian poetry, music, and art are suffused our romance with the rains6. Waiting for the rains, revelling in them, is a metaphor of a larger emotional landscape of desire and longing. In Kalidas’s Sanskrit poetry from the 5th century, the raincloud is a messenger from an exiled young man to his distant beloved. Just as the rain shall feed the ‘fountain with new water, make the peacock dance, and awaken the flowers and creepers from the fatigue of summer heat’, it shall quench the burning loneliness in the beloved’s heart7. In the Prakrit verse of the Gathasaptashati from the same period, an older woman mocks her friend:
Thunderclouds in the sky,
Paths overgrown, streams in flood,
And, you, innocent one, in the window,
Expecting him8.
Medieval miniature paintings from north India depict trysting lovers under cloudy skies, the Hindu god Krishna embracing Radha as they shelter from the rain, kings and queens enjoying the cool easterly breeze on the terrace of their garden pavilions. Folk song genres specific to saavan-bhadon, the season of the rains, tease out the themes of separation, yearning, and anticipation. In more contemporary Hindi cinema, rain-drenched bodies express shringar rasa, the savour of ‘beauty, eroticism, voluptuousness, and the promise of approaching fulfilment’9. My memories of the monsoon are intertwined with classical Hindustani music, in particular the Malhar family of Raga, said to be so powerful that when properly sung, they can actually summon the rains. Mian Tansen, musician in the 16th-century court of the Mughal emperor Akbar, was a notable singer and composer of Malhar. For me, it is the Mian ki Malhar Raga sung by Pandit Bhimsen Joshi that is the most sublime music on earth: each note, each interval is suffused with a soul-drenching benediction. In these cultural forms, the Monsoon moves between sky and earth, body and soul, humans and god, the temporal and the spiritual. It is about simultaneously being in the moment and transcending it.
There is also the simple, almost primal pleasure of getting wet: I remember a June in my middle-class locality of Mukherjee Nagar, when the first gusts of wind and spatter of raindrops brought me out onto my balcony. And across the road, on the terrace of their house, my very respectable neighbours were out, dancing in the rain, their clothes soon plastered against their bodies. Who could have thought that this plump, staid Sardar-ji could let himself go like this, jumping and splashing with his wife and squealing children, as the rain came crashing down? That’s what the first rain releases: dance, laughter, joy in life.
And the scents of the monsoon! That warm, musky scent of the first rain hitting dry earth. That smell, oh that incomparable never-to-be-forgotten fragrance. In the 1960s, scientists gave it an English name, petrichor, and traced it to microscopic Streptomyces bacteria in the soil that produce a compound called geosmin. Drops of water hitting the ground release geosmin into the air. In north India, we call that scent sondhi mitti. This short-lived—but all the more powerful for that—trigger of memory, has even been distilled into an ittr, a traditional perfume. I have been looking for it but haven’t found it, and the smell itself, as it occurs in nature when rain hits hot earth, is becoming more elusive.
Then there is the charcoal-tinged sweetness of roasting bhutte, the first cobs of tender corn sold by roadside vendors in August. And the over-the-top ripeness of rotting nimboli fruit littering the ground, as much a part of the monsoon season as the dusty fragrance of neem flowers signifies early summer. As the rain washes away their flesh, the moist, warm soil incubates each kernel until it sends out a little green bud of folded leaves. Even in the city, surrounded by concrete and tarmac, plants leaf, flower, seed, sprout, and grow in step with seasonal rhythms, the life-giving power of the rains organizing their schedule. Visitors arrive, like the chatak or Jacobin Cuckoo from East Africa. In Indian mythology, the chatak flies with an open beak, catching raindrops to quench its thirst. Its arrival heralds the Monsoon. More prosaic explanations say that the bird takes advantage of the prevailing winds to fly to India, feasting on the clouds of larvae produced by mating insects in the rainy season. But what will happen to the annual migration of the chatak now when ‘the year’s clocks are off by a month or so, and entire ecosystems are unravelling’?10 Without that fecund insect swarm, ready for the eating in June, the synchrony between prey and predator, how will the chatak survive?
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For the rains are different now. The usual variability in the monsoons has been amplified by global warming11. Erratic and reduced rainfall and delayed onset of the monsoons may now be the new normal. Tellingly, the India Meteorological Department is considering lowering its definition of ‘normal rainfall’ by 2 per cent and changing the expected date of onset. What we can expect is more drought across the region, as scattered showers are interspersed with prolonged dry spells. The river Yamuna which supplies most of Delhi’s water will shrink to a trickle in summer as the glacier and snowmelt in the Himalaya that feed it remain unaugmented by Monsoon rain until late in the season. With a deeper crisis of drinking water, we will hear increasingly vociferous demands for building more upstream dams in the Himalayan ranges, further destabilizing a geologically active region already prone to landslides and floods. Delhi’s troubles spill over to distant lands, leaving deep, devastating ecological footprints across the countryside.
Global warming is not the only human-made cause for the Monsoon’s increased variability. Delhi’s status as the most polluted capital city in the world also has a role to play. Part of the reason for the rain drying up is the cloud of particulate matter that hovers over Delhi, the result of accumulated emissions from vehicles, diesel generators, brick kilns, the construction of buildings and paving of roads. Soot or black carbon particles absorb heat. This floating layer of hot air means that the moisture in Monsoon clouds, instead of condensing as it encounters cooler air, simply re-evaporates. Instead of falling as rain, the clouds release their moisture back into the air. Instead of delivering the heat-quenching showers that delight the soul, Kalidas’s cloud messengers wander away emptyhanded.
This aerosol of smoggy pollution also affects the formation of rainclouds in another way. Water vapour needs a surface on which to condense. Thanks to Delhi’s air pollution and the increase in aerosol particles, there are many more surfaces for vapour to cling to and condense on. So there are many more droplets of water but they are smaller. They also reflect the light more and scatter it. Reflective clouds and the gases that make up these aerosols help to cool Delhi’s summer. At the same time, smaller droplets take longer to coalesce into raindrops, leading to bigger pauses between spells of rain. And when the rain does fall, it does so in heavier downpours. In any case, globally, warmer air holds more water; more water vapour condenses into heavier rain. But it is the particularity of the interaction between global warming and Delhi’s air pollution that creates a distinctive pattern. The global is localised in complex and contradictory ways that are hard to comprehend, let alone control. As I try to understand these changes in cloud micro-physics, words from an old Joni Mitchell song swim into my head:
I’ve looked at clouds from both sides now
From up and down and still somehow
It’s cloud illusions I recall
I really don’t know clouds at all.
***
Droughts and downpours: how do extreme rain events affect life in Delhi? When I asked people about what the Monsoon meant to them, the first thing that most of them mentioned was traffic jams. Not the poetry of romantic desire, not the exhilaration of dancing in the rain, not the celebration of lovely mausam, but traffic jams. One heavy shower is all it takes to create snarls on the road that take hours to untangle. As it rains, the unseen infrastructure of Delhi’s drainage system rises to the surface, revealing its myriad pitfalls and faults. In principle, the city has been planned and engineered for rainwater to tidily flow into stormwater drains. Every summer, municipal workers clean the drains of silt and debris, leaving little heaps of muck to neatly punctuate the roadside. Collecting and disposing of the dirt is someone else’s job. So one pre-monsoon shower is all it takes for the muck to go right back into the drain. The work was done, the contractor paid, so what if the drains are clogged again?
As a capital city, Delhi has an image to maintain, and an aspiration to be ‘world-class’. So it is imperative that the main roads, the arteries of the city, must be clear. Water must not accumulate. World-class cities don’t have waterlogging. But there is a contradiction here. Delhi depends on groundwater. Officially, ten per cent of all the drinking water supplied by the government comes from underground sources. Apart from that, millions of residents who don’t get municipal water or don’t get enough of it, collect or buy water from tanker trucks supplied by illegal borewells. And for that groundwater to be recharged, rain must slowly soak into the ground, not be efficiently channelled into drains and released into the river. Waterlogging is temporary, one just has to wait it out. But who has time to wait these days? A city must be a place of ceaseless, seamless mobility. Time is money. A traffic jam matters more than the unseen seep of rain into the ground.
Since Delhi’s water-table has been severely depleted in recent years because of accelerated siphoning off, it is all the more important that this gradual percolation be allowed to happen. This requires land that is not built up, and where the soil allows water recharge. In Delhi’s topography and geology, it is the floodplain of the River Yamuna that affords the most favourable conditions for recharge. But these low-lying areas are where working-class populations have been settled in great numbers: first in the mid-70s during the eviction drives of the Emergency when civil liberties were suspended, and then in the great wave of slum demolitions that occurred in the 2000s. At the turn of the millennium, as India adopted economic policies to convert the riverbanks into real estate and to commodify what had long been an urban commons, working-class people were forcibly shifted and squeezed into smaller, denser settlements on the floodplain while new, more prestigious projects were protected by embankments12. So a smaller part of the floodplain now performs the vital ecological function of groundwater recharge, and it is the inhabitants of this area that suffer the seasonal influx of rainwater mixed with sewage in their homes.
The spatial and social order of the city shapes the flow of water. Where rainwater collects and where it goes is not decided by geography alone but is socially engineered. Those who dwell in jhuggi-bastis, squatter-settlements, and ‘unauthorised colonies’ are forced to live with the floods so that the city’s water-table is replenished. This spatial and social coincidence is not accidental; it is the product of postcolonial planning and the political ecology of a deeply unequal nation-state where environmental sustainability and social justice are steamrollered in the pursuit of a world-class dream for some.
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Mosquitoes are the other thing that residents of Delhi now associate with the Monsoon. The rains create conditions where insects thrive. Those of us who grew up in Delhi in the 1960s and ‘70s, recall monsoon nights where kamikaze beetles and moths blundered into the house, when frogs croaked and crickets creaked without end. They have now been replaced by the buzz of mosquitoes. Among them is the Aedes aegypti mosquito, the primary vector of malaria, dengue and chikungunya. In his essay, ‘Can the Mosquito Speak?’, Timothy Mitchell describes another mosquito, Anopheles gambiae, endemic to Sudan, entering Egypt during the second World War, hitching a ride with troops on trains and planes, spreading by taking advantage of the moist environment created by perennial irrigation from the Aswan dam13. Far more than the war, it was cerebral malaria carried by A. gambiae that killed people, already malnourished by the switch from food crops to sugarcane and cotton. Mitchell’s virtuoso analysis of the techno-politics at work in mid-20th century Egypt has a bearing on how the mosquito is staging a comeback in Delhi. Aedes aegypti is well adapted to urban habitats. It happily breeds in discarded containers and used tyres, water tanks and desert coolers, on construction sites, in storm water drains and pools of stagnant water. Resistant to most insecticides, it thrives in densely populated areas. Anopheles stephensi is the vector species of urban malaria which, in 2017, was again detected in Delhi after a gap of ten years. These are now our companion species; our relationship is co-constitutive.
Dengue can kill. It causes severe internal bleeding and organ impairment. Malaria leaves its victims feverish, shivering and weak. Long after a bout of chikungunya, people complain of aching joints. Yet it is not only the risk of falling ill but also the irritation of whining, biting mosquitoes that prevent restful sleep that prompts anyone who can afford it to use pyrethroid-based mosquito repellents. They are relatively safe but more expensive. Poorer people use stronger pesticide-laced incense sticks and coils. For Reena, a labourer who lives in the Yamuna Khadar slum with her husband and two children, sleeping on a Monsoon night is a struggle against heat, humidity, and mosquitoes. The small electric fan in their small one-room dwelling barely stirs the heavy air. She lights a few incense sticks before going to sleep and hopes that the smoke will keep the mosquitoes away. Rainwater drips from a leak in the tin roof; sewage-laced water slops outside the door of their jhuggi. So much for the romance of the rains.
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Downpours and droughts: what happens when it doesn’t rain? In his book Late Victorian Holocausts, Mike Davis described the rise of Western meteorological science and its discovery of global weather patterns14. At the turn of the 19th century, drought occurred simultaneously in north-east Brazil, Egypt, India and China, related to the El Niño Southern Oscillation. Davis argued that the occasional failure of rains was a natural phenomenon and people had devised ways of sharing food and other resources to deal with these times of dearth. Droughts turned into famines because of colonialism and its policy of conscripting cultivators into growing cash crops rather than food. Writing at the turn of the millennium, before global warming had begun to be widely discussed, Davis could still describe drought as a natural phenomenon. Twenty-five years later, we know that the incidence and character of drought has been forever altered by our actions. Drought and rain are now partly human-made phenomena, more uncertain than ever before. We have disrupted the Monsoon. And our capacity to deal with the consequences of this change—preventing droughts from spiralling into famines, stopping floods from sweeping away the lives and livelihoods of millions—is compromised by the same shortsighted pursuit of private gains that created the problem in the first place.
Are we destined to live out the rest of our lives in this dystopia? Or can we rescue ourselves and others from the worst of what lies before us? I don’t know. But I do know whose side I am on: the activists working indefatigably to save the Yamuna floodplains from encroachment, those helping neighbourhoods recharge groundwater, those who campaign to keep pavements from being concretised so that the rain can soak in. Then there are those who strive tirelessly so that decent housing, food, wages, healthcare, and education are available to all. Only when the working classes have the rights and resources to live a fuller life can they be resilient in the face of whatever climate change throws our way. Global warming is a ‘binding crisis’—one that affects everyone, irrespective of who they are. It ought to bring people together in concerted action15. Yet it is more likely to deepen the fissures between people. Just as the degree of culpability in causing the climate crisis varies widely across the world and within countries, so does the ability to weather its effects. Who gets to eat onion fritters and enjoy the rains from the security of their house, and who struggles to fix a leaky tarpaulin roof so that their meagre possessions stay dry—the Monsoon has always been different for different people. Only now, it will be all the more so. Perhaps, as that dissonance sharpens, it may precipitate a vision of ecological justice that gathers strength and grows into a river and an ocean of social change.