Waterlogged streetsIJ Stalled trafficIJ Overflowing drainsIJ Who thinks of these when the romantic imagination soars to the cloudsIJ
Is the monsoon only about forcible stay indoors, overflowing drains, flooded streets, traffic jams, and wading through stagnant, sewage-infected waterIJ All of these happen during monsoons, fraying tempers, scuttling quotidian routine. The belly-aching these trigger is warranted though these are far less devastating in their consequences than the massive floods and landslides that follow. The rains, however, still constitute the main lifeline of the country's agriculture and though the Indian Budget may not be the gamble in the monsoon — an expression whose fatherhood has been attributed to several persons — it once was, its economic impact remains more than considerable. A bad monsoon bodes bad times. One needs only to cite the alarms and excursions about an impending hobbling of the economy set off by the drought in many parts of India earlier this year, to underline the point.
But then many tend to view economics as the science of doomsaying given the grim prognoses some of its practioners frequently make. That, however, was not the reason why Scottish writer and essayist, Thomas Carlyle, called it the “dismal science.” He did so because the subject found “the secret of this Universe in ‘supply and demand,’ and reduced the duty of human governors to that of letting men alone.”
The expression has frequently been in circulation since then, thereby attaining the status of a venerable cliché. What is not as often said is that Thomas Carlyle, used it while advocating slavery under which, in his own words, the “idle black man in the West Indies could be compelled to work as he was fit, and to do the Maker's will who had constructed him.” The obnoxious reference, which featured in his Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question (1849) was, as everyone can make out, to West Indians of African origin who, like their American counterparts, were pejoratively called Negroes.
Of course, economists have also welcomed the monsoon when its generous amplitude causes crops to overflow and boost the purchasing power of the farmers which helps manufacture by raising sales. No such mundane thoughts seem to flit through the minds of poets, whose imaginations seem to take wings at the sight of clouds and pouring rain. In Kalidas' Meghadootam, a Yakshya (a demi-god who is generally said to guard treasure), exiled by Kubera (the god of wealth) to central India for a year, asks a passing cloud to act as his messenger and convey to his wife in Alka in Mount Kailash, his deep sorrow on being parted from her.
Rabindranath Tagore, whose poetry could be as deeply romantic as metaphysical, was profoundly moved by the monsoon — which is formally supposed to arrive on the first day of the Indian month of Ashadha — and the rains. In his famous poem Abinoy (Immodesty), he asks Nirupama (a woman in this context without comparison) to forgive him for any flippancy on his part, “for this is the first day of Ashadha, the forests are eager (for rain) and benumbed, the row of Bakul trees are drunk with buds in the woods, the new Kadamba flower makes one bewildered with its toxic scent.”
He again asks Nirupama to forgive his flippancy because “on her black eyes falls the shadow of dark Ashadha, a necklace of jasmine adorns her deeply dark, curled hair, her body holds the basket welcoming the new monsoon. And of course, he writes in Barshar Dine (Rainy Day) “One can tell her on a day like this/ In this pouring dense rain. / In the voice of the clouds amid heavy downpour/ In this Sunless dense darkness.”
Waterlogged streetsIJ Stalled trafficIJ Overflowing drainsIJ Who thinks of these when the romantic imagination soars to the cloudsIJ