Opinion From Kalidasa’s ‘Meghaduta’ to the monsoon ragas: Waiting for rain

It is water we seek and need, water from the sky, water nearby, on our bodies of course, as prophylactic to the curse of heat, but also to our ears.

For everything began — as scientists have told us about life — in water.

Sumana Roy

June 20, 2024 11:08 AM IST First published on: Jun 20, 2024 at 08:00 AM IST

My first awareness of the intimation of magic — or the magical — is about water. Someone is filling a glass of water in a very dark room. It’s the Bengal of the load-shedding era — the 1980s. Power, which Bengalis call “light” or “current”, comes and goes. When it goes suddenly, the darkness becomes bitterer, or so it seems. Someone feels the urge to urinate, someone else to drink water. It is as if the darkness deepens these urges — to lose and gain water. Sitting with my eyes closed, as if to keep the darkness from entering me, I listen to both: My little brother’s urine touching a skin of stagnant water in the toilet; an adult filling water from a steel jug into a glass. The first does not surprise me — the darkness has only intensified the sound. The second becomes a thing of wonder: How does the person — mother, father, visiting relative — know when to stop pouring the water? It is dark, very dark, after all — there were no inverters or generators in our small town then, darkness was not the sieve that it would become. The summer heat, that now seems mild compared to the burning and blistering world we are living in, was made bearable by these sounds of water. It was as if the availability of the presence of water, even through synecdoche, this sound, could temporarily pacify our mammalian heat.

For everything began — as scientists have told us about life — in water. In the river Tamasa, from which Valmiki emerges with a disciple and chances upon two birds, one of which has just been killed by a hunter. Valmiki curses the hunter — with lack of peace — and, in a moment devoid of intention, shoka transforms into shloka, as if only that was natural, this movement from water to land, and sadness — or emotion — to verse. It is water we seek and need, water from the sky, water nearby, on our bodies of course, as prophylactic to the curse of heat, but also to our ears.

Is it this that explains the origin and life of the monsoon ragas, Megh and Malhar, for instance, that Tansen combined into Miya ka Malhar, or Meghmalhar and Madhyamavati, singing which brings the rain to us? If singing Raga Deepak brought fire, to placate and douse it, Malhar had to be sung. It seems to me to be analogical to Aruna, the heat from the Sun God, being cooled and calmed by Karuna rasa, by pity and compassion after suffering. “Malhar”, a common source raga for the rain songs, gets its name from two words — “mala” and “hari”, which, when brought together, means the remover of uncleanliness. Is it this, then, the uncleanliness caused by heat, torturous and vulturous heat, that is removed by the rain?

In Kalidasa’s long poem Meghaduta, where a lover is punished with separation from the woman he loves, in frustration and fear, desperation and desire, he turns to a cloud to convey his message to her. ‘You are the refuge, O Rain-Giver/for all who burn with anguish; so bear/a message from me parted from my love by the wrath of the Lord of Treasures…’ It is the first messenger poem in the Indian subcontinent; Kalidasa chooses two things — the aerial perspective, that allows him to measure distance, not in miles but through various kinds of vegetation across the breadth of the Indian subcontinent; his choice of cloud, a creature of water, to communicate viraha, the pain of separation. “The mere sight of a cloud can stir a man’s heart even when he’s content,” writes Kalidasa.

The poet, composing more than 1,500 years before our heat-traumatised world, makes constant invocations of the sounds and sights of a cloud-speckled sky, so that the cloud becomes not a messenger alone but a message itself — of the reward of relief, of water, for waiting. “And, hearing your thunder — a sound sweet to their ears —/that can make Earth unfurl her mushroom parasols”; “With his forest fires fully quenched by your sharp showers,/ Amrakuta will bear you gratefully/on his crown”; “…to induce Sindhu/visibly grieving at your absence,/her waters shrunk to a thin braid and pale/with the paleness of dry leaves… to cast off the sorrow withering her”. This is in Chandra Rajan’s translation, and in spite of the difficulty of ferrying the register and tonality of Sanskrit into English, we are still able to hear the thunder and vapour, water growing and shrinking, even as Kalidasa gives us the landscape of the Indian subcontinent from a cloud’s eye view, much before the bird’s eye view became a mainstay of European art.

We need to hear the sound of water to survive.

Sweat has no sound.

Roy, a poet and writer, is associate professor of creative writing, Ashoka University. Views are personal