Even until the early years of this century, it was impossible to imagine oneself in love and not think of the word “mausam” at least once. Growing up with a soundscape that included Hindi film music, one met the word more frequently than words that were rarely used then, words such as “boyfriend”, “lover”, “partner”. Like these words, the word “mausam” too had travelled from outside the Indian Subcontinent — in this case, literally, across Asia, as wind, carrying rain, to rest against the mountains of our V-legged landmass. This moisture and its behaviour, on the body, on the mind, inside the voice and other musical instruments, would give to our music its vapour and personality, like the angle of our bent bodies does to the resonance of our voices inside water wells.
That romantic love is an integer of the serve-and-volley between the elements and emotions seems as obvious as the curtain responding to the wind teasing it. “Yeh mausam ka jadoo hai mitwa, na dil pe kaboo hai mitwa …” Whether it is the directness of the confession about the loss of control over one’s heart due to the magic of the mausam or the playfulness of coming to this seemingly inexplicable connection indirectly, as in “Bagon mein bahar hain?… Tumko mujhse pyar hain” – because spring has come to the gardens, you must love me! — it’s a train of illogical consequentiality that goes back to the oldest relationship we know, between the earth and the heart, the reason they are perhaps anagrams of each other. The nervous lover, expecting constancy of the kind that they have been given by the force of gravity, that keeps them from falling off the earth, is bound to liken emotions with the seasons, with flux, with change, with fluidity. It’s a lineage of thought that goes back to the rasa theorists, their recognition of changing emotions as the axis that makes — and keeps — us human. That is why Kishore Kumar can sing about writing with air on air: “Hawaon pe likh do hawaon ka naam”.
Listening to Lata Mangeshkar sing “Rahein na rahein hum mehka karengey, ban ke kali, ban ke saba”, with its emphatic “mausam koi ho”, no matter what the season, we are led into a world of love promised with Shakespearean conviction (the English poet, who has no faith in “brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea”, but believes “that in black ink my love may still shine bright”), one immune to “mausam”, which, in songs such as these, is a metaphor for fickleness, for change (“Mausam ki tarah tum bhi badal toh na jaoge”, I hope that you won’t change like the seasons, the fragility of a lover’s hopeful plea, in another song).
The mausam is not a trigger for romantic love; it is part of the love itself, giving it dimension and sky: “Thhandi hawa yeh chaandni suhani …” Like the opening lines of the Rig Veda make evident our composition, that our bodies and its neighbourhood are constituted of the elements, so does the recurrence of “mausam” in these songs from Hindi cinema up to a certain period — the same reason children were named “Ritu”, with its various suffixes. The acknowledgement of this lineage of thought and feeling can be found summarised in Mahendra Kapoor singing “Neeley gagan ke taley, dharti ka pyar paley…” – the “phool”, “pedon”, “subah”, “shaam”, “dharti” and “sagar”, flowers, trees, the morning and evening, the earth and the sea, are analogous to the invocations to agni and vayu, fire and air, in the opening verses of the first veda. “Ratnadhātamam”, in the first verse of the Rig Veda, a Sanskrit word that holds in it delight and ecstasy, is achievable only through a dialogue — and even drowning in — with the elemental. It was this awareness, one we take as a given, that Robert Frost must have been trying to summarise in “Earth’s the right place for love: I don’t know where it’s likely to go better”.
Where are the songs about mausam in our time of “climate change”? Our complaint now, made with as much bafflement as an impersonal sadness, about how love, its sweetness and translucence, has disappeared from our cinema, where we implicitly blame a “third person” that is not really a person but a machine, the smartphone, is perhaps related to the disappearance of mausam from our senses (notice how the Urdu word “fiza”, which can hold in it a universe, from “air” to the “environment”, has disappeared from our songs), its transfer from skin to screen, where we are made aware of it only through a language of numbers, the temperature and the AQI. How is one to sing of love then, except as parody? Let us go then, you and I, where the evening is spread against the sky, to a place of low AQI? Or “Yeh raatein yeh mausam nadi ka kinara, yeh dhool aur dhuwa …”?
Roy, a poet and writer, is associate professor at Ashoka University. Views are personal
