Opinion With Chandrayaan-3, a look at Indians’ waxing and waning relationship with the Moon
The Moon, as it changes shape and size, offers more nuance and thus more literary possibility. There is a phase of the Moon to suit every mood so much so that Gulzar once joked he had a copyright on the Moon given the number of poems he had written about it
Lander Imager Camera of ISRO’s Chandrayaan-3 captures a portion of its landing site on the surface of the Moon after its successful descent, in Bengaluru. (PTI) 
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As Chandrayaan-3 made its soft landing on the Moon, and elated ISRO scientists stood up and cheered, a Kolkata television channel flashed a sign in Bengali: “The South Pole of the Moon is now in India’s grip.” It is human nature to want to think of ourselves as conquerors, whether of the Moon or Mt Everest or the coronavirus. Humans always want to establish dominion. But the Moon is a slippery object, constantly waxing and waning, in and out of our reach. The Sun might give this planet life but the Moon has given us poetry. And nightmares as well — the word lunatic comes from the Moon. In the West, the Moon is a thief, stealing the light from the Sun, pale and wan making Percy Bysshe Shelley wonder, “Art thou pale for weariness of climbing heaven and gazing on earth.” The Moon is fickle and William Shakespeare goes so far as to say “Arise, fair Sun, and kill the envious Moon.”
But in India, my relationship with the Moon was a bit different, sweeter like a chandrapuli mithai, stuffed with coconut, shaped like a half Moon. Growing up in Kolkata at a time of power cuts, I remember lying on the roof and looking up at the Moon in a patch of night sky framed by the dark silhouettes of apartment buildings and our neem tree. The Moon was the stuff of Chandamama comics, fairy tales and rhymes. Mothers asked Chandamama (uncle Moon) to bless their moon-faced children, moon to moon. And unlike for Charlie Brown in Peanuts, moon-face was a full-blown compliment.
The Sun was never changing, a round fiery orb, something to hide from. Come back on a full Moon night, the boatman at Marble Rocks near Jabalpur told me. Then you can see the true beauty of these cliffs. Daylight does not do it justice. The Moon, as it changes shape and size, offers more nuance and thus more literary possibility. There is a phase of the Moon to suit every mood so much so that Gulzar once joked he had a copyright on the Moon given the number of poems he had written about it.
Film songs love the Moon in all its stages. Sometimes it is hidden because chand chupa baadal mein, sometimes it is khoya khoya, often radiant like a chand sa roshan chehra or just half a moon because adha hai chandrama. Usually, it was the moonlight that spurred madhur chandni romance but occasionally the hero asked the Moon to turn its face away (dum bhar jo udhar moonh phere, o chanda ) so he could romance the heroine.
But the Moon’s romance could also wane. In Sukanta Bhattacharya’s famous Bengali poem, in a world stricken with hunger and inequity, there is little room for poetry anymore. Even the full Moon looked like a scorched roti to the starving. That reminded us that in the end it is about the eye of the beholder. One person’s chaudhvin ka chaand can be another person’s charred chapati. But it’s the same Moon. We just keep changing our own relationship to it.
In science fiction we, like Tintin want to go it because it’s far away. In poetry we hold it close as it shimmers back at us from a pool of water. That perhaps is its allure, that it’s right here, so close that a cow could jump over it and yet remain tantalisingly out of reach. Artists are drawn to that duality.
The young child in Rabindranath Tagore’s The Crescent Moon wonders “When in the evening the round full moon gets entangled among the branches of that kadam tree, couldn’t somebody catch it?” His older brother, more worldly wise, calls him the silliest child he has ever known because the moon is ever so far away. But the child replies “When mother looks out of her window and smiles down at us playing would you call her far away?”
My television ticker might think that the Moon is now in our grip but who is to say we are not the ones in the moon’s grip all along? As Kabir wrote “The Moon shines in my body, but my blind eyes cannot see it.”
Roy is a novelist and the author of Don’t Let Him Know
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