'The monsoon gives life to India’s economy, ecology and culture'

Mahesh Rangarajan

is an environmental historian teaching at

Ashoka University

. Sharing his insights with

Times Evoke

, he outlines India’s centuries-old relationship with the season of rain:
The monsoon is of huge importance to India. We are part of what is known as monsoon Asia and monsoon Africa. There are 20 countries in the world where 80% of all precipitation in the form of rain or snow comes from the monsoon. Therefore, life cycles in these countries depend greatly on the rain. In India, the monsoon has been vital for thousands of years in terms of moisture, biodiversity, plant productivity and culturally — in north India alone, entire festivals like Teej, with songs, swings and seasonal food, centre around the rain.



The monsoon and India have a tremendous history — most interestingly, the rains were always a time of peace. Logically, during the monsoon, armies simply couldn’t march. Rivers broke their banks and the quantum of water rose hundredfold, particularly in the Indus-Ganga-Brahmaputra basin and the peninsular rivers which became raging torrents. The dry season, in contrast, was a good time for warfare when rain, rivers and malarial mosquitoes were all limited.

A FLAMBOYANT ARRIVAL: Indian culture has adapted to the monsoon over millennia. Picture: iStock

The failure of the monsoon also exacerbated conflicts. The Mughal war of succession came at a time of multiple monsoon failures when crops perished and it was easier to enlist men to battle. Both in 17th century India and the Tokugawa Shogun reign of Japan, when the monsoon failed, the ruling class began distributing food and writing off taxes, like a Keynesian pump priming of the economy. Yet, dry spells regularly became times of war while the rains brought productivity and peace. Importantly, good rains meant good sowing.



Thus, a British official remarked in 1908, ‘The Indian budget is a gamble on the monsoon.’ Today, with mechanised development, we might think India is no longer dependant on the monsoon, but this is not so. Among technological developments the 1960s onwards, the motorised handpump changed our relationship with water. India has a huge reservoir of groundwater which earlier had to be extracted using human and animal power.

With the motorised handpump, fossil fuel-based energy could extract this water. That transformed agriculture, with double-cropping raising the intensity of production, less land thereby able to support more people. But this also meant an enormous pull on groundwater reserves, with the result that within a few years, we will likely face a groundwater deficit in many regions, given its overuse in agriculture, industry and human consumption. So, the monsoon is still extremely important to renew groundwater itself.



The rain is also vital to recharge surface water in wetlands, ponds, lakes, etc. This enables reeds and thatch to grow, small fish to mature, clay to be formed. Water being critical to our lives and biodiversity, you cannot imagine an unpredictable monsoon with equanimity. Even today, those dependant on agriculture form about 50% of the labour force in India. This is the largest agriculture-dependant workforce of any nation. For them, the regularity and health of the monsoon are essential — and its manifestations are a part of living culture. This explains our cultural repository around the rain, from paintings and cuisines to songs and stories. These have been reflected in post-industrial cultural expressions as well. Until the 1990s, for example, all Indian cinemas had songs referring to rain, trees and clouds — this showed the deep emotive roots of the monsoon in our cultural lives and our living traditions which continue to cherish nature.

As a contrast, consider the Cultural Revolution in China which meant the breaking of multiple relations of parable, metaphor and simile, not only with the past but also with the world of nature all around. The Cultural Revolution’s Red Guard aimed to conquer and dominate nature — I’m glad that has never been the case in India. Our metaphorical relationship with nature, and its most striking manifestation, the monsoon, remains extremely strong. However, we must take far more responsibility for our actual actions towards our environment, including the extraction of groundwater. This will grow more important as climate change impacts the monsoon. Alongside Earth warming,

La Nina

and

El Nino

are part of a vast global network of atmospheric movements where changes occurring near, say, Peru, with the air becoming hotter or the ocean cooler, will affect rainfall in Puddokotai or Imphal.The monsoon’s growing variability will also affect the enormous water tower of the Himalayan mountain chain. The northern rivers across the Indo-Gangetic-Brahmaputra river basin have the perpetual snow melt of the

Himalayas

— but this is also the result of the monsoon. With climate change, this stands to be impacted as well. It is critical that we become aware of these phenomena and modify our environmental behaviour now. For India, the notion of the monsoon as the giver of all life is true in a very profound sense.

All 80 agroclimatic zones, our biogeographic regions, our multitudes of soils, plants, animals, birds and microorganisms and the lives of us human beings are enabled by the rain. This huge canvas of life is upheld by the monsoon’s rhythm. Today, as climate change forces this to alter, we must prepare ourselves and conserve the water this extraordinary entity still gives us.

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