I do not remember at what age and how I had learned a children’s rhyme in Telugu, Vaanallu-kuravaali Vaana-demuda, but the stanza still reverberates in my thoughts, especially during the summer season when most of India, except for a few hill stations, gets unbearably hot. Though the rhyme has many local variations, the one I know in translation goes as follows. “Rains have to be showered, O rain-god! Paddy crops have to be ripened, O rain-god! Dark clouds have to lend the cool rains, O rain-god! Mother-frog has delivered frog-lets, and our earthen pots have filled with water, see for yourself, O rain-god! Get drenched in the rain, again and again, O rain-god! The large bamboo baskets at our home have to be filled with twelve varieties of grains, O rain-god!” A few versions have additional stanzas such as, “Workers who migrated to cities have to return to find work in their villages, O rain-god!” Evidently, the rhyme is being improvised constantly by adding new stanzas, which often reflect contemporary situations and conditions of agrarian workers, and other working-class people.
All such children’s rhymes in many Indian languages are now disappearing, though their message is very much apt to the soil and conditions in which Indians by and large depend on even today. Years later, when I read/heard for the first time an English children’s rhyme, “Rain, rain, go away, come again another day”, which apparently is very popular across India, I wondered as to how relevant this nursery couplet is to the weather conditions that prevail in many parts of the country, perhaps with the exception of Cherrapunji. A couplet from another English rhyme, which mentions the patron saint of weather, Swithin (c. 800-863), says, “St. Swithin’s Day, thou dost rain, for forty days it will remain.” I suppose that so many days of rain would be welcomed in our country, especially by those who are involved in agrarian activities.
In Rig Veda, Rutu is the term frequently mentioned to denote a season, which is counted as three or more; and at times, even six seasons. The Vedic divinity, Varuna, is being revered even now as the God of water, including ocean, rivers, rains and the like. When it rains for the first time during the monsoon of a year, tillers of agricultural fields still say, “Varuna-demudu-karunichaadu” (God Varuna has shown empathy).
Kalidasa’s Rutu-samhara (the Pageant of the Seasons), which happens to be the first Sanskrit text printed in Calcutta in 1784, contains verses on all six seasons viz. grishma (summer), varsha (monsoon), sarat (autumn), hemanta (cool), sisira (winter) and vasanta (spring). The poet wrote 28 verses on the monsoon in which the concluding stanza appears almost like phala-sruti (fruits of listening), and the same goes as follows: “May this period of the rain-giving clouds, Charming with its many attractions, The dream of delight of romantic maids, Unselfish friend of trees and vines, And the breath of life of animate beings, Grant you your heart’s inmost desires!” The poem of Kalidasa has been translated into English by many, including R S Pandit, who dedicated the translation to Rabindranath Tagore. The first printed edition of the book, released in 1947, contains a painting done by Nandalal Bose as its frontispiece. The painting, to the best of my knowledge, is not well-known as it has not been reproduced elsewhere in any book on the works of Nandalal Bose.
Mas’ud Sa’d Salman (c. 1046-1121), the first known poet who wrote in Indo-Persian language under the patronage of kings of the Ghaznavid dynasty of Lahore, had compared the Indian monsoon with spring season and said, “Monsoon, the spring of Hindustan, is the saviour from the torment of summer; you brought tidings of the month of Tir, and once again we’ve escaped the heat.” Reflecting upon the fact that rains in India often cause flash floods leading to havoc, Salman said, “I spent such a night in the monsoon rain; water was up to my neck, and mud up to my throat.” Suggesting that anything in excess is harmful, Sant Kabir (15th century) had said, “Excessive amount of anything is dangerous, either talking more or keeping absolutely quiet; like too much sun and rain are not good.” Later, Mirza Ghalib (1797-1869) wrote a stanza, “How does one pass the dark monsoon night? Alas, my eyes have become accustomed to counting the stars”, which suggests not only lack of rains, but also the loneliness of a man without his beloved during the monsoon.
Rice and rice-based preparations are the staple food of a majority of people in India, especially in the south; and, paddy cultivation requires abundance of rains, and water needs to be stored in the field from the time of sowing seeds to the ripening of the crop. This reminds me of a verse written by Sri Krishna Deva Raya of the Vijayanagara empire in his poem in Telugu, Amuktamalyada (c. 1517), that goes as follows. “As paddy crop has ripened, farmers have drained water out of the fields; and hence, many water pools with lotuses have appeared around the fields; when mild breeze is wafting over the fields, the tall and ripen paddy shoots, moving gently, appeared to have raised their hands to plead with the lotuses for some water.”
Srinivas Sistla
Associate Professor in Art History and Aesthetics, Department of Fine Arts, Andhra University, Visakhapatnam
