On Kolkata monsoons, Bombay monsoons, and the songs that taught us how to feel
Shaon gagane ghor ghanaghata, nishith jamini re; the sky of Shraban, or monsoon, dark with grey cloud, the night deepening around it. That is the line Rabindranath Tagore plucked out of his head to describe the exact sound of monsoon dread, written under his invented persona Bhanusingha, borrowing the old Brajabuli of Vidyapati.
He gave voice to a heartbroken Radha, something to sing while she waited for her beloved Krishna to brave the storm and come to her. I could hum the melody long before I understood the words. That is usually how these things arrive in a Bengali household: as sound first, meaning later, sometimes many decades later.
There is a lushness that only monsoon leaves seem to manage, that impossible, oversaturated, chlorophyll green, once the rain has had a few days at them, glossy and dripping past its own edges, playing its own small santoor against the ones above and below it. Lower down, on the pavement, a quieter and less lyrical rhythm keeps time too: some stray paper boat, a forgotten cardboard box, wedged together at the mouth of a drain, taking on rain by the hour, softening at the corners, until it gives up being a shape at all and simply disappears into the water it can no longer hold back.
There is the rain that is romantic and the rain that sours the day, and which one you get depends entirely on how old you are. When you are young and it rains, it is cheerful and nonchalant, chanting “Rain, rain, go away, come again another day” at the window without really meaning a word of it, because wet leather school shoes are a problem that belongs to parents.
Also Read: Monsoon Melodies of the Culinary Kind
The teenage years turn it into something else entirely, a private romance, rain on our shoulders, water dripping down the hair. Only when you start work does the rain become a genuine bother: the crisply ironed shirt drenched through in the time it takes to cross a street, the saree wound wet and heavy around the legs, dignity negotiated one soggy step at a time.
There is, on top of all this, a difference in temperament between the monsoon in Kolkata and the monsoon in Bombay, and anyone who has lived through both will tell you it is closer to a difference in personality than in rainfall figures.
Shantiniketan still marks the season with Barsha Mangal, an entire ritual of songs to be sung while it rains.
Kolkata’s monsoon is a moody but ultimately reasonable relative. It usually rains for a few hours, offers a genuine truce for a few more, and then returns. Bombay’s monsoon has no such manners. It arrives in entire sheets, relentless, and finds its way through the smallest leak, through the seals of modern glass towers that were presumably designed by people who had never actually stood in a Bombay July.
It is fitting, then, that each city produced its own soundtrack for the season. Somewhere in the American West, Paul Newman’s Butch Cassidy is climbing onto a new bicycle in the rain, cycling Etta Place around a farmyard to the tune of “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head”, and the whole scene, weather included, is played for pure, uncomplicated joy, rain as a prop for flirtation, nothing more sinister than that.
He has company in that tradition: Gene Kelly, decades earlier, whistling the tune to himself then swinging round a lamppost and tap-dancing through the puddles for the sheer, soaked joy of it in “Singin’ in the Rain”, and, on the gloomier end of the same shelf, Creedence Clearwater Revival asking “Have You Ever Seen the Rain.”
Bombay’s monsoon asked for something with more longing in it. “Rimjhim gire sawan, sulag sulag jaaye man”, sings Amitabh Bachchan through Kishore Kumar’s voice in Manzil, composed by R.D. Burman. He walks soaked streets with Moushumi Chatterjee, their heights comically mismatched in every frame, in a downpour so real it was shot in an actual Bombay cloudburst rather than a studio water shower.
Hindi cinema did not stop at longing. Anu Malik’s own “Dekho Baarish Ho Rahi Hai, it’s raining”, announces the weather with all the subtlety of a foghorn. The heavy hitter “Ghanan Ghanan” from Lagaan sees A.R. Rahman and Javed Akhtar send up six voices to summon clouds in a drought-starved village, alongside Asha Bhosle’s aching “Chhoti Si Kahani Se” from Gulzar’s Ijaazat, and Lata Mangeshkar’s “O Sajna Barkha Bahar Aayi” from Parakh, set to a Salil Chowdhury tune.
Long before either bicycle or umbrella made it to a film reel, Tagore had already worked out that a monsoon night was longing with thunder as a stand-in, associating romance with the rain.
Shantiniketan still marks the season with Barsha Mangal, an entire ritual of songs to be sung while it rains.
Behind all of it sits Malhar, the raga Tansen is said to have sung to call the rain down in the first place, proof that setting this weather to music is a far older habit than any of these songs.
Finally, rain is a mood for love, in Kolkata’s stop-start sulking or Bombay’s total surrender, in a bicycle built for two or a soaked street built for longing, in a language six centuries old or a film reel forty years old. Whether jhom-jhom or tip-tip, the rain has always known its own mind; we are the ones who keep changing our opinion of it as we change.
Image Courtesy: Daily News Reel
Reshom Majumdar has spent decades in advertising across Asia and Europe, trying to sell everything from tech to biryani.
She's a devoted follower of pop culture and moonlights as a guest columnist, turning coffee orders, curry politics and expat quirks into little essays.
Scratch the marketing polish, though, and you'll find a Calcutta "para" girl at heart, still writing about the fictional neighbourhood she never really left.
