Season close to Rabindranath\'s heart

Nilratan Halder | Published: August 20, 2016 00:00:00 | Updated: February 01, 2018 00:00:00

The month of Shrabon has just given over to Bhadra. But its legacy lingers. Rabindranath has an overwhelming favouritism for the rainy season. His love for the season was intense and passionate. This is why he could write immortal lines of songs like: "Shraboner dharar moto paruk jhare" (like the non-stop stream of Shrabon, let it fall) or "Aaaj Shraboner purnimate ki enechis bol, bol amare" (what have you brought over on the occasion of full moon of Shrabon?).
Has Shrabon been any different from what it was during Tagore's time? Certainly it has been. There were rains all right. But were rains as profuse as those were, say, 30 years ago -let alone during the time Rabindranath made an intimate bond with the season. Compared to the previous year, the frequency of rains was higher this year but still something was missing. Intermittent, the rains never poured like before when the impression was of gate-crashing by waterfalls from heaven.
Bangladesh was once one of the wettest places in this part of the world. But it never was like the world's number one wettest place like Mawsynram, a Khasi village in Meghalaya and the number two Cherrapunji also in Meghalaya, Bangladesh's immediate neighbour. Climate change has been responsible for reducing the country's share in annual rainfall as also the monsoon rains.
Yet the people here can count them lucky this time because of some rains. Rains were scarce last year. It was really frightening to see the absence of rains in peak monsoon. This year clouds form frequently and the sky is overcast but they are not producing as much rains as they used to do in the past. Something has gone terribly wrong with the system. And none other than man is to blame for this.
Not that the geo-morphological changes cannot take place on account of natural forces. The Himalayas formed when the Indian plate on separation from Gondwana, a super-continent of four continents - Africa, South America, Antarctica and Australia - drifted to crash into Asia. Forces like oceanic subduction and volcanic eruption are released, leading to magmatic arc. The collision then produced the Himalayas. The ecology of the subcontinent owes largely to the Himalayas. It works as a natural barrier to arrest the floating clouds and cool those in the form of ice which at some point melts to be the source of the major rivers flowing through the countries of South Asia. Â
The Andes also came into being out of collisions between and among South American plate, Nazca plate and Antarctic plate. Argentina's vast Patagonia once received rainfall and had tall trees but with the rise of the Andes, the wet air from the Pacific in the west causes rainfall in Chile but then gets weaker. When it enters Patagonia it loses its strength and fails to cause any rainfall there. Thus once a fertile land, Patagonia has become completely arid where hardly any tree other than ferns grows now.
Will monsoon ever be a thing of the past here as it has become the case in Patagonia? This will depend on how things take shape. The Indian plate is still moving north and the Himalayas are rising by a centimetre each year. Much of the convulsion below is a result of the active movement of the Indian plate. The sea called Tethys has disappeared as a result of the merging of Asia and Indian subcontinent that came floating like an island.
Similarly, many changes can take place over millions of years when sea rise devours what today are land areas in this part of the world. Now much will depend on how fast the effect of climate change accelerates the process of disappearance of polar ice and subsequent sea rise.
If monsoon does not remain what it was 50 years back or when Tagore lived to write verses or compose songs in its appreciation, this part of the world will really miss one of Nature's greatest gifts to the peoples all over South Asia. Rabindranath had a love affair with hilly towns in North Bengal. His rendezvous with Mungpoo is one of a quest as well as renewal of his love affair with rains in its mellifluous magnificence.