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Magazine
REVIEW
Rethinking rain
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International Gallerie: Rain pays homage to rain in all its interpretations and improvisations: contemporary, ancient, urban, rural, innocent, sensuous, savage and life-giving, writes TISHANI DOSHI.
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THREE months ago, I sat in the Hamarikyu Asahi Concert Hall in Tokyo and listened to Dhrupad renditions of Raag Miya Malhar and Raag Megh Malhar by the Gundecha Brothers. They were performing at the Tokyo Summer Festival whose theme this year was "Ritual, Nature, and Music". The main thrust of the festival was to showcase some of the musical traditions that continue to tenaciously survive in different parts of the world despite a growing alienation from nature. Music that has emerged alongside with ritual has always been part of the dialogue between man and nature, and it has long had the ability to bridge gaps between cultures, languages, worlds; the human and the divine. And so it happened, that at the end of the rainy season in Japan, I listened transfixed along with the rest of the non-Urdu-understanding, predominantly Japanese audience, while the music carried us along like heavily-laden thunder clouds to a place in India that was about to receive the miracle of monsoon rain.
In the latest edition of International Gallerie, there's a picture of Ando Hiroshige's woodblock print, "Sudden Shower Over Shin-Ohashi Bridge and Atake", from the early 1800s. On the facing page is Vincent van Gogh's reproduction of the print, and while the scene is the same — six figures scurrying across the bridge while sheets of rain have cracked open the sky with a lone boatman rowing by, the rain is completely different. Hiroshige's rain is the rain of surprise; menacing rain that has come down in thin, hard, black lines. He has captured that suspended moment before the rain begins; the darkening of the sky, the heavy smell of the air, the anticipation of the earth ready to receive, and the moment after — the frenetic race for shelter. Van Gogh's version is mellow. It looks like it's been raining in his picture for centuries. His is an enduring rain that blurs over the page, it doesn't have the ability to sever time into those cracks of before, after, during. These two pictures placed side by side represent the heart of the issue which pays homage to rain in all its interpretations and improvisations: contemporary, ancient, urban, rural, innocent, sensuous, savage, life-giving.
Bina Sarkar Ellias, in her Editor's note, mentioned that there had been difficulty finding rain-inspired art, and that most of the pieces featured by the 33 contemporary artists had been specially created to fit the theme. This seems surprising considering we live in a country where rain has permeated every layer of literature, lyric, legend, and life; whose presence or absence continues to play a huge part in the changing landscape, what with floods in Orissa wiping out whole families and droughts in Karnataka causing farmers to commit debt-related suicide with brisk alacrity. Ellias also comments how much of our association with rain goes back to childhood memories. Madan Gopal Singh writes about the songs of yearning, separation and desire, of the wandering Rajasthani nomads that seemed to herald the coming of rain in his childhood in Delhi. Yusuf Arakkal evokes the torrential rains of Kerala and contrasts it with the image of a parched earth and children waiting for a drop of water. Kasma Loha-Unchit remembers her childhood in Thailand where it didn't rain cats and dogs, but fishes. Mahumud's photo essay takes us through various rain-drenched country roads and city scenes, but what stays in the mind's eye is the row of naked and half-naked boys flanked side-by-side with rain flattening their hair, seeping in through the skin and forming its own bonds with nostalgia in black and white.
It's a beautiful book, and there are pictures that you'll want to return to over and over again — Gulammohammed Sheikh's exquisite gouache, "Conjuring Rain", reminiscent of a Buddhist tangkha, Paritosh Sen's "Couple with Umbrellas", venerating the ubiquitous black umbrella, the wonderful pathos and humour of Gieve Patel's "Man in the Rain with Bread and Bananas". Some of the pictures are accompanied with memories, or anecdotes from the artists themselves — Krishen Khanna sketches a visit to Panjnad, the confluence of five rivers, where a flood carried away a doomed buffalo with water-birds on its back seeking shelter. Others, like Jogen Chowdhury, Chandrima Roy, and Gautam Mukherjee go to those more reliable sources for words: Shakespeare, Tagore, the Bible. Meera Devidayal juxtaposes myth and reality by placing Krishna and Radha enjoying their lush, evergreen love against a barren, bone-dry Nal Sarovar, with migratory birds having nowhere to fly.
To get to the essential rawness of rain though, one must go to the great master Kalidasa, who in the Kumarasambhava, traces the passage of rain, stirs up poetic desire and the subtleties of sensual love with the accuracy of the eye of a thunderstorm. Dr. B.N. Goswamy discusses Kalidasa's brilliance in his essay on rain in Indian miniature painting, which he introduces with the papeeha bird. This curious bird waits with parched throat, looking skyward for months because it subsists only on the first drops of rain. Without the rain, the bird would die, but if the rain should fall, it would sing the sweetest, most seductive of songs. The papeeha bird should be the poster-child for contemporary artists, because it is absolutely essential to be romantic about rain. Otherwise, 10 years from now, a publication like this would make no reference to dancing peacocks, hissing serpents, maitrya-kanyas, or botu dolphin men. Instead, we would have to sift our way through potholes and waterlogged roads, struggle to find beauty in chaos and restoration like Ranjith Hoskote has done in his essay, "A City Horizoned by Rain". Already there has been a concretisation of schools, which has eliminated the whole concept of rain-holidays. Already there are traffic-jams with or without the monsoon, dire pollution levels, so even if it did rain fishes, they would surely splutter and die. Combine that with the other modern distortions that rain has had to endure — endless analysis by banal weather women and men on TV with their infuriatingly bright personalities, rain harvesting, catching, and harnessing. Also, as Meenakshi Shedde rightly points out in her essay on rain in Indian cinema, rain has always served as a metaphor for sex, and dance sequences more frequently than not, further eroticise the Indian woman. But there has been a move from lyricism to lewdness, from suggestion to a smack in your face. All this put together provides alarming potential to completely de-romanticise our association with rain.
Jitish Kallat writes how rain is the only way our bodies can touch the clouds. It's our most tangible link with the sky. Each person has his or her own love story with rain, as do cities and countries, fuelled by various myths and histories, but the beautiful thing about rain is that it envelopes all, cannot isolate, brings together or takes apart with terrifying parity.
The Thirrukural puts it this way: It is rain that ruins, and it is rain again/ That raises up those it has ruined. Water being the scarce resource that it currently is; bottled, bought, stored, and stolen, there is something so marvellously lavish and forbidden about a sudden downpour. It's like a special indulgence, part of a dream manifesting itself in reality, and perhaps the fragile image of a paper boat emissary is not so displaced after all. If rain is to continue to be a bore-well of inspiration to contemporary artists, then keeping the current state of affairs in mind, they must learn to dig deep.
International Gallerie, A Journey of Ideas, Rain, Vol. 6, No 1, 2003, edited by Bina Sarkar Ellias, Rs.250
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