By Ritambhara
Kalidasa’s Meghaduta, or The Cloud Messenger, follows one rain cloud north across India at the start of the monsoon. Along the way the poet records which birds breed, which plants flower and which fields are ploughed as the rain arrives.
Kalidasa wrote in Sanskrit, probably in the 4th or 5th century CE. The Meghaduta runs to between about 110 and 120 verses, depending on the edition, in the slow mandakranta metre. A yaksha, a nature spirit exiled for a year to the hill of Ramagiri, sees a cloud on the peak in the month of Ashadha, which falls in June and July. He asks it to carry a message to his wife in Alaka, a city on Mount Kailasa. Tradition places Ramagiri at Ramtek, near Nagpur.
A route set by the rain
The first half of the poem, the Purvamegha, works as a travel guide for the cloud. The yaksha sends it north over the Vindhya hills, the Narmada river and the city of Ujjain, then on towards the Himalaya. That direction matches the season. Each June the monsoon moves north across central India, and in July it reaches the far north of the country. A cloud seen near Nagpur in Ashadha would travel the way Kalidasa sends it.
Birds and plants on the calendar
Kalidasa ties each stage of the trip to living things. In Colin John Holcombe’s translation, “conceiving female cranes” cross the sky “in garlands, row on row” to greet the cloud. Wild geese, “bearing lotus shoots for voyage”, leave for Lake Manasa near Kailasa. Peacocks cry at the thunder, and the kandali plant flowers once the forest ground is soaked. At a ploughed upland, farm women look up at the cloud for the harvest it promises.
Holcombe notes that the crane verse repeats a popular belief that clouds make cranes conceive. Field biology supports the timing behind that belief. The crane researcher K S Gopi Sundar has found that sarus cranes breed during the monsoon and build nests only once rain fills the wetlands. Of about 5,000 breeding records he described to Down To Earth in 2018, fewer than 0.3 per cent fell outside the season. Each of those was tied to unusual water, from off-season rain or irrigation canals.
The monsoon calendar today
The India Meteorological Department (IMD) now keeps its own record of the same northward advance. In 2020 it revised the normal monsoon onset dates using data from 1961 to 2019, replacing normals drawn from 149 stations between 1901 and 1940. The monsoon still reaches Kerala on 1 June. It now reaches the far north-west of India by 8 July, a week earlier than the old normal of 15 July, according to the IMD and The Week (2020).
The Meghaduta describes a monsoon that people, birds and plants read together as one calendar. Kalidasa wrote that calendar down in verse about 1,500 years ago, and the IMD now writes it in tables. The poem asks readers to watch it closely, because a shift in the rain’s timing changes when cranes nest and when fields can be sown.
