Why in India, the monsoon is as much music as season
Long before classical ragas acquired elaborate grammars or cinema discovered the romance of rain, the monsoon belonged to ordinary people. Across India, rain songs emerged not from composition desks, but as folk tunes, sung in fields, forests, riverbanks and fishing villages. The monsoon determined whether crops would flourish or fail, whether rivers would swell or dry and whether entire communities would prosper or struggle. Music, like every other aspect of life, responded to that rhythm.
In India, the arrival of the monsoon has never been announced by clouds alone. It has been sung. Photo: iStock
The first monsoon shower rarely arrives in silence.
Before the rain gathers enough force to drum against tiled roofs or wash city streets clean, there is another sound that seems to accompany it, one carried across generations rather than clouds. Somewhere, a singer reaches instinctively for raga Malhar. In a village, women fall into the cadence of an old sowing song. A fisherman along the Konkan coast hums a tune inherited from those who measured time by tides rather than calendars. In a temple, a devotional composition invokes rain not as weather but as grace. On a concert stage, a vocalist lingers over a phrase that seems to suspend the gathering clouds in melody. And for millions raised on Hindi cinema, the first downpour almost inevitably summons the memory of a rain song that has long outlived the film it belonged to and the heart calls out: Rimjhim ke taraane leke aayi barsaat…
In India, the arrival of the monsoon has never been announced by clouds alone. It has been sung. Rarely has any other season inspired such musical expression. Few countries have woven a season so deeply into their musical consciousness.
That intimacy between rain and music is rooted in something far older than aesthetics.
“Musical forms associated with the rains have evolved as a human response to nature in an essentially agricultural society,” says musicologist, percussionist and composer Dr Aneesh Pradhan. “Fertility is what an agrarian society yearns for and monsoon brings to the earth this much-needed abundance of crop.”
He adds: “The seasonal cycle, nocturnal-diurnal cycle and the life cycle have all been integral to Indian music. It is, therefore, natural to find the monsoon playing a major role in inspiring musicians.”
As the rains revived the land, they also gave voice to an extraordinary spectrum of human emotion. Songs celebrating harvest gradually became songs of reunion after separation. Dark clouds came to symbolise both earthly desire and divine compassion. The monsoon became, as Indian music itself evolved, not merely a season but an emotional landscape.
“This celebratory response has many facets to it,” Pradhan explains. “It can move from the immediate joy of seeing agricultural yield and verdure to a more layered response where the fertility in nature catalyses emotions of love, reminding lovers of union after a period of separation.” In Indian music, the greening earth became inseparable from the blooming of the heart. Rain came to signify anticipation, reunion, longing and desire as much as it did relief from a parched summer.
The monsoon melody’s remarkable legacy lies in the way every musical tradition has found its own language for the same natural phenomenon. Folk singers celebrate labour and livelihood. Classical musicians discover infinite shades of mood within the Malhar family of ragas. Carnatic composers imagine the downpour as a shower of divine grace. Mystics such as Kabir transform rain into a metaphor for spiritual awakening, while cinema reinvents it again and again for new generations of lovers and dreamers, using it as an enduring metaphor for romance, longing, rebellion and celebration.
Steeped in Malhar
“We often speak of ‘Malhar’ as though it were a single musical entity,” says Hindustani classical vocalist Arti Anklikar, “but each member of the family has its own personality, its own emotional colour.”
For many listeners, Malhar is almost synonymous with the monsoon. Yet within Hindustani music, it is less a single raga than a richly branching family, each member approaching the rains from a different emotional direction. Together, they demonstrate one of Indian classical music’s most remarkable achievements: the ability to transform a shared natural experience into an astonishing spectrum of feeling.
“Miyan Malhar has immense grandeur and depth,” Anklikar explains. “Sur Malhar is gentler and more lyrical. Gaud Malhar carries a certain brightness, while Megh Malhar evokes simplicity and serenity. They all remind us of rain, but not the same rain. One may suggest dark monsoon clouds gathering over the horizon, another the first cool showers, another the joyous abandon of rainfall in full force.”
The distinction is both subtle and profound. In the classical imagination, rain is never a single emotion. It may arrive with the majesty of thunderclouds, the quiet relief of the season’s first shower, or the exhilaration of a landscape suddenly brought back to life. Each raga inhabits a different emotional weather, allowing musicians to explore not simply the monsoon itself but the many human experiences it awakens.
For many listeners, Malhar is almost synonymous with the monsoon. Yet within Hindustani music, it is less a single raga than a richly branching family, each member approaching the rains from a different emotional direction. Photo: iStock
That richness has ensured the Malhar tradition endures far beyond the legends that surround it. Stories of Tansen summoning rain through Miyan Malhar or Baiju Bawra’s miraculous powers continue to enchant audiences, but Anklikar believes the real wonder lies elsewhere. “Whether or not the legends are literally true is, in many ways, secondary,” she says. “They reflect the profound impact that music has always had on people’s imagination. The real miracle is not that a raga can bring rain; it is that it can transform the listener’s inner landscape.”
It is a transformation she has witnessed from the concert stage. Reflecting on her recent Ghan Garje performance at Mumbai’s The National Centre for the Performing Arts (NCPA), Anklikar recalls a moment during Miyan Malhar when “the hall had become completely still. Nobody was merely listening anymore; everyone seemed immersed in the raga’s emotional world”. Such moments, she says, cannot be manufactured. “You don't consciously create them; they simply happen when the raga reveals itself.”
If Hindustani music hears the monsoon through the many voices of Malhar, Carnatic music imagines the rains through a different, though equally evocative, musical language.
“Rain softens the mind and lends the sensitive musical mind to artistry,” says Oscar-nominee vocalist Bombay Jayashree. “It smoothens the rough edges of life and thus finds expression through the artistic mind.” Her words suggest that the monsoon is not simply an external phenomenon but an inner condition, one that prepares the imagination to receive music.
The rains, in Carnatic music, are often less a symbol of romantic longing than of divine grace. Unlike the ever-changing spectrum of moods in Hindustani classical music’s depiction of the rains, Carnatic music approaches it through a different sensibility; one where nature, devotion and melody become inseparable. Rain is not merely an image to be described but a blessing to be invoked, an act of grace that nourishes both the earth and the spirit.
This tradition finds one of its finest expressions in the celebrated raga Amritavarshini. Tradition holds that the great composer Muthuswami Dikshitar created the raga and composed Anandamritakarshini during a time of drought, invoking life-giving rain. Whether regarded as history or legend, the story speaks to the enduring belief that music possesses the power to transform not only emotion but the world itself. “Generations have explored this raga and the composition,” Jayashree says, adding that even the lesser-known Megha Ranjani captures “the beauty of rain”.
Carnatic vocalist Gayatri of the Gayatri-Ranjani duo sees the monsoon less as a seasonal theme than as a spiritual metaphor woven into the repertoire. While Carnatic music does not possess a vast family of rain ragas comparable to the Malhars, composers such as Tyagaraja, Syama Sastri and Purandaradasa repeatedly invoke clouds, thunder and rain as symbols of divine compassion. “Rain as karuna varsha rather than as a season of romantic longing,” she explains. “In Carnatic music, monsoon is not just weather but a devotional outpouring of grace expressed through compositions.”
The distinction reveals another facet of India’s musical imagination.
A folk tune for every rain
Across the subcontinent, as the same clouds gather over different landscapes, each musical tradition discovers its own meaning in them. And yet the boundaries between these worlds have never been rigid.
“Traditions continue to co-exist and also take inspiration from each other,” Jayashree says.
As Gayatri observes, rain is a universal experience. “Everyone has felt the buildup before a storm and the relief that follows. That shared feeling is what travels across cultures.” Even when listeners do not understand the language of the lyrics, the raga and its bhava carry the season across linguistic and geographical boundaries, reminding us that some experiences need no translation.
Across India, rain songs emerged not from composition desks but from fields, forests, riverbanks and fishing villages. They marked the rhythms of sowing and harvest, migration and return, prayer and celebration. Their melodies were shaped as much by labour as by artistry.
“What makes Maharashtra’s rain music special is that it isn’t one sound; it changes with the landscape,” says Ajay Gogavale, one half of the composer duo Ajay and Atul Gogavale, whose music has consistently drawn upon the state’s folk traditions. “Rains on the Konkan coast create a different musical mood from rain in western Maharashtra or Vidarbha. Every community responds differently because their lives depend on the season in different ways.”
That changing folk landscape produces an equally varied emotional map.
Adds Atul: “The Dhangar [mountain clan] sings of migration, grazing and open skies; the Koli [coastal community] celebrates the sea and waits for it to calm; Gondhal [traditional ritualistic performance] invokes the divine with tremendous energy; Bhajans [devotional music] become prayers for abundance; and even Lavani [part of tamasha or folk theatre] carries the fragrance and romance of the rains. So the monsoon isn't just weather, it is livelihood, devotion, longing and celebration.”
For the brothers, these traditions are more than musical influences; they are childhood memories. “We grew up in a village where music wasn't something performed on a stage; it was part of everyday life,” recalls Ajay. “During the first rains, people instinctively began singing while working in the fields, during festivals, or simply while sitting together in the evening.” The melodies were inseparable from the sounds around them — the rain striking tiled roofs, temple bells carried on damp air, women singing as they worked. “Those sounds became our first orchestra.”
Also read: Why Kanupriya Dhingra’s The Sunday Book Bazaar is a bibliophile's ode to this iconic Delhi market
In Mumbai, where the monsoon transforms both the sea and the city, the music of the Koli Christian community speaks of a different dependence. “For our communities, the monsoon has always been more than a season; it is the rhythm by which life is organised,” says folk musician Cedric Tixeira. Fishing slows, rice fields are prepared and village life turns inward. “Rain is understood as God’s grace, but it also reminds us of the power of nature. That mixture of gratitude and humility is deeply embedded in our songs.”
Unlike Maharashtra's many other rain traditions that celebrate labour, devotion or livelihood, Lavani has always found something far more intimate in the monsoon. “Naughty, bold, in your face and mostly practical, it can also be hopelessly romantic at times,” says Tamasha and Lavani scholar Bhushan Korgaonkar, who runs his own troupe. “It uses a playful mix of direct words and metaphors.”
Where a Dhangari song might celebrate grazing lands and a Koli the sea, Lavani turns the rains into a language of desire. Korgaonkar points to a traditional lavani in which the heroine laments, “Bara varsha gela paus, jameen kara gaar (12 monsoons have passed me by; come, cool this parched earth with your rain).” The rain and parched earth are unmistakable metaphors for her own longing. Another popular verse, “Bai, shravanacha oon mala jhepena (Dearest, I can’t endure even the soft sunshine of Shravan anymore),” captures vulnerability with equal measures of tenderness and seduction. “Lavani centres desire, longing and agency rather than just devotion or agrarian cycles,” he explains. “The monsoon here is less about crops or gods and more about the body, desire and the courage to speak of both without shame.”
Across languages, landscapes and traditions, the rains echo through folk songs born in fields and fishing villages, through classical ragas and through film music that has turned rain into a metaphor for romance. Photo: iStock
That emotional register also reflected the realities of the performers themselves. Traditional travelling Tamasha troupes suspended performances during the monsoon, when work disappeared and many artistes took up farm labour or other seasonal jobs to survive. “A full belly might make the monsoon romantic; for farmers it is about life and death; but for Dalits and nomadic Tamasha artists, it often meant leaking roofs, hunger and unemployment,” Korgaonkar explains. It is a reminder that even as Lavani celebrated romance, its performers experienced the rains very differently.
Hundreds of kilometres away in Karnataka, Padma Shri Manjamma Jogati remembers a similar intimacy between rain and community. “In our tradition [Jogati Nritya is a folk dance of Karnataka], rain is never just weather. It is prasada, the blessing of the Mother Goddess,” she says. As a Jogati, travelling from village to village carrying the stories of Yellamma [a Hindu deity, revered as the goddess of the masses], she found that the monsoon altered not only the landscape but the performance itself. “The smell of wet earth, the sound of frogs, the flowing streams, everything becomes part of the performance. Nature is not our backdrop; it sings with us.”
That intimate relationship between music and work is central to Karnataka’s Janapada [folk] tradition. “Our songs were never composed inside rooms,” Manjamma says. “They were born in the fields, on village paths, beside wells and under trees.” Their rhythms followed the movements of sowing, transplanting and carrying water, making labour lighter while reminding people that "no one struggled alone”.
In the Malwa region of Madhya Pradesh (where Mahakavi Kalidas composed his iconic Meghdutam), the rains assume yet another meaning through the poetry of Kabir. Folk singer Prahlad Singh Tipaniya sees the monsoon less as a change of season than as a metaphor for inner awakening. “For Kabir, the rain is never just rain,” he says and recites बरसै अमृत धार, भीजै मन का खेत/ सतगुरु बीज बोय दे, उगै प्रेम की रेत (The nectar-rain pours down and moistens the field of the heart / When the true Guru sows the seed, love begins to grow.)
“The cloud is grace, the parched earth is the human heart, and the first shower is the awakening of consciousness.” The longing of the farmer waiting for rain becomes, in Kabir’s hands, the soul’s longing for truth. "The real monsoon begins when compassion and awareness arise within us."
Unlike cinema, where rain often belongs to two lovers, these folk traditions remain resolutely community-centric. They celebrate harvests, accompany work, mark village feasts and preserve memories of lives shaped by the seasons. Together they remind us that before the monsoon became one of India’s most enduring artistic metaphors, it was first a shared way of life.
That relationship between rain and song is not confined to history or to the classical stage. It continues to thrive in communities where the monsoon still shapes the rhythms of everyday life. In Assam, where the arrival of the rains transforms the landscape into a tapestry of rivers, paddy fields and lush greenery, music remains inseparable from the season itself.
For Assamese violinist Sunita Bhuyan, the monsoon is woven into Assam’s cultural identity through songs that celebrate both nature and agriculture. “Our music follows the rhythm of the seasons,” she admits. “When the rains arrive, they bring not only relief but a sense of renewal, and that joy naturally finds expression in song.”
Like the Kajris [folk song and dance] of North India or the sowing songs of Maharashtra, Assamese folk music reflects a society that has long measured time by the cycles of the land.
Yet Bhuyan believes these songs endure because they speak to something deeper than rural memory. “Even today, when people’s lives have changed, the emotions endure,” she says. “The rains still remind us of hope, belonging and our relationship with nature.”
Singing it on screen
By the time Indian cinema embraced the monsoon, the rains had already been singing through India’s cultural imagination for centuries, inheriting the rich legacy of the country’s classical and folk monsoon music and translating it into a language to capture popular imagination like never before.
“I feel Indian cinema has been influenced by a long tradition of music-making and poetry associated with the rains,” says Pradhan. “But it has equally reshaped the earlier association to suit cinematic narrative and at times to even titillate.”
Also read: Why contemporary Hindi cinema seems to have little new to say about Partition
The silver screen discovered that rain could do what few other cinematic devices could. It heightened emotion without explanation. A gathering storm could foreshadow conflict; the first shower could signal hope or renewal; a sudden downpour could dissolve inhibitions, bringing lovers together or leaving them to confront loss. Rain was never simply part of the setting - it became another character in the story, silently carrying meanings that audiences instinctively understood.
That instinct, Pradhan suggests, came from a much older cultural memory. For generations, Indians had encountered the monsoon not merely as a change in weather but as a season invested with emotional, spiritual and social significance. Poetry had associated dark clouds with yearning, folk songs with reunion and harvest, and classical music with a spectrum of moods ranging from quiet anticipation to ecstatic celebration. Cinema did not have to teach audiences what rain meant; it merely drew upon meanings they already carried within them.
“The capacity of rain to carry emotions as varied as romance, longing, nostalgia, devotion, rebellion and joy makes the monsoon such a durable musical metaphor for cinema,” Pradhan observes. Few natural phenomena possess such emotional elasticity. Rain could belong as easily to the farmer praying for a good harvest as to the devotee seeking divine grace, the separated lover yearning for reunion or the rebel defying convention. On screen, these meanings merged effortlessly, allowing filmmakers and composers to create songs that resonated across regions, languages and generations.
If cinema borrowed freely from India's older musical traditions, it also gave something back. For an increasingly urban nation, many of whose listeners were growing distant from the rhythms of agricultural life, film songs became a new repository of seasonal memory. The monsoon continued to evoke longing, celebration and renewal, but now through melodies carried by radio, records and television into homes far removed from the landscapes that had first inspired them.
Yet beneath the glamour of the silver screen, the older echoes never disappeared. Every cinematic rain song, whether joyful or melancholic, carries within it faint traces of the village singer awaiting the first showers, the classical musician unfolding a Malhar, the devotee invoking life-giving rain and the folk poet who first imagined dark clouds as the language of the heart. The idiom may have changed, but the monsoon continues to sing the same enduring truths - of hope after hardship, abundance after scarcity and renewal after longing.
Different voices. Different landscapes. Different centuries. But they all recognise the same season… a season that never simply arrives but announces itself in song.
