The day Alexander Frater was born, in a small mission hospital in an island in the South West Pacific, “2.1 inches of rain fell in a space of seven hours and 12 minutes,” knocking flowers off trees and washing away top soil. As he explains in the prologue to Chasing the Monsoon (1990), his father, a doctor, told him this detail and also taught him to observe and analyse weather. Later, a picture by his bedside would lead him to “Cherrapunji: the wettest place on earth.” But before he embarked on his journey in the late 1980s, he began reading and found that the temperamental monsoon had acquired some “disturbing behavioural changes”. It had grown “spiteful... Some areas of India were paid only fleeting visits, some no visits at all. This wilfulness puzzled the weather men and frightened the politicians.” In the 21st century, the monsoon is just as capricious, but are politicians still scared?
Leaving nimbus clouds aside, geopolitical writer and intrepid traveller Robert D. Kaplan drew up the importance of the Greater Indian Ocean in Monsoon (2010). “In this rimland of Eurasia... we can locate the tense dialogue between Western and Islamic civilisations, the ganglia of global energy routes, and the quiet, seemingly inexorable rise of India and China over land and sea,” he wrote. Recalling the late British historian C.R. Boxer’s words “Monsoon Asia”, Kaplan said India, Pakistan, China, Indonesia, Myanmar, Oman, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Tanzania “will demographically and strategically be a hub of the twenty first century world”; a world “where the fight for democracy, energy independence, and religious freedom will be lost or won”. He even highlighted issues like climate change and its impact.
Calling attention to some of the perils lurking in the waters of the region is Amitav Ghosh’s searing narrative, The Great Derangement (2016), where he spoke of “elemental” forces that had “untethered” hundreds of people, including his ancestors, early “ecological refugees”. While writing his book set in the Sunderbans ( The Hungry Tide ), Ghosh became aware of the unique landscape. As he wrote in his notes: “I do believe... that the land is demonstrably alive; that it doesn’t exist solely, or even incidentally, as a stage for the enactment of human history; that it is [itself] a protagonist.” Here rivers change course overnight, villages disappear in a flash — and the deluge during the monsoons usually has a hand in it.
