India and the Sound of Rain

The Essay

Nandini Das, Professor of Early Modern Literature and Culture at Oxford, brings us stories and personal experiences of rain and the way it informs and combines with different cultures across the globe. Each of the five essays takes a particular sense and location as focus, beginning with Nandini's native India and the sound of rainfall. She recalls the deafening, thundering rains of the monsoon season in Kolkata, and the language that captured its power. She recalls how the inherited myths and stories of India have always been informed by the uneasy balance of the country's rain and searing heat. And she recounts the musical dramas in which raags are used to call the rains and Bengali nursery rhymes carry its sound, 'brishti porey tupur tapur' (pitter-patter falls the rain).