Right now the temperature in Delhi has risen from its winter low to over 40 degrees centigrade. Summer is well under way.
I’m amazed by the number of people who don’t cast off their tight-fitting Western clothes and revert to traditional loose-fitting Indian garb with its thinly woven cloth.
In the days of the Raj the lucky ones escaped the heat by moving to the foothills of the Himalayas or the mountains of western and southern India.
The whole of the government of India moved from Calcutta - and then Delhi when it became the capital - to the hill station of Simla, known today as Shimla.
Husbands who did not have the good fortune to be part of the Viceroy’s entourage and had to sweat out the summer in some dusty district headquarters in the plains would often send their wives to Simla to spare them from the summer sun.
Time for love
There were plenty of young bachelors in Simla too. Kipling who wrote about the romances that ensued in his Plain Tales from the Hills described Simla as having “one of the most unhealthy moral atmospheres in Asia”.
The poet Kalidasa, who probably lived at the close of the 1st Century BC wrote a poem about the seasons.
This translation of one verse indicates that in those days summer was a time for one of the most important activities of life, making love:
“Curving hips, their beauty enhancedby fine silks and jewelled belts;sandal-scented breasts caressed by necklaces of pearls,fragrant tresses bathed in fragrant water;with these women sooth their loversIn burning summer, my love.”
It is ironic that a time of the year when humans wilt, and the earth is baked by the sun, Delhi should be looking so good.
In the parks where I walk the golden gulmohar trees, the purple jacarandas and the lemon yellow Indian laburnum are all blooming. There are autumnal trees too, mighty arjuns for instance standing tall amidst carpets of the deep brown leaves they have shed.
Migrant birds have arrived. Rosy pastors, so called because their pink and black plumage is reminiscent of a robed clergyman, have stopped off on their passage to feed on the fruit of peepul trees.
The oriole, immaculate in gold and black, with a call that ornithologists describe as liquid, is another visitor. The multitude of mynahs and the hornbills with their beaks like scythes ignore the heat as they laboriously construct their nests.
In the British Raj in addition to the water-carriers there were also pankahwalas to cool the sahibs. A pankah was a strip of cloth suspended from the ceiling which flapped lackadaisically as it was pulled to and fro by a rope. The rope was often attached to the prostrate pankahwala’s foot.
Blocks of ice were provided for railway passengers. Buildings were designed to take advantage of breezes, and much of life was lived on open verandas. At night it was not uncommon to sleep outside under a mosquito net.
Managable heat
Now, for more prosperous Indians, technology has overcome the heat of summer. Air conditioning has come of age.
There are even all-air-conditioned trains, although the vast majority of passengers still travel without that facility. There is air-conditioned shopping in the new malls and air-conditioned entertainment in restaurants, bars, and cinemas.
But technology has not yet come to the rescue of rural north India. Erratic or non-existent supply of electricity, plus of course economic constraints, rule out air conditioning for most villagers.
They are lucky if they get power for light. Traditional methods of coping with the heat are still in vogue.
Sleeping outside is one. Another is social life which takes place under the shade of village trees rather than in air-conditioned bars, restaurants, or drawing rooms.
In the villages, summer provides a break between the harvesting of the winter wheat and the sewing and transplanting of rice. That has to wait for the monsoon, and much of the conversation in villages will be about the prospects for it.
But if the Indian economy goes on growing at the pace it is, maybe in 20 years many of those farmers will have no worries about the hot weather because they too will sleep in air-conditioned bedrooms.
And perhaps technology will have made them less dependent on the monsoon.
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