The Monsoon and the Midnight Birth

The monsoon changes everything. The dust of the summer turns to mud, the dry riverbeds fill and run, the fields go green almost overnight, and the flooded earth pushes its hidden creatures up into the light. The festivals of the rains have the smell of wet ground in them. And in the deepest dark of the wet season, on a midnight when the rain is falling, the tradition keeps the birth it loves best.

But before the birth, the rains bring the serpents.

The serpents in the rain

On the fifth tithi of the bright fortnight of Shravana, in the thick of the monsoon, comes Nag Panchami, the festival of the nagas, the serpents.

The timing is not arbitrary. When the rains flood the burrows and the low ground, snakes come up, into the fields and the houses and the paths people walk, and the danger is real. The tradition meets the danger the way it meets the devourer in the first chapter, by turning toward it rather than away. The serpent, the thing to be feared in the flooded month, is worshipped. Milk is offered at anthills and snake-holes and to the images of the nagas. Prayers are made for protection from snakebite and for the blessing the serpents carry.

For in the tradition the serpent is far more than a threat. The nagas are guardians of the waters and the underworld treasures, powers of fertility and of the earth’s hidden life. Vishnu sleeps on the coils of the great serpent Shesha between the cycles of creation. Shiva wears the serpent Vasuki around his throat. The serpent power, Kundalini, coiled at the base of the body, is the whole subject of another treatise on this site. On Nag Panchami the creature that the flood drives into the open is honoured as kin to the gods, and the fear of the rains is folded into reverence.

The thread

On the full moon of Shravana, the same month, the festival turns from the serpents to the bond between people. This is Raksha Bandhan, the tying of the thread of protection.

The rite is simple and old. A sister ties a rakhi, a thread or a small amulet, around her brother’s wrist, and the brother in return pledges to protect her. The word raksha is protection, bandhan is the bond or the tying. What passes across the wrist is a covenant: protection offered, loyalty returned, a thread standing for a tie that the year is meant to renew.

The protective thread is older than the sibling festival it has become. The tradition keeps several stories for it. The most loved tells that Draupadi, when Krishna once cut his hand, tore a strip from her garment and bound the wound, and that Krishna, moved, vowed himself her protector ever after, a vow the tradition says he kept when she was most in danger. Other tellings reach back to the protective threads of older rite, tied by priests and wives for safekeeping. A famous later story, of a queen named Karnavati who is said to have sent a rakhi to an emperor for protection, is widely retold, and an honest treatise marks it as a popular tradition of uncertain history rather than established fact. What endures under all the stories is the gesture: a thread that says, you are mine to protect, and I am yours.

The midnight birth

Then comes the festival the monsoon is building toward. On the eighth tithi of the dark fortnight of Bhadrapada, in the deep of the rains, the tradition keeps the birth of Krishna.

The story is one of the most dramatic in all of Hinduism, and the Bhagavata Purana tells it at length in its tenth book. The tyrant Kamsa ruled Mathura, and a prophecy warned him that the eighth child of his sister Devaki would kill him. So he imprisoned Devaki and her husband Vasudeva and killed each child as it was born. Seven died. When the eighth, Krishna, was born, the prison fell into a strange sleep. The chains opened. The cell doors swung wide. Vasudeva lifted the newborn and carried him out into the storm, across the flooded Yamuna, the river parting or the great serpent Shesha shielding the child from the rain in the tellings, to the safety of Gokula, where he was exchanged for another newborn and raised in secret among the cowherds. The eighth avatara of Vishnu was born in a prison, in the dark, in the rain, and smuggled out alive past a king who had killed seven children to stop him.

This is what Janmashtami keeps, and it keeps it by the clock of the story. The birth was at midnight, and so the devout fast through the whole day and into the night, holding the fast until the midnight hour when Krishna was born. At that hour the birth is celebrated: a cradle holding the infant Krishna is rocked, his name is sung, his story is told, and the long fast is broken in joy. The strongest reckonings want more than the tithi. They want the moon in Rohini, the nakshatra Krishna was born under, and because the eighth tithi and the star Rohini do not always fall on the same night, the festival is sometimes kept on two consecutive days by two communities, the Smarta tradition following one rule and the Vaishnava another. The treatise names the divergence and leaves it, as it has throughout. Krishna is born on the night each lineage reckons.

The day after carries the play. In Maharashtra and Gujarat the dahi handi is kept: a pot of curd and butter hung high above a street, and young men forming a human pyramid to reach and break it, in a roar of crowd and water. It recalls the child Krishna, the butter-thief of Gokula, who climbed and schemed and pyramided his friends to steal the curd his mother hung out of reach. The midnight birth is solemn. The morning after is pure mischief, the god remembered as the most charming child who ever lived.

The turn toward autumn

The monsoon festivals have a particular texture, and it is worth naming as the volume turns. They are intimate. The serpent in the house. The thread between a brother and a sister. A baby carried through a storm. After the cosmic scale of the first volume, Mahakala and the wheel of ages, the rains bring the sacred down to the size of a family, a wrist, a cradle. The same tradition that worships time the devourer also rocks a cradle at midnight and ties a thread around a wrist for safekeeping. It holds both.

And then the rains begin to ease, and the year turns toward its richest, densest season. The festivals that follow come close on one another’s heels through the autumn, the clay god of Maharashtra, the flower-king of Kerala, the nine nights of the Goddess, the lamps that answer the dark. The monsoon’s quiet is about to give way to the loudest stretch of the entire calendar.

The child is safe in Gokula.

Now the autumn comes on.