South Asian precipitation amount and extreme variability are predicted to increase due to thermodynamic effects of increased 21st-century greenhouse gases, accompanied by an increased supply of moisture from the southern hemisphere Indian Ocean. We reconstructed South Asian summer monsoon precipitation and runoff into the Bay of Bengal to assess the extent to which these factors also operated in the Pleistocene, a time of large-scale natural changes in carbon dioxide and ice volume. South Asian precipitation and runoff are strongly coherent with, and lag, atmospheric carbon dioxide changes at Earth’s orbital eccentricity, obliquity, and precession bands and are closely tied to cross-equatorial wind strength at the precession band. We find that the projected monsoon response to ongoing, rapid high-latitude ice melt and rising carbon dioxide levels is fully consistent with dynamics of the past 0.9 million years.

Orbital‐scale Indian Summer Monsoon variability is often interpreted as a direct response to northern hemisphere summer insolation. Here we present a continuous (0–640 kyr) orbital scale precipitation isotope (δDprecip) record using leaf wax δD from the core monsoon zone of India. The δDprecip record is quantitatively coherent with, and δDprecip minima in phase with, greenhouses gas maxima, and ice volume minima across all orbital bands. The δDprecip record is also coherent and in phase with the two existing orbital‐scale Indian speleothem δ18O records, demonstrating a consistent regional response among independent proxies. These findings preclude interpretation of Indian precipitation isotope records as a direct response to northern hemisphere summer insolation. Rather, they dominantly reflect changes in moisture source and transport paths associated with changes in greenhouse gases and ice volume. The orbital‐scale precipitation isotope responses of the Indian and East Asian monsoon systems are uncoupled and are driven by different forcings.

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