This article is a high-quality piece of work with some important new data spanning an interesting climatic transition with material being delivered from central India and providing critical new constraints on the development of environment during interglacial periods within the core monsoon area. I believe that it is worthy of publication but it will need some rewriting before it could be accepted. I actually found the paper really difficult to follow and understand. The writing is very dense and there is so much use of abbreviations that it makes it very difficult to follow. Not everyone is going to be as familiar with all these abbreviations as the authors and I found their use obstructive to my understanding of the manuscript. I’m sure the data is a good quality and if I understood this correctly it suggests that during warm periods there was a greater prevalence of tropical forest in central India compared to other times but that the intensity of the Indian monsoon and the vegetation is regulated by orbital processes but also the extent of ice sheets in high latitudes. One of the other things that stopped me understanding the manuscript more fully was the use of the MIS stages rather than telling me whether it’s warmer or a colder period. Again, the number of the stages and sub stages are probably very familiar to the author but not to all the readers and I think it might be helpful if they were to try and better describe what each provide more information about what each stage number means. The authors assume too much prior knowledge. I was a little confused about the comparison of the climate model and the data itself. The conclusion appeared to be that the model wasn’t very good unless you accounted also for glacial variations which at least in my reading suggests at the model isn’t that good and so I wonder why so much time was spent discussing the results. I provide here below a number of smaller editorial comments and questions to help improve the understanding of the manuscript.

Line 18 - Marine Isotope Stage (MIS) 11 -  Should say how old this is in ka

Line 20 - core monsoon zone (CMZ) -What is that?

Line 28 - MIS 11c -  Again, we need the ages of these substages

Line 36 - ISM weakening could also occur under similarly warm future conditions – Triggered by what? Be specific

Line 43 - Core Monsoon Zone (CMZ) – Label this on a map

Line 73 – IODP – Define abbreviation. And SST

Line 79 - during MIS 5e  - provide age in ka

Line 101 - Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP)- Say this on first use

Line 106 - LOVECLIM Earth System Model – Need a reference here

Line 111 - δ18Ob – Superscript “18”. Is “b” right?

Line 140 - rapid delivery of continental material – Depends what you mean by “rapid”. Could be a whole 100 ky glacial cycle for coarse grained sediment. There is likely buffering in the flood plain for fine material including the pollen.

Figure 1 -  Text in inset North Atlantic map needs to have the same font as the rest of the figure. Text needs to be larger.

Line 154 - A total of 62 levels were sampled for pollen analysis, - A total of 62 samples were taken for pollen analysis

Line 163 - main sum -  I’m not quite sure what this means

Line 163 - excluding Himalayan taxa – Why are there Himalayan taxa in the sample. Is the sediment really from the Mahanadi or perhaps the Ganges?

Line 171 - tropical forest (TF)  - Not sure this abbreviation is necessary

Line 174 - tropical forest (TF) – If you are going to abbreviate you only need to define this once.

Line 185 - primary indicator of ISM rainfall variability -  But the monsoon is seasonal. Couldn’t this be found in a tropical, non-seasonal environment?

Line 189 - Fig. 4 -  Call out figures in numerical order

Line 196 - over the India's CMZ (17°-27.5° N, 67.5°-90° E) - over the Indian CMZ. Also mark this on the map figure.

Figure 2 – This chart is very hard to read.

Line 231 - abundance tropical deciduous forest – abundance of tropical deciduous forest

Line 238 - increasing dryness. – and seasonality?

Line 241 - Site U1446 shows a gradual TF decline-  pollen from Site U1446 shows a gradual TF decline

Line 246 - PZ MIS 11a-1,  - You use too many abbreviations. I already forgot what PZ means

Line 250 - substantial less humid condition - substantially less humid conditions

Line 250 - The two forest expansion  - What does that mean?

Line 258 - decrease of 22.3% - decrease to 22.3%?

Line 296 - long records – long duration records

Line 300 - unusually high global terrestrial biosphere – Not sure what this means

Line 305 - contribution of tropical forests to the global terrestrial biosphere -  you did not estimate volumes of forest or the volumes of carbon that would be captured by the forest so I don’t think you really understand what proportion of the global budget this represents.

Line 314 - asymmetric “M-shaped” structure – I’m unclear about what you mean. Are you talking about the shape of proxy record? Which one in particular?

Line 325 - EDC ice core – what does EDC mean? And where was this core taken?

Line 327 - imprint on the CH4 record -  what record are you talking about? What is a proxy for methane?

Line 339 - tropical wetland extent – how can a speleothem record tell you about the extent of wetlands?

Line 343 – speleothem data alone cannot be used as a definitive proxy -  or that these data indicate complicated hydrological system

Figure 5 -  I suggest you use different colours when you’re plotting two sets of data on the same plot. Using two shades of blue is a little confusing. Why don’t you just use something more distinctive?

Line 381 - The asymmetric M-shaped pattern – I don’t know what you mean. You’re going to need to label that quite clearly on one of your figures.

Line 386 – NHSI - This is a confusing abbreviation. If you told us what it was earlier in the manuscript, then I’ve already forgotten. I suggest you don’t use this.

Line 395 - gradually declines - gradually declined

Line 426 - the absence of ice-sheet forcing and associated freshwater flux in the simulations -  this seems like a major omission to me. Is it necessary to ignore the ice sheets in the model? Seems like a bad model.

Line 444 - Yongxing Cave -but that is east Asian monsoon and not entirely clear that it’s appropriate.

Line 448 - MIS 11c optimum in southern Europe – I don’t understand. Site U1446 and the Yongxing Cave are both not in Europe

Line 472 - involves distinct in-cave processes – also, they may be issues related to regional rainfall patterns

Line 483 – soutprashern -  Spelling

Line 492 - monsoon Hadley circulation patterns – I don’t understand. Monsoon circulation is exactly the opposite of Hadley circulation at least in South Asia.

Line 498 - still highly discussed  - strongly debated? Controversial?

Line 505 - carbon dioxide jumps (CDJ)  - this is entirely inappropriate. You have far too many abbreviations. The manuscript is extremely hard to read anyway without you adding this. Nobody understands these abbreviations when there are so many..

Line 503 - DO-like  - More confusion

Line 526 - Ice-Rafted Detritus (IRD)  - Please stop

Line 541 - the asymmetric M-shaped pattern in our tropical forest record -I never really understood what you meant by this.

Line 548 - IN the CH₄ record -  IN?

Line 555 - CH₄ overshoots – I don’t understand what that means

Oliviera and co-authors present interesting new data from an important interglacial period that may be analogous to the Holocene. I believe the data is of good quality and the topic is interesting. But I found the writing and figures of the paper to be overly complicated and difficult to follow. 

I would suggest a major simplification and focusing on key takeaways in both the text and figures so that readers with a wide range of interests can learn something from the paper. As it is currently written, one needs to be an expert in the Indian summer monsoon and MIS 11 to be able to understand the presentation. But in order to reach the goal of demonstrating how this era could be relevant to the Holocene and future warming, the presentation needs to be simplified. 

I will provide some examples and ideas of how to clarify, mainly focused on figures and nearby text, but please work on the paper as a whole to simplify the message and improve readability. 

Relating to figure 1: The maps as currently presented are confusing. I would recommend breaking this into two separate panels rather than having the Atlantic sites inset. Next, I would add another panel with a figure or table summarizing the preceding text which has a lot of information about rainfall amounts and vegetation type that would be better presented graphically.

Relating to figure 2: I know that it is valuable to show the whole pollen diagram, but I would love some additional context and explanation for which taxa are important for the green bands. I see some patterns but its tough to get a cohesive understanding. 

Figure 3. The combination of the arrows, the dashed lines, and the shaded bars is a lot to take in. I have a tough time knowing what I am supposed to be looking at in this figure.

Figure 4. It's a bit tough for me to understand why the highlighted sections are important, but other similar large magnitude changes in the pollen are not interpreted.

Figure 5. The data should be in front of the bars on the graph. As it is currently, the bars obscure the data. To my eye, it's not totally clear that NHSI is the main driver of the dynamics as it seems like the text is saying. The patterns look like they share features of lots of the potential drivers plotted in this figure

Overall, I would suggest a focused rewrite and figure updates that highlight key takeaways, but at the same time acknowledges that it is complicated. It's a big win to bring together all of these different data sets, complexity is more exciting to me than a simple answer.