draft
THE INVENTION OF RIVERS
A L E X A N D E R ’ S
Dilip da Cunha
DRAFT
FEB 2017
E Y E
A N D
G A N G A ’ S
D E S C E N T
CONTENTS
Preface
INTRODUCTION: River Literacy
ALEXANDER’S EYE & GANGA’S DESCENT
Alexander’s Eye
The Ganges
Ganga’s Descent
RIVER ESSENTIALS
I. COURSE
River of Rivers
Oceanus
Riverbanks
Infinite River
Separating Ganga
Sundarbans
Gangasagar
Bhagirathi
II. SOURCE
15
29
draft
Waters of Eden
Paradise
Mountains
Valleys
Calibrating Ganga
Himalayas
Kailas
Gangotri
III. FLOOD
1
Ocean of Rain
Deluge
Settlement
City
Containing Ganga
Sindhu
Kashi
Varanasi
CONCLUSION: River Colonialism
River Landscapes
Engineering Rivers
After Rivers
46
69
87
110
124
149
ENDNOTES
i
PREFACE
Working in the Lower Mississippi in the 1990s, I began to suspect that
the line separating water from land exists by choice, a choice not in
where it is seen in a shifting and dynamic terrain, but in the fact that it
is seen at all. At the time, Anuradha Mathur and I were investigating the
line that held the Mississippi River to a place in the vast alluvial plain of
its making. We traced this line to the early years of European occupation and forward from there to the 19th and 20th centuries when it was
enforced by a hydraulic regime of levees, spillways, jetties, revetments,
and cutoffs alongside a culture of prediction and modelling to prevent
flood. We glimpsed the possibility at the time that Native Americans
with whom Europeans clashed, lived outside this ‘landscape of flood’.
Their habitation was not necessarily on riverbanks exposed to the flows
and floods of an entity limited by a line; it was rather in an open field of
wetness that rose and fell. In other words, their difference went further
than seeing the Mississippi differently; they saw a different Mississippi,
a Mississippi that was not a river to begin with. To me, this was not a
fact to verify; it was an opportunity to entertain in design. Irrespective
though, of what it was, it began weakening the grip that the river and by
extension, the line separating land from water, had on my imagination.
draft
In the years since Mississippi Floods was published, our practice has
taken us to diverse places, all of which threw the line between land and
water into question whether it was in a riverbank, a coastline, or an
edge of an impoundment of rain. In India, I found that this line does not
just result in the exceptional flood; it results in an everyday chaos that
passes for the informal, kitsch, and underdevelopment. Here, it did not
take long to see that as in the United States, the line transgressed is not
simply a line drawn; it is a line imposed. Furthermore, this line does not
simply separate water from land; it creates water and land on either
side of it as entities that can be commodified and as such coveted,
made scarce and violated. Indeed, it is hard to miss the infrastructural
presence of this line beneath the many pressing problems in India that
are generally attributed to poverty, a colonial history, overpopulation,
illiteracy, and so on. It is also hard to miss the fact that people need to
be taught to see this line, draw it, and respect it. In other words, the line
between land and water is not taken for granted.
For the last five years, I have sought to understand what it takes to separate water from land on the earth surface, to naturalize this separation,
and to impose it on people who today suffer the increasingly drastic
consequences of its violation, particularly by the rains of the monsoon
which refuse containment. The outcome is this book. It is an appreciation of the river as a remarkable feat of design made possible through
the drawn line, a line that has had nothing less than nature constituted
for its success, allowing it to recede into the ordinary, the everyday and
everything. Questioning it is not easy. It requires more than a critical
stance, more than simply seeing things differently; it requires another
ground all together, one that offers different things.
ii
I found this ‘other’ ground in the rain of the monsoon, a wetness that
is everywhere before it is ‘water’ somewhere (separate from ‘land’). It
does not run into rivers or is harvested to assist a river-inspired infrastructure of pipes and canals; it rather operates a world without rivers,
holding in everything across air, earth, and life before, if at all, flowing to
the sea. I present it in this book as a world constituted in another moment of the hydrologic cycle when watery stuff is precipitating, seeping,
soaking, evaporating, and transpiring in ways that defy delineation. Its
otherness affords a worthy vantage from which to engage the world of
rivers. As such, even as this book is about the making of rivers, it is also
about the ground of habitation afforded by rain. Rain is another ground
for constituting the past, present and future.
In the Ganges I found an interesting case study of precipitation that
does not seem to want to form into a river, perhaps even be a river. Like
other names on the Indian subcontinent that are classified as rivers, it
keeps defying its so-called banks, erasing efforts to control its course,
and nullifying plans to clean its watery stuff. Many will balk at the idea
of questioning the riverness of the Ganges. After all, there is little doubt
that millions of people worship the Ganges as a river, rely upon a river
for their infrastructural needs, and describe a river that is the lifeline of
a unique civilization. However, is it possible that they look upon something that was introduced to the subcontinent, something that enforces
a particular language of habitation with terms such as ‘land’ and ‘water’
that were not shared by people who lived here? The question is worth
asking given that people in India refer the name Ganga, which is seen by
scholars as the vernacular equivalent of Ganges, not just to a river but
also to a ubiquity that they venerate through the icon of a goddess, a
ubiquity that may well be a rain-driven wetness. Indeed, there is much
between the lines of texts, behind the scenes of habitation, and in the
interstices of everyday life in India, to suggest that this Ganga continues to exist. However, it does so in the shadows as an ‘other’ ground
of experience with a difference that refuses to conform to rivers and
river-based ideas such as the city, history, and development.
draft
By questioning the place to which a name refers and venturing an ‘other’ with its own terms of difference, this book follows in the tradition of
our previous works, Mississippi Floods, Deccan Traverses and Soak. All
of them put another place to a name. In Soak, for example, we presented Mumbai as an estuary where the sea and monsoon are insiders as
against the conventional appreciation of it as an island where they are
outsiders with the monsoon an annual visitor. The latter was how British
colonists saw Mumbai and how it continues to be researched, historicized, governed, and planned. Positing an estuary was not just for the
sake of the city’s future, which to us would be better served in the face
of climate change and sea-level rise; it was also for the sake of its past
and present, which we suggested, is better understood on the complex
and fluid ground of an estuary. Besides, from our engagement with
Mumbai, it seemed very likely that people here see their place in terms
iii
of an estuary, terms that have been lost in translation to the language of
an island. Soak basically reinforced the idea that emerged in Mississippi
Floods and was confirmed in Deccan Traverses, our project on Bangalore, which is that European colonialism did not just impose another
way of seeing and knowing place; it imposed another place.
It is then with an empathy for irreconcilable difference that this book
raises the possibility that India is a rain-driven wetness rather than a
land drained by rivers which is how maps, textbooks, histories, plans,
ecologies, and everyday conversation project it. Unlike places we have
sought to reimage and reimagine in the past, the imposition in question
here reaches far past the colonizing events of the last few centuries to
possibly Alexander the Great who came across the mountains from the
rain shadow of Central Asia in the 4th century BCE with a geographically
disciplined view of the earth surface divided between water and land
with a line that could be drawn in a map. It set the stage for rivers on
the subcontinent and arguably laid the ground for the waves of colonization that followed, all of which survived and thrived on keeping water
contained with a line. Today, the authority of the line continues in place
even as it is increasingly out of place in everyday life, particularly during
each monsoon.
draft
Is it possible for India to recover an appreciation for Ganga’s Descent?
The phrase recalls the fall of rain. But as this book seeks to make clear,
it also necessarily calls for a defiance of Alexander’s Eye, an eye that
awaits the clarity of a fair-weather moment to separate water from land.
Rain and river, in other words, are not merely two moments in the water
cycle; they are moments that begin two inquiries, two infrastructures,
two modes of design. The more one is pursued, the more it diverges
from the other.
iv
draft
INTRODUCTION
INTRODUCTION: RIVER LITERACY
Separating land from water on the earth surface is one of the most
fundamental and enduring acts in the understanding and design of
human habitation. The line with which this separation is imaged on
maps, etched in the imagination and enforced on the ground with
regulations and constructions has not only survived centuries of rains
and storms to become a taken for granted presence on the earth
surface; it has also been naturalized in the coastline, the riverbank, and
the water’s edge. These are places subjected to artistic representations,
scientific inquiry, infrastructural engineering, and landscape design
with little attention to the act of separation that brought them into
being. Today, however, with the increasing frequency of flood and
not unrelatedly, sea level rise attributed to climate change, the line
separating land and water has come into sharp focus with proposals for
walls, levees, ‘natural defenses’, pumps, land retirement schemes and
proposals for ‘retreat’. These responses raise questions on where the
line is drawn; but they also raise questions on the separation that this
line facilitates. Is this separation found in nature or does nature follow
from its assertion?
draft
This book makes the case that separating land from water is an act of
design facilitated by a uniquely endowed line in a chosen moment of
time. While this line can be seen at work in a number of places, the
book focuses on a particular deployment of it, one that allows us to see
and experience a river, an entity much appreciated across the world as a
‘spine of civilization’, an ‘ecological wonder’, a ‘lifeline’, but most of all, a
‘natural’ thing. By presenting the river as a product of human intention
rather than ‘nature’ the book makes room for worlds without it. In
particular, it makes room for rain which the presence of the river has
done much to malign and marginalize. It is, however, in a world of rain
that the design of the river was initiated with the invention of the line of
separation.
Lines of Flow
A line separating land from water is essential to a river. It features in its
definition alongside a flow as “flowing water in a channel with defined
banks.”1 The definition can be more complex: “a natural stream of water
of fairly large size flowing in a definite course or channel or series of
diverging or converging channels;” or “A large natural stream of water
flowing in a channel to the sea, a lake, or another, usually larger, stream
of the same kind.”2 Correspondingly, the image is more elaborate with
multiple points on high ground, each generating a pair of lines on
either side of a flow, lines that converge in banks alongside a main flow
before diverging again to connect with a coastline. Indeed, without lines
rivers are inconceivable, which is to say that to hear or speak the word
‘river’ is to think flow and see lines, lines like the one that the Greek
academic Heraclitus in the 5th century BCE famously calls his readers to
1
cross in order to understand that “you cannot step twice into the same
river; for other waters are ever flowing on to you.” Not all will learn the
lesson which Heraclitus believed this experience would impart, viz., that
change is in the nature of things. Some will even disagree that this was
the lesson he intended; but all will ‘see’ the line that he is asking them
to step across, a line dividing land from water. (Fig. 1 and Fig. 2)
Much is written about rivers in various disciplines. A 19th century text,
among the earliest to focus exclusively on rivers, describes them as
“physical phenomena and geological agents, as elements of picturesque
scenery, as the seats of vegetable and animal life, and as connected
with the history, religion, and industry of man.”3 Today, the literature
continues to grow on the role rivers play as natural habitats, subjects
of art, photography and design, objects of engineering, and grounds of
social activism. This though is only their first life. They enjoy a second
existence at the hands of scholars who write of them, in the words of
Wyman Herendeen, as “one of the most popular metaphors for life,
time, and consciousness, and for death, timelessness, and dissolution.”
Here, he says, “the river participates in the spread of civilization and the
establishment of the social arts over the forces of nature,” becoming
“part of our cultural consciousness.”4
draft
In all the appreciation and use of rivers, however, little is said about the
necessity of the line that marks its edge. This line is unique in that it
separates water from land, holds water to a place and calibrates time
along its length so that it is possible to appreciate a flow from an origin
to a destination or at least an earlier to a later. More fundamentally, this
line calls out a unique entity that can be named, touched, represented,
engineered, but above all believed to exist. In this sense, it does
for a river what an epidermis does for an organism, viz., allow the
individuation of a corporeal thing. As one among a growing number
of scholars concerned for rivers writes, “Rivers do exist – they are
‘embodied entities’ that can be seen, felt, touched and traced on a map.
Their characteristics – different and visible though they undoubtedly are
and have been – are lived out in a physical body.”5
Not only does the line delimit a corporeal entity, it is made to do so
universally. There is an extensive record of rivers in the history and
everyday life of various peoples on the planet, particularly their role
in facilitating what are generally accepted as benchmarks of human
development, such as the invention of agriculture, civilization, literacy
and the city. In his introduction to Jacquetta Hawkes’ The First Great
Civilizations, a book which describes the emergence of cities and
civilizations on three rivers, apparently independent of each other –
Tigris-Euphrates, Nile and Indus – historian John H. Plumb notes that
“it is essential not to impose upon the civilizations here described
later uses of techniques or of ideas of our own that seem to resonate
with theirs.” He applauds the author for her scholarship in this regard.
History, he observes, “requires not only a strong intellectual grasp
of social relationships and historical development, but also delicate
imagination and subtle empathy; otherwise, the whole way of life of
Fig. 1 The Nile is in many ways the quintessential
flow. By articulating its place on the earth surface
with lines of separation, natural philosophers of
the Milesian School in the 6th century BCE called
out an object of study: a river. Lines marked the
course of this river on the ground and enabled its
plotting to scale in maps; but they also created
flood and gave rise to one of the first questions
in science: why does the Nile flood? Aaron
Arrowsmith, Map of Upper Egypt, 1807 [David
Rumsey Map Collection, www.davidrumsey.com.
6910.001]
Fig. 2 Aaron Arrowsmith, Map of Upper Egypt,
1807 [David Rumsey Map Collection, www.
davidrumsey.com. 6910.001] detail
2
these fascinating peoples would be distorted.”6 It does not occur to
Plumb or Hawkes or for that matter to any archeologist and historian
that the river on which they hang the narrative of cities and civilizations
may well be the product of a particular culture and cultural disposition.
Thus most children across the world today learn of the significant
role that rivers have played in history in general. “Sources of both,
abundance and destruction, life and death,” write Christof Mauch and
Thomas Zeller in Rivers in History, “rivers have always had a powerful
hold over humankind. They run through every human landscape,
whether mythical or actual.”7 (Fig. 3)
Not only is the line of a river situated beyond cultural differences; it
is also sighted beyond human history. The Nile, for example, is dated
to 250 million years and the Indus to 45 million years. Geologists
even identify rivers that do not exist anymore, some of them dating
to previous geological eras. They see these rivers in ‘paleochannels’
identified from patterns of sedimentation or drainage of a topography
which they construct around geological events in an earth history that
reaches back billions of years, events such as continental drifts, uplifts,
eruptions and earthquakes. All this is to say that rivers are taken to be
constituents of the earth and not products of human enterprise. They
are declared ‘natural’. Even animals are believed to see and live by them.
Fig. 3 Paul Klee, “The Water Course,” in Paul
Klee Notebooks, Vol. 2, The nature of nature
(New York: George Wittenborn Inc., 1964), 75.
Besides confining water and enabling maps, lines
facilitate the conceptualization of a flow. Artist,
Paul Klee, shows how this is done in “The Water
Course.” The form of the line, he writes, suggests
four characteristics of a river: aggregation (1),
a quiet course (2), an unquiet course (3), and a
mouth (4). “By expanding the conceptual field,
I create a higher whole that may be perceived.”
©2017 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
draft
Today, the line that calls out a river is part of everyday experience. When
historians and archaeologists speak of early civilizations on rivers they
invoke this line. When geographers describe a landmass drained by
rivers they draw this line. When engineers devise embankments, dams,
barrages, drains, diversions and bridges, they work with this line on the
drawing board where such interventions are more easily conceived and
tested. When urban designers envision cities on rivers they conceive
this line as a ‘riverfront’ or ‘waterfront’. When ecologists speak of a river
basin they see this line gathering from multiple points like branches of
a tree and dispersing like roots into the sea and when they speak of a
riparian zone they thicken this line to interface between land and river.
When scholars translate ancient texts or the spoken word, they tend to
be already disposed to seeing a terrain marked by the line of riverbanks.
When social and environmental activists in their drive against dam
projects speak of ‘lifelines’ to which so many disempowered people and
wildlife are bound, they are referring to the line of riverbanks. When
people see flood, which is becoming an increasingly common event
across the world, they see water transgressing this line. And when
authorities keep people from encroaching on rivers, they enforce this
line.
Flow of Lines
Despite the line of separation being part of the everyday, however,
it takes a lot to call out a river. It certainly requires more than what
naturalist John Muir believes is necessary. All it takes writes this founder
of the Sierra Club, speaking of the Merced River in California, is a high
3
point. From here, the river “as a whole, is remarkably like an elm-tree,
and it requires but little effort on the part of the imagination to picture
it.”8 But it also requires the clouds to pass, the rain to stop, a level of
water to be set, and a host of other things that have taken centuries
to establish through ideas, beliefs, stories, facts, but perhaps most
significantly the art of the drawn line: its beginning in a point of no
length or breadth; its extension with a stroke of length and no breadth;
and its ready modification by erasure. It is not a mere coincidence that
these facets of the drawn line correspond to three essentials of a river
– source, course, and flood. But this correspondence has made the river
one of the most recognizable things on earth despite never being seen
in its entirety. Even an aerial position – contrary to Muir’s assertions –
does not guarantee seeing an entire river. It is something made evident
by a drawn line. (Fig. 4 and Fig. 5)
Rivers have always been prominent features in
maps. But in the mid-1800s with geographic
surveying extending its claim to accuracy and its
reach across the globe, rivers became popular
subjects of comparative study. Mapmakers
devised ways to extract rivers and present them
in comparison.
Indeed more often than not the drawn line speaks louder than the ‘flow
of water’. After all, rivers do not cease to exist when they are without
water. It is accepted that they ‘run dry’, some seasonally and others
exceptionally. What remains is a space between lines which continues
to be seen and enforced as a ‘river’ or a ‘river bed’, suggesting that it is
the line more than water that is essential to rivers. It ‘flows’ even when
waters do not.
draft
The drawn line is also a conspicuous presence in times of flood which is
nothing more than water crossing a line declared by humans to be the
limits of a river. Yet hydrologists define flood as a “naturally occurring,
temporary inundation of normally dry land.”9 And children are taught
in textbooks that flood as a natural event has played a significant role
in land-building operations of the earth, improving soil fertility in the
story of civilizations, and providing a critical environment in the life
cycles of a number of species and ecosystems. Today, when floods
have tragic consequences, it is common to hear people questioning the
nature of the line of separation, its strength, position, management,
encroachment, but not its necessity to a river and to the appreciation
of its ‘floodplain’. The fact is that ecologies, histories, policies, design,
and the increasingly popular fields of disaster management and risk
assessment depend on the existence of flood as much as they depend
on the existence of rivers, whether for explanations, descriptions,
projects, or a field of expertise.
The drawn line is also more prominent than a flow of water in assertions
of a river’s source. Despite the awareness that rivers are fed by rain that
falls all over and melting snow and ice spread across hundreds of square
miles, the source of a river continues to be traced to a point where
two of its ‘longest banks’ meet in a point.10 This definition of source
has given rise to numerous expeditions across the world in search of
what is called the ‘longest source’ of rivers. Only recently, a group of
explorers in 2006 declared that they had finally found the source of the
Nile in a ‘muddy hole’ in the Nyungwe Forest of Rwanda at the head
of a tributary of the Kagerain River flowing into Lake Victoria. “All the
greatest names failed – until now,” they write, referring to men like John
Fig. 4 “A Map of the Principal Rivers shewing
their Courses, Countries, and Comparative
Lengths,” Maps of the Society for the Diffusion of
Useful Knowledge, vol. 1 (London: Chapman and
Hall, 1844) [Kislak Center for Special Collections,
Rare Books and Manuscripts, University of
Pennsylvania]
Fig. 5 G.W. Colton, “Mountains & Rivers,” Colton’s
Atlas of the World, Illustrating Physical and
Political Geography (New York: J.H. Colton and
Company, 1856) [David Rumsey Map Collection,
www.davidrumsey.com. 0149.001]
4
Hanning Speke, Napoleon, Alexander III of Macedon, and Herodotus.
“We know we are correct because we have studied the maps in detail
and have now physically traced the longest source on the ground.”
“We’ve measured the river electronically using GPS tracks and now have
the electronic data to prove the Nile is 6,719 kilometers in length.”11
Some give up the ‘longest source’ for a cultural favorite point such as
a spring, lake or head of a rill, a point that nonetheless is the start of a
drawn line. Thus numerous scientific treatises and school textbooks say
that the Ganges originates in Gangotri, the Tiber in a spring on Mount
Fumaiolo, and the Mississippi in an outlet of Lake Itasca. The point at
the start of the line seems inescapable even for hydrologists who favor
a ‘basin’ logic to understanding the source of rivers. They merely see
numerous points at the start of lines that keep dividing as they move to
higher ground to gather the entirety of a surface within a watershed.
M
clo
O
ud
M
idity + rain + dew
hum
+
s+ T S O F E P
H mi
EN
E M st +
E R moi
s
A t
L
e
IT
Y
draft
ur
There is then an art to seeing and experiencing a river. It involves
drawing a line between land and water on the earth surface. It also
involves a choice of time when water is not precipitating, seeping,
soaking air, soil and vegetation, collecting in interstices, pores, terraces,
cisterns, and aquifers, evaporating, and transpiring in ways that defy
delineation. Those familiar with the hydrologic or water cycle, which
depicts the extended presence of water transitioning through states of
solid, liquid and vapor, will understand this time to be a moment among
many in the endless circulation of water. Children in schools learn it
as one of four significant moments: precipitation, flow formation on
the earth surface, evaporation and cloud formation (shown here in a
diagram by the artist Paul Klee). The world it seems has cast anchor in
the second moment, making it the time of reality when an earth surface
is had, maps are drawn, properties are demarcated, infrastructure
designed, the past described, the present experienced, and the future
envisioned. More seriously, in the time of this second moment certain
‘things’ of water can and have been called out on the earth surface,
things that are given the status of natural entities with a significant
role to play as agents of change in everyday life. The river is among the
most notable of these things. It is inconceivable without a line endowed
with the special ability of separating water from land, containing it to a
course and calibrating it into a flow. Drawing this line requires clarity as
to the place of water. It is why surveyors who are tasked with mapping
the earth surface tend not to work in rain. It is not just because of the
inconvenience that rain causes, but because rain blurs the separations
they want to see. But even in times of no precipitation, they need to
simplify what they see or at least be selective with where they see water
given its boundless nature and tendency to be everywhere in some
measure. The important issue, though, is that anchoring in the moment
of flow formation, i.e., making this moment the time of reality, has made
water in other moments in the hydrologic cycle ephemeral, so that rain,
mist, snow, humidity, etc. are seen as visitors where rivers are granted
the status of residents. (Fig. 6 and Fig. 7)
Fig. 6 Paul Klee, “The Water Cycle,” in Paul Klee
Notebooks, Vol. 2, The nature of nature (New
York: George Wittenborn Inc., 1964), 93. The
water or hydrologic cycle depicts the extended
presence of water transitioning through states,
mediums and places. This drawing of the cycle
by artist Paul Klee is one of its simplest forms,
showing water in four moments of its movement.
1. Precipitation from clouds to earth; 2. Flow
formation from earth to sea; 3. Evaporation from
sea to clouds; and 4. Cloud formation from sea
to land. In Klee’s accompanying words: “Water
descends from the sky in rain and rises to the
sky as vapour, hence I guide the curve upwards
and close the circle in the clouds.” ©2017 Artists
Rights Society (ARS), New York
m
ap T
pa s d I M
st raw
de n E
d
scr + p
O F
Y
ibe rope
R E A L I T designed
d + r e s
ma
pres
cture one
ent e rked + infrastru re envisi
xp e r i e nc e d + f u t u
Fig. 7 Rivers are sightings in the second moment
of Klee’s water cycle. It is a moment in which
the world has cast anchor, making it the time
of reality while reducing other moments of the
cycle to ephemerality. Thus, rain, mist, snow,
humidity, etc. are considered visitors where
rivers are granted the status of residents.
Building on Klee’s “The Water Cycle,” in Paul Klee
Notebooks, Vol. 2, The nature of nature (New
York: George Wittenborn Inc., 1964), 93. ©2017
Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
5
Inscribing the line of separation on the earth surface also demands
a particular material appreciation, one that constitutes water as a
substance separate from land so that when we speak of water, when
we feel, think and imagine water, we acknowledge the land from which
it is separated. This is to say that the line of separation does more than
articulate a surface divided between land and water; it brings ‘land’
and ‘water’ as two extraordinary things into being from a ubiquitous
if varied wetness, presenting them on either side of a line that unites
them in difference. Water however is lesser in this difference, positioned
to be in the service of land. Thus rivers as ‘flows of water’ are readily
appreciated for draining land and providing it with transportation
corridors, energy, water supply, waste disposal routes, and popularly
today, a ‘riverfront’ for real estate development and consumption. As
such if rivers are polluted, exploited, and endangered today, it is not
just because they are violated; it is because water is set up by a material
literacy to be dominated by land.
M
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F
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on
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fall
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e s + r a i n + d e w + s n ow
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ER
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Y
In India it is very likely that the moment of choice is rain or more broadly
precipitation. It comes before rivers in the hydrologic cycle, a moment
when land is not separable from water. In place of land and water one
has here a ubiquitous wetness of varying extents. This wetness does not
flow as rivers do; instead it is held for varying extents of time ranging
from seconds and minutes to centuries and eons in soils, aquifers,
glaciers, snowfields, tanks, building materials, agricultural fields, air,
even plants and animals that come alive and thrive for the period of the
monsoon. It soaks and saturates before exceeding and overflowing only
to be held again. This is not water draining to the sea; it is rather rain
moving in complex, field-like ways. This is also not water with a source in
points on high ground; it is rather rain with a source in clouds. The fact
is that in India and indeed the entire monsoon belt the moment of rain
has long been a choice not just in rain-fed agriculture as against river-fed
m
draft
As products of the act of separation facilitated by the drawn line in a
chosen moment of water, rivers are extraordinary products of human
creation. They are rightly credited with generating great wealth,
stimulating remarkable feats of engineering, depositing vast and fertile
alluvial plains, providing a home for riparian ecologies, and facilitating
significant thresholds of human ‘development’, including the city and
civilization. But they do not work everywhere and at all times, especially
in places of rains like those which come with the monsoon, places like
India. Here, rivers flood devastatingly, run dry, are terribly polluted, and
increasingly contested. The tendency is to see these issues as problems
in need of solutions and indeed, considerable effort is being made to
solve them, including building embankments, linking rivers, constructing
big dams, and making big plans. But are these problems to solve or are
they the consequence of rivers being imposed upon places that refuse
to conform to the separation of land and water and the chosen moment
that rivers demand, places where other choices can be made? (Fig. 8)
IT
Colonizing Rain
Fig. 8 There is much to suggest that people of
the monsoon belt anchored and continue to
anchor in the moment of precipitation in Klee’s
water cycle, making it their time of reality. Their
world today, imposed upon as it is by a world
that anchors in the moment of flow formation, is
one of profound dissonance, appearing as chaos,
informality, poverty, and underdevelopment.
Building on Klee’s “The Water Cycle,” in Paul Klee
Notebooks, Vol. 2, The nature of nature (New
York: George Wittenborn Inc., 1964), 93. ©2017
Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
6
irrigation or rain harvesting as against piped water supply; it has also
been a choice in myths and stories, festivals and everyday practices. The
word that captures the choice of this moment in India is Ganga. Looked
upon as a goddess, she arrives on the wind of the monsoons each year
to much celebration and expectation in an event known as Ganga’s
Descent.
Much, however, has been done over centuries to move Ganga’s Descent
into the realm of myth and religion and favor the River Ganges. And
much has been done, particularly over the last couple of centuries, to
demean the moment of rain as unpredictable, uncertain and unevenly
distributed. The erstwhile British rulers of India made a concerted
effort to turn India into a country worthy of its ‘great rivers’ by a
variety of enterprises conceived, understood and carried out in the
moment of flow formation. Among these enterprises is the Great
Trigonometrical Survey (GTS) that brought unprecedented accuracy to
the land-water divide and the alignment of rivers through maps. There
are also the many feats of engineering that extended rivers with pipes
and canals into ‘drylands’, connected rivers across their watersheds,
drained settlements into rivers, and controlled the flows of rivers with
embankments, barrages, canals and drains. Alongside these efforts,
these colonizers also worked the moment of rivers into education,
administration, translations of ancient texts, and indeed everyday
practices and conversation. They sought to leave little doubt that
the name Ganga, at least in matters of state, referred to a river – the
vernacular equivalent of the Ganges River – and not rain. They capped
their efforts by tracing the best practices of settlement in India to a past
in ‘great river civilizations’.
draft
The British in India, however, were only taking the river to new heights.
It was introduced to the subcontinent millennia before, following the
structure and purpose given it by pre-Socratics of the School of Miletus
in Asia Minor. These scholarly men, led by Thales, whom Aristotle called
the first natural philosopher, are credited with asking the question ‘why
does the Nile flood’, a question that can be asked only after asserting
the edge of what is presumed to be a river. These men are also credited
with inventing the world map by which they represented the separation
of land and water in the view of the earth surface from above with a
geometric line. This representation would reach India through Alexander
III of Macedon, familiar to most people as Alexander the Great. He,
together with the surveyors who accompanied him, sought to confine
water to channels on the earth surface, name these channels, and draw
them into their world map. He even referred to the Ganges, which
he did not see but imagined as the ‘greatest river on earth’ and the
wealthiest. He had to turn back before reaching it however because, it is
said, his men were tired and homesick. It is more likely that they found
confining rain with lines in the world of the monsoon a superhuman task
out of reach of even Alexander whom they revered as a demigod.
In the brief time that he spent in India, however, Alexander succeeded
in seeding the moment of rivers and today, over two millennia after him,
7
the discourse on human habitation in India is most definitely rooted
in rivers, having shifted from a ground of wetness to a surface divided
between land and water, from holding and soaking rain to flowing
and draining water, from a field-like world where identities extend
into one another for varying extents of time to a linear world where
identities have a clear and distinct edge as rivers do. On the ground
though, the moment of rain persists. It operates behind the scene or in
a parallel universe to explain why so much of everyday life in India and
the monsoon belt does not fit the linearity and contained sensibility
of rivers, making for places that appear chaotic, underdeveloped,
and informal. Rivers here are revealed to be not just products of the
act of separation; they are also a means of colonizing rain, i.e., taking
possession of a place constituted by choice in another moment of
the hydrologic cycle. This ‘project’ is far from complete. It continues
to be implemented on two fronts: refining the idea of the river and
articulating a ground – landscape – to receive it.
The first front of implementation, viz., refining the idea of the river,
is pursued with ever more sophisticated mappings of its form and
knowledge of its characteristics, particularities, history, ecology, culture,
hydrology and hydraulics. This pursuit has raised some fundamental
questions that reach back in time – where do rivers begin, what is
the origin of the water of their springs, why do they flood, how are
they represented and deployed by different cultures, what is their
role in shaping the earth, and so on. These questions gather around
the river’s three essentials – course, source and flood – clarifying
them and through them the idea of the river. They take the river to
beginnings in powerful and enigmatic ideas such as the hydrologic cycle,
paradise and deluge. These are ideas that have evolved along multiple
trajectories, contributing significantly not just to the idea of the river
that is implemented, but also to ideas that have played a prominent
role in reinforcing the river on the ground and in the imagination – the
riverbank, the water cycle, mountains, river valleys, the watershed,
settlement, and the city.
draft
What has made the idea of the river so universal, though, is that its
essentials and accessories have found a home in translations of local
myths and stories in places like India, contributing here to not just
implementing the river in general but also constructing the River Ganges
in particular. A number of names here such as Sindhu, Kailas, Kashi,
Sundarbans, Himalayas, Bhagirathi, Varanasi that could be read in the
moment of rain have been appropriated and made familiar on the terms
of the river.
The second front of implementation, viz., articulating ground to receive
the river, has involved nothing less than ordering the earth surface
with an eye granted the ability to separate land from water with a
line. As pointed out earlier this act does not just give land and water
a distinct space on the earth surface, it brings them into being as
elements of landscape set apart by difference. Little is said about this
eye in landscape discourse. It is largely taken for granted. By exposing
8
its workings, this book makes the case that landscape has a more
fundamental starting point in the act of separation. Upon the divided
surface that this act sets up, other elements such as rivers are created,
elements that cannot be assumed to be universal. The British rulers of
India discovered this to be the case. They had to educate their subjects
into seeing and appreciating the line of separation through the discipline
of geography. It is an education that continues to be needed today,
making one wonder if India in order to be postcolonial needs to consider
possibilities beyond not just colonial power and its legacies but also the
line of separation and the elements of landscape that follow in its wake.
This however, requires expanding the ground of landscape discourse.
The meaning of landscape has been a subject of much debate among
geographers, anthropologists and landscape architects. According to the
Oxford English Dictionary the word was first used in English to refer to
a picture of a scene looking inland rather than out to sea before being
used to refer to the scene itself “taken in at a glance from one point
of view,” and eventually to the land viewed – “a tract of land with its
distinguishing characteristics and features.”12 The same has been derived
by landscape theorists from words in various European languages such
as landskip, landschap, paysage, landskab and landshcaft.13 Irrespective,
though, of whether landscape is in the picture, scene, or tract of land,
how it is seen must figure prominently in what it is, wrote geographer
Donald Meinig because landscape “is composed not only of what
lies before our eyes but what lies within our heads.” He discusses ten
possible ways in which what he calls the beholding eye “makes sense
out of what we see” – nature, habitat, artifact, system, problem, wealth,
ideology, history, place, and aesthetic. These “organizing ideas,” he says,
do not exhaust this eye; they merely serve to demonstrate the many
possible “essences” of landscape.14
draft
Others have added to Meinig’s list of organizing ideas. To geographers
Denis Cosgrove and Stephen Daniel the beholding eye organizes
“a cultural image, a pictorial way of representing, structuring or
symbolizing surroundings.” To landscape writer J.B. Jackson it sees
“a composition of man-made or man-modified spaces to serve as
infrastructure or background for our collective existence.” To landscape
theorist and historian John Dixon Hunt, this eye distinguishes three
landscapes – wilderness or ‘first nature’, infrastructure or ‘second
nature,’ and the garden or ‘third nature’.15 To anthropologist Tim Ingold,
it “is not ‘land’, it is not ‘nature’, and it is not ‘space’” that this eye sees
but rather “the world as it is known to those who dwell therein, who
inhabit its places and journey along the paths connecting them.” And to
landscape architect Ian McHarg, the beholding eye distinguishes natural
elements from cultural ones. McHarg primed a generation of landscape
architects to ‘design with nature’ even as he compelled teachers and
practitioners of landscape architecture to, at the very least, clarify the
distinction between the natural and cultural constituents of site, site
being anything from a house lot to a city-region to the planet surface.
9
The many possibilities of the beholding eye, however, come with a
presupposition that the “elements” of landscape are given. These,
Meinig says, are easily agreed to; it is only the ideas by which we fit
them together that we need worry about.16 In other words, there are
things the existences of which are beyond dispute. One may appreciate
or question their essence – their cultural image, the inhabitants’ view
of them, their appropriation “to serve as infrastructure or background
of our collective existence,” their natural or cultural status – but their
existence is beyond question. Meinig mentions houses, roads, trees, and
hills as elements of landscape. However, there are also rivers, lakes, and
seas and, more fundamentally, land and water. They are surely among
the most fundamental elements of landscape, appreciated by the
beholding eye in all the different ways that the mind makes possible.
But can the elements of landscape be taken for granted? After all
it requires an act of separation and the choice of a moment in the
hydrologic cycle to bring land and water into being. And they are only
a beginning. Their creation is followed by the articulation of other
things. Rudyard Kipling speaks of these things in his novel Kim where
he has Colonel Creighton tell the boy Kim whom he is grooming to
be a surveyor: “Thou must learn how to make pictures of roads and
mountains and rivers—to carry these pictures in thy eye till a suitable
time comes to set them upon paper. Perhaps some day, when thou
art a chain-man, I may say to thee when we are working together: ‘Go
across those hills and see what lies beyond’.”17 Most children in schools
in India at the time were not being trained to be surveyors, but like Kim
they were being taught to single out roads, mountains and rivers. Their
‘education’ grew out of deep concern among the colonists beginning
in the early 1800s that the ‘natives’ did not ‘know their country’; they
had to be taught it through the discipline of geography. The preface of a
textbook designed for this purpose put it this way in 1843: “In Hindustan
. . . the science of Geography has been greatly neglected. The sunny
plains, the noble rivers, the venerable cities, and varied productions of
the country, are mostly unknown to its inhabitants. Though inhabited
for thousands of years, much of the country is, to this day, unexplored.”
Native writers, the author goes on to say, have described imaginary
continents, seas, and islands, but “are silent respecting all that a native
of India would desire to know.” This “darkness” however, is passing and
“the present generation, at least the youthful part of it, will improve
the facilities, now within their reach, for becoming acquainted with this
important science.”18 To this end textbooks in geography were published
not just in English but in a number of local languages beginning in the
1820s.19 They begin by defining geography as a “science which describes
the surface of the globe; the various divisions of that surface both
natural and artificial; the inhabitants of the earth, and the variety of its
production; together with the various lines, real or imaginary, which are
drawn upon it.” This definition is followed by the identification of the
first line. It separates land and water. “Land and Water,” the textbook
says, “are constituent parts of the surface of the earth.”20
draft
10
Students then were learning not just to position their eye above the
earth surface; they were also learning to draw from this vantage a line
between land and water that they professed to see forming continents
and islands surrounded by water. They would learn to further articulate
the land component of this divide with a number of things, one of
which is the river. They were told that it is “a long narrow channel of
fresh water, rising among mountains, or issuing from a lake, and flowing
into the sea.”21 It formed a ‘drainage system’ that served to carry water
off the land into the sea.22 There were other occupants or ‘land uses’
that the student’s eye was drawn to, such as forests, grasslands, cities,
agricultural fields, and so on.
In short, geography was teaching the native to see with an extraordinary
eye, one that demanded an exceptional out-of-experience viewpoint
and an exceptional out-of-experience time when the clarity of the
separations it sought on the earth surface was not compromised by
storms, clouds and rain. What the native then saw was a landscape that
precedes rather than follows Meinig’s beholding eye, a landscape that
inevitably marginalizes the moment of precipitation and an undivided
world of wetness that people could choose to inhabit.
draft
A number of postcolonial scholars have critiqued the colonial enterprise
for the knowledge systems that it imposed, the controls it enabled,
the institutions it set up, and the identity of the native and ruler that
it structured. They are led by Edward Said, who may not have focused
his attention on India and the Indian surveys, but saw former European
colonies bound by orientalism: “a system of representations framed
by a whole set of forces that brought the orient into Western learning,
Western consciousness, and later, Western empire.”23 This system
constructed the colonized as it did the colonist and by extension their
landscapes and the beholding eye. Mathew Edney, among others,
builds on this existent condition, deploying the idea of empire to make
sense of the landscape of India.24 He sees the British using the Great
Trigonometrical Survey to structure a rational and uniform space in “line
with their own preconceptions of territorial order.” They justified this
‘disciplining’ of space on the basis of their “cultural superiority” and the
need to correct what they saw as an “irrational” conception of space
among locals that encouraged mysticism, despotism, and imprecision.
The Indians resisted the surveyor’s “geographic panopticon and its
archive,” says Edney, but were nonetheless drawn into its landscape
which continues in place today.25
Yet it takes more than the awareness of a beholding eye even when
infused with a critique of orientalist and imperialist imperatives to look
beyond elements such as rivers, hills, trees, houses, mountains, land
and water. It takes the awareness of a colonizing eye. C.S. Lewis in Out
of the Silent Planet, the first of his ‘space trilogy’, tells us what this eye
sees through the event of Ransom’s arrival on the planet Malacandra.
“He saw nothing but colours – colours that refused to form themselves
into things. Moreover, he knew nothing yet well enough to see it: you
cannot see things till you know roughly what they are.”26 The colonizing
11
eye then forms things out of colorful matter, things made into landscape
before it is subject to the beholding eye. In short, the colonizing eye
constitutes landscape out of what it takes to be a terra nullius – land in
no one’s possession.
The term terra nullius is familiar as a legal concept. It was used as such
by European nations in the occupation of Australia, Africa and the
westward expansion of North America. The people who lived in these
places were said to be savages or nomads who had no concept of
land possession. In this capacity the concept survived until 1973 when
the International Court of Justice ruled it indefensible and recognized
the peoples of these places as ‘first inhabitants’. Terra nullius though
signifies much more than unpossessed land. It signifies a ground open to
being constituted. Maps have played a prominent role here, not in their
much criticized imperial capacity of imposing a new frame of knowledge
on unwitting subjects or their structural or rational capacity of preceding
territory; but in their capacity of converting what is presumed a terra
nullius into landscape where land is separated from water and things
seen in the view from above are called out. It then cannot be simply
assumed that natives see the same things colonists do. They had to be
cultivated with the eye to see them.
draft
Terra nullius is not a familiar concept in India. But here perhaps one
needs to look further back to Alexander to see the introduction of
landscape to the Indian subcontinent and the beginnings of a colonizing
eye taking root. This landscape would be deeply set in maps, words,
infrastructures and travelogues by the time Vasco da Gama came
around the Cape of Good Hope followed in due course by the various
European East India Companies who would turn colonizers. Armed with
the river, which by then was taken to be a natural feature of the earth
surface and a necessity rather than choice, they would accelerate the
conversion of the entire monsoon belt from the moment of rain to the
moment of rivers by every means possible – trade, war, science, maps,
religion, research, education. Their efforts were such that today decades
after ‘independence’, the countries of this belt fitted with a possibly
inappropriate river infrastructure, suffused with a river imagination,
and implanted with a colonizing eye that is taught with rigor in schools,
struggle to ‘develop’ more often than not with aid from their former
colonial masters and against the moment of rain.
This book is then about the art, science and infrastructure that it takes
to materialize and naturalize a river on the earth surface and the role
that this ‘design project’ has played and continues to play in colonizing
places of rain. It makes the point that in India and elsewhere the design
of human habitation begins more fundamentally with the articulation of
an earth surface with a line separating water from land.
In what follows I explore the project of the river through three essentials
by which the river is defined – course, source and flood. Each has
involved constituting and constructing part of a ‘river landscape’ – flows
12
of water, their place of origin, and the land adjoining them. Together,
these parts account for the continent component of the earth surface,
although the sea is never too far and in many instances a key player in
all three parts. Critical to realizing these essentials is the drawn line –
its extension in a stroke, its beginning in a point, and its modification
by erasure. The capacity of this line to be marked on the ground,
reproduced to scale on a map, and inscribed as an image in the mind
has made it indispensable to the project of the river. It has taken this
inquiry into a wide array of academic fields that share this image and
the literacy of a line granted the special ability to separate, contain and
calibrate water. These fields have all contributed in some way to making
the line a natural presence on the earth surface and with it, the river a
corporeal thing with a course, source, and capacity to flood, but also the
ability to shift, grow, work, leave a trace and even cease to be.
The book pursues the materializing of each of these three essentials of
a river in two contexts: the river in general and the Ganges in particular.
The two have evolved in mutually supportive ways. The river in general
is navigated through powerful concepts on the earth stage such as the
hydrologic cycle, paradise, and the deluge that have built and reinforced
a unique entity of water distinguished from rain and sea among other
things. The Ganges, on the other hand, is navigated through three select
geographies of the Indian subcontinent familiar today as mountains,
plains and delta. W.W. Hunter, the compiler of The Imperial Gazetteer
of India who deployed the line of separation more effectively than
most at the zenith of the British Empire, described the Ganges in these
three geographies as three different rivers. The first, he says, “dashes
down the Himalayas, cutting out for itself deep gullies in the solid rock,
ploughing up glens between the mountains, and denuding the hillsides
of their soil.” The second “begins at the point where it emerges from
the mountains upon the plains. It then runs peacefully along the valleys,
searching out for itself the lowest levels. It receives the drainage and
mud of the country on both sides, absorbs tributaries, and rolls forward
with an ever-increasing volume of water and silt.” And the third begins
at a point where, “finding its speed checked by the equal level of the
plains, and its bed raised by the deposits of its own silt,” the river “splits
out into channels, like a jet of water suddenly obstructed by the finger,
or a jar of liquid dashed on the ground. Each of the new streams thus
created throws out in turn its own set of distributaries to right and
left.” Here, in the delta, he says, is the river’s last scene, “a wilderness
of forest and swamp at the end of the delta, amid whose malarious
solitude the network of tidal creeks merges into the sea.”27 Although
course, source and flood are evident in all three Ganges, each has been
pursued with particular vigor in one of them: course in the Sundarbans
Delta, source in the Himalaya Mountains, and flood in the Gangetic
Plain.
draft
Before launching into the essentials of the river, I introduce Alexander’s
campaign as driven not just to build empire and empirical knowledge,
both of which it is famous for doing; but more fundamentally and
necessarily to articulate an earth surface with a line separating land
13
from water. It is a task for which he was both, encouraged and assisted
by the geographic map, a means of representation not comfortable with
rain, particularly the rain of Ganga’s Descent. It refuses to be contained
by this line, being driven not to form rivers and drain off the land, but to
construct a ubiquitous wetness.
The book concludes with the possible role that rivers have played in
the ‘clash of cultures’ that followed the European discoveries of the
late 1400s. This clash, I suggest, is less about west vs east or Europe
vs others, and more about a clash between peoples anchored in two
different moments of the water cycle and by extension two natures, two
imaginations, two paradigms of design practice. The British occupation
of India is here taken as a case in point. These colonists educated
people in a rain terrain to see and appreciate rivers, their virtues
and possibilities. Their efforts continue today fueled by ideas such as
progress and development, but also by a dissonance between river and
rain that refuses to go away.
draft
14