ABSTRACT
River and rain are not just two moments in the water cycle; they are two grounds of imagination. The former, however, has consumed the eye primarily by means of the discipline of geography and its use of the line to describe the earth surface. This line with its given ability to divide land from water, contain water to a place and calibrate water into a flow has not only facilitated a visual language that privileges rivers over rain, but it has also made rivers believable ‘natural’ entities. But even more than facilitating the creation of an extraordinary natural feature, this line has cultured a widespread literacy that has reinforced rivers on the ground and imagination with powerful ideas and physical interventions even as it qualifies rain and practices of rain as indigenous, informal, inadequate, alternate, and even primitive. By distinguishing Ganges from Ganga as river from rain, this chapter begins the task of situating rain on its own ground – a ground of holdings in place of flows, multiplicity of drops in place of hierarchies of lines, rain terrains in place of river landscapes. Ganga, it is argued, is another moment of the ‘natural state’, a moment in which we do not just see the world differently, but see a different world.
