GANGES, INDIA The Ganges Machine: A River Without Banks

Since the 1820s the Ganges River basin has been transformed into a vast water machine. Such a transformation demands scrutiny. It is for this reason that the world’s most hyper-engineered river basin merits a dynamic atlas: a new form of visualizing how this landscape has changed over the last two hundred years and how it changes every year with the arrival of the monsoons. A purely cartographic concern? If only. Centuries in the making — the shift from creating new rivers from existing rivers to building rivers within rivers reoriented people’s thinking and daily lives, forming a vast and varied infrastructural landscape. With these changes in mind, the exhibition investigates and interprets the “Ganges Water Machine,” that radical transformation of the sacred Ganga River basin. Moving between the terrestrial and celestial, this exhibition examines how and why the Ganges became a testing ground for a new culture of water management — one that inspired awe and copycat projects across the globe. From the capriciousness of the monsoons to the great Ganges Canal system, from the proliferation of millions of private borewells to annually shedding over one billion tons of silt from the Himalayas, from the temporality of tent cities to an endless agro-urban mosaic, a dynamic atlas of the Ganges Water Machine reveals a hidden order, a design intelligence, and the formation of a vast hydrological supersurface.