The Ganges is formed by the amalgamation of the streams which drain the southernmost slopes of the Himalayas.
The Bramaputra rises also within easy distance of the Indus in the northern slopes of the Himalayas, flows east for some considerable distance, and then enters India at the extreme eastern point of the Himalayas. It is therefore to be noticed that the river system, of such vast importance to the people of India, is the drainage of both the northern and the southern slopes of the Himalayas.
The Ganges is the sacred river of the Hindus, rises in a snow-field of the southern face of the Himalayas at an elevation of nearly fourteen thousand feet above the sea, rushing down as a torrent to the highest accessible point on its banks (ten thousand three hundred feet), where the temple of Gangotri is built. To the Hindu a bath or a drink of the sacred water at this point has wonderful atoning virtues, and those who cannot themselves make the pilgrimage hither are supplied with flasks of the holy element bottled by the priests of Gangotri. At Allahabad the Jumna, which has followed a parallel course from the mountains, adds its strength; thence, by Benares and Patna, it passes eastward to weave its many mouths with those of the Bramaputra, and to wage a battle twice daily with the inflowing tide among the malarious islands of the Sundarbans. One of the westerly delta branches, the Hugli, on which Calcutta stands, is the most frequented highway to the sea.
Climate.—The whole country has three well-marked seasons—the cool, the hot, and the rainy. The cool months are November, December, January, and a part of February; the dry hot weather precedes, and the moist hot weather follows the periodical rains. The rainy season falls in the middle of summer and is called monsoon. It is the occasional failure of the monsoons that causes the periodical famines to which the country is liable.
The central tableland is cool, comparatively, but the alternations of heat and cold differ greatly elsewhere.
In the northwest there is burning heat with hot winds in summer, and frost at night in winter.
In the south the heat is more tempered, but the winter is cool only, and not cold.
The fall of rain varies greatly in different parts of the country. In the northeastern and other outlying parts it exceeds seventy-five inches. In the Deccan, in the upper basins of the Ganges and the Indus, it is thirty, and in the lower regions of the Indus less than fifteen inches. The remainder of India is placed between the extremes represented by these damp and dry belts.
Production and Industry.—The large majority of the population of India are engaged in agricultural pursuits, nearly 200,000,000 being either engaged in tilling the soil or dependent upon those so engaged. Great irrigation works have been carried out, the area irrigated being 42,486,724 acres.
The principal crops cultivated are rice, wheat, millet, pulse, and other food grains, oil-seeds, tea, cotton, sugar-cane, tobacco, and indigo.