The Brahmaputra waterscape was subjected to the colonial desire to tame, enframe and transfigure it into an abode of order and productivity. In this context, the article examines two interconnected socio-historical processes that unfolded at the Brahmaputra waterscape in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. First, it examines the colonial representational practices that sought to make the Brahmaputra legible, which eventually led to its socio-natural production. Second, it interrogates the colonial biopolitical regime that produced a hierarchy of geographical and racial subjectivities intertwined with the waterscape. The article argues that these historical constitutions were characterised by the epistemic anxiety of its colonial framers. Building on the academic work that foreground the tensions within imperial representational artefacts, and that view colonial archives as a process and art of affective governance, the article shows that the knowledge claims which were otherwise projected as orderly and stable in colonial discourse, in reality, were fragmented and piecemeal.