इस क्षेत्र का अनुवाद अभी इस भाषा में नहीं हुआ है, इसलिए यह अंग्रेज़ी में दिखाया जा रहा है।
Magadh · Middle & Lower Gangetic Plain
छोटी-छोटी बातें
- A state named after its monasteriesBihar takes its name from vihara, the word for a Buddhist monastery. There were enough of them here that the plural became a place name, then a province, then a state — one of the few Indian states named after a building type.
- Water dug by hand, still workingThe ahar-pyne system diverts monsoon rivers along contour channels into embanked catchments that hold water for the winter crop. It is centuries old, was maintained by village labour obligations, decayed after those were abolished, and is now being restored in places because nothing built since works as well on this terrain.
- A river with no water in itThe Phalgu at Gaya is dry sand for most of the year, with water below the surface. The local explanation is a curse laid on the river by Sita during the ancestor rites; the hydrological one is that it is a monsoon river on a permeable bed. Both are told, often by the same person.
- Polished granite nobody can explainThe interiors of the Barabar caves, cut in the third century BCE, are polished to a mirror finish on hard granite. How it was done at that scale, with that consistency, is still not settled — the Mauryan polish appears on the pillars and the Didarganj Yakshi too and then stops appearing entirely.
- A ritual with a priesthood organised by geographyThe Gayawal families who officiate at pind daan hold hereditary rights over pilgrims from particular regions of India — a family's clients might be all of coastal Andhra, or all of Marwar. The registers go back generations and are consulted when a family returns after fifty years.
- Sesame beaten by hand, in rhythmTilkut cannot be made by machine and cannot be made in the heat. From November, teams of two or three beat sesame and jaggery with wooden mallets on stone in an alternating rhythm; by March the lanes are silent and the same men are doing something else.
- The most international small town in IndiaBodh Gaya has a permanent population of a few thousand and monasteries maintained by Thailand, Japan, Bhutan, Tibet, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, China, Korea, Bangladesh and Nepal. In January, the Tibetan teachings can add a hundred thousand people to the town.
- The oldest language family tree in the plainMagadhi Prakrit, the spoken language of this region in the Mauryan period, is the ancestor of Magahi, Bhojpuri, Maithili, Bengali, Assamese and Odia. The Jain canon was written in a form of it, and the Ashokan edicts here are its earliest written record.
- A miniature school that painted ordinary peoplePatna Kalam, formed by Mughal-trained painters who moved east in the eighteenth century, painted vegetable sellers, palanquin bearers, weavers and dancers rather than kings — the first substantially secular school of Indian miniature painting, and it died out around 1920 with almost no successors.
- Fifty-two motifs on one sariThe Bawan Buti sari from Basawan Bigha carries fifty-two woven motifs, several of them Buddhist — the wheel, the bodhi leaf, the stupa — in a village a short drive from Nalanda. The weave nearly disappeared and was brought back by a handful of families.
Magadh की छोटी-छोटी स्थानीय बातें — रीति-रिवाज़, अनोखी आदतें और वे चीज़ें जो किसी गाइडबुक में नहीं मिलतीं। (10)