Anga & Seemanchal · Middle & Lower Gangetic Plain

People

Name	Years	Field	Known for
Karna	Legendary	Epic figure	The Mahabharata's king of Anga — given the kingdom by Duryodhana because no one else would grant a charioteer's son a throne. The region's identity has been organised around him for two thousand years.
Phanishwar Nath Renu	1921–1977	Novelist	From Aurahi Hingna in Purnia. Maila Anchal, published in 1954, made a region rather than a person its protagonist and created the anchalik novel in Hindi; his story Maare Gaye Gulfam became the film Teesri Kasam.
Tilka Manjhi	c. 1750–1785	Rebel	A Paharia leader who fought the East India Company in the Rajmahal hills and was executed at Bhagalpur — among the earliest armed resistances to Company rule, and the namesake of the city's university.
Swami Satyananda Saraswati	1923–2009	Yoga teacher	Founded the Bihar School of Yoga at Munger in 1964, whose systematised teaching and publications shaped how postural yoga is taught across the world.
Sharat Chandra Chattopadhyay	1876–1938	Novelist	Spent much of his youth and early writing life at Bhagalpur, in his mother's family's house — the Bengali novelist most read across India, formed partly in an Angika-speaking town.
Ashok Kumar	1911–2001	Actor	Born at Bhagalpur; among the first Indian film stars to work in a naturalistic register, with a career running from the 1930s to the 1990s.
Vasupujya	Traditional	Tirthankara	The twelfth Jain tirthankara, born at Champapuri, which makes this the only region with a tirthankara's birth, initiation, enlightenment and liberation all attributed to one place.
Atisha Dipankara's teachers at Vikramshila	Eleventh century	Scholars	Vikramshila's faculty trained the monk Atisha, who went to Tibet in 1042 and reorganised Buddhism there — the Pala monasteries of this stretch of the Ganga are the direct source of Tibetan monastic scholarship.
Bhagwat Jha Azad and the Angika movement	Twentieth century	Politics and language	The long campaign for Angika's recognition as a language in its own right, still unresolved, and one of several such movements in a state whose census counts most of its languages as Hindi.

People from Anga & Seemanchal who shaped its history, arts, science, sport and public life. (9)