Tier 2 · Cultural region · Middle & Lower Gangetic Plain
भोजपुर
A region with an overseas half — its songs are sung in Mauritius, Fiji, Trinidad and Suriname by people whose ancestors left in the 1870s.
Bhojpur is the densest, poorest and most exported cultural region in the Gangetic plain, and it has turned all three facts into a culture. Between 1834 and 1917 hundreds of thousands of people left these districts under indenture for Mauritius, Fiji, Trinidad, Guyana, Suriname and Natal, and took the language, the Ramcharitmanas, the songs and the wedding rites with them — so Bhojpuri is a living language on four continents. What stayed behind is equally distinctive: Chhath, the most rigorously kept festival in India; Banaras, with its silk, its ghats and its gharanas; Bhikhari Thakur's theatre, which is about migration and is performed by the people it describes; and a foodway of sattu and ember-baked litti designed, not by accident, to be carried.
The central fact about Bhojpur is that it exports people, and has for two hundred years. Everything else follows. The food is designed to be carried. The most important festival is the one everyone comes home for. The signature song forms — purvi, bidesiya, birha — are all about someone who has left. And the language is now spoken as a first language on four continents, with more institutional support in Fiji and Suriname than it has in Delhi.
Banaras sits inside this region and slightly apart from it: a pilgrim city with its own gharanas, its own breakfast, its own vocabulary and a considered indifference to being anywhere else. It is where the weavers, the singers and the dying come. The countryside around it is where everyone leaves from.
Humid subtropical, with 1,000 to 1,200 mm of monsoon rain and a pronounced hot season. May and June reach 43–45 °C with a dry westerly; January nights fall to 7–9 °C, with fog along the river. The plain floods routinely where the Ghaghara and the Gandak meet the Ganga.
Landforms
Rivers and waters
Through the year
| Season | Months | Typical | What it is like |
|---|---|---|---|
| Winter | November–February | 7–24 °C | Foggy and cold, and the region's festival season — Dev Deepawali at Varanasi, Sonepur's cattle fair, weddings and the malaiyo mornings. |
| Summer | March–June | 26–45 °C | Hot and dry, with sattu, chura and green mango carrying the day. The Ganga drops to its channel and the diara land is farmed. |
| Monsoon | July–September | 27–35 °C | Flood season on the Ghaghara and Gandak. Kajri is sung, jhoolas go up, and the paddy is transplanted. |
| Post-monsoon | October | 22–32 °C | The Ramlila season, and Chhath at the end of the month — when the whole diaspora comes home. |
Best time to visitOctober to March. Time it for Chhath in late October or November if you want to understand the region, or for the Ramnagar Ramlila's thirty-one nights from September, or Dev Deepawali at Kartik Purnima when the Varanasi ghats are lit end to end.
Bhojpur's periods are set on the stretch of the Ganga where the river turns east, and they do not follow the national dates. The ancient period belongs to Kashi and to Sarnath, and to the Chunar quarries below Varanasi that supplied the stone for the Mauryan pillars. The medieval period has two centres rather than one: the Sharqi sultanate at Jaunpur from 1394, which built in an idiom found nowhere else, and the Rohtas and Sasaram country that produced Sher Shah Suri, who ruled northern India from 1540 to 1545 and whose tomb stands in a tank at Sasaram. The modern period begins in 1764, not 1857, because the battle at Buxar on 22 October that year was fought inside this region and the Company's revenue authority over eastern India dates from it. And the largest modern fact about the region is not a date but a flow: the indenture emigration of 1834 to 1917, which took the language, the Ramcharitmanas and the song forms to four continents and made half of Bhojpur a place outside India.
Periodisation is regional, not national — the medieval period does not begin in the same century here as it does elsewhere in India.
Kashi was one of the sixteen mahajanapadas and Varanasi its principal city, and Sarnath, a few kilometres north, is where the Buddha's first discourse is placed. The pairing gave this stretch of river an unusual density of institutions very early — monasteries, teaching lineages and, later, the workshops that supplied them. The material link is Chunar: the fine buff sandstone quarried on the river south of Varanasi is the stone of the Mauryan polished pillars, including the lion capital at Sarnath, and it is the stone of the Gupta-period Sarnath Buddhas seven hundred years later. A single quarry supplying two of the defining sculptural moments of Indian art is a regional fact, not a national one.
| When | What happened |
|---|---|
| c. 6th century BCE | Kashi is one of the sixteen mahajanapadas, with Varanasi as its principal city. |
| c. 5th century BCE | The Buddha's first discourse is placed at Sarnath, north of Varanasi. |
| 3rd century BCE | An Ashokan pillar is set up at Sarnath; its lion capital is carved from Chunar sandstone quarried on the river below Varanasi. |
| c. 5th century CE | The Sarnath school produces the seated preaching Buddha, in the same Chunar stone. |
| 7th century CE | Xuanzang records Varanasi and the monasteries at Sarnath. |
| 1194 | After the defeat of the Gahadavalas at Chandawar, Varanasi and the country east of it pass under Delhi's authority. |
Two things distinguish the medieval history of this region from the Awadh plain to its west. The first is Jaunpur, where a governor's family established an independent sultanate in 1394 and held it for eighty-five years. Its architecture — the Atala Masjid of 1408 and the Jama Masjid, with enormous pylon-like screens fronting the prayer hall — is a local invention with no close parallel, and the court is credited in later musical writing with the early development of khayal. The second is the Sasaram country south of the Ganga, where Sher Shah Suri, a jagirdar's son, defeated Humayun at Chausa in 1539 and at Kannauj in 1540 and then ran northern India for five years, in which time the silver rupiya, the sarai and postal network and the extended trunk road were all established. In the eighteenth century the Ujjainiya Rajputs held the Sone–Ganga country from Jagdishpur, and at Banaras a family of revenue managers turned their office into a raj.
| When | What happened |
|---|---|
| 1394–1479 | The Sharqi sultanate rules from Jaunpur; the Atala Masjid is completed in 1408. |
| 26 June 1539 | Sher Shah defeats Humayun at Chausa, in what is now Buxar district. |
| 1540–1545 | Sher Shah rules northern India; the silver rupiya, the sarai and dak network and the extended trunk road date from these five years. |
| 1545 | Sher Shah's tomb is completed at Sasaram, built on an island in an artificial lake. |
| 17th–18th century | The Ujjainiya Rajputs hold the Sone–Ganga country from Jagdishpur. |
| 1730s–1740s | Mansa Ram and then Balwant Singh convert a revenue farm at Banaras into an autonomous raj under the Nawab of Awadh. |
The Company's authority over eastern India was settled at Buxar in this region in 1764, and the consequences arrived here first. Banaras was transferred to the Company in 1775; Chait Singh's refusal of escalating war demands produced a rising in 1781 that briefly drove Warren Hastings to shelter at Chunar, after which the raj was reduced to a landholding based on Ramnagar. From the 1830s the region's principal export became people: recruiters working the Bhojpuri-speaking districts sent hundreds of thousands under indenture to Mauritius, Trinidad, Guyana, Suriname, Fiji and Natal between 1834 and 1917, which is why Bhojpuri is a living language on four continents and why the region's best-known theatre is about departure. In 1857 the region produced the most persistent rebel command in eastern India, and in the twentieth century two of the sharpest turning points of the national movement — one that stopped it and one that briefly replaced the administration — both happened here.
| When | What happened |
|---|---|
| 22 October 1764 | The Company defeats the combined forces of Awadh, Mir Qasim and the Mughal emperor at Buxar; the Treaty of Allahabad follows in 1765. |
| August – October 1781 | Chait Singh's rising at Banaras against Warren Hastings' financial demands; Hastings withdraws to Chunar before the rising is suppressed and the raja is deposed. |
| 1834–1917 | Indenture emigration from the Bhojpuri-speaking districts to Mauritius, Trinidad, Guyana, Suriname, Fiji and Natal. |
| 1857–58 | Kunwar Singh occupies Arrah on 27 July 1857 and campaigns through Awadh and the Rewa border country before returning to Jagdishpur in April 1858. |
| 4 February 1922 | A Non-cooperation procession and the police clash at Chauri Chaura in Gorakhpur district; the police station is burned and twenty-two policemen are killed. Gandhi suspends the movement nationally on 12 February. |
| 2–11 July 1923 | Nineteen men are hanged for the Chauri Chaura killings after the Allahabad High Court judgment of 30 April 1923; fourteen others are sentenced to life. |
| 19 August 1942 | A parallel administration is declared at Ballia during the Quit India movement; it is displaced within a week. |
Rulers and commanders
Under him Jaunpur became an independent capital with an architecture of its own — the Atala Masjid of 1408 set the pattern of the great screen front that later Jaunpur mosques repeat, and it is found essentially nowhere else.
Dynasty: Sharqi of Jaunpur. Seat: Jaunpur
Born at Sasaram to a jagirdar's family; defeated Humayun at Chausa in 1539 and Kannauj in 1540 and ruled northern India for five years. The silver rupiya, the sarai and dak system and the extended trunk road are his. He died of wounds at Kalinjar on 22 May 1545 and is buried at Sasaram.
Dynasty: Sur. Seat: Sasaram, then Delhi
A revenue manager under the Awadh administration who obtained the zamindari of the Banaras districts for his son — the clearest case in the region of an office being converted into hereditary property.
Dynasty: Banaras raj. Seat: Gangapur, near Banaras
Turned the family's revenue farm into an autonomous raj with its own fort at Ramnagar, its own troops and a working independence from Awadh.
Dynasty: Banaras raj. Seat: Ramnagar
Refused escalating war levies demanded by Warren Hastings and was placed under arrest at Banaras in August 1781; the rising that followed drove Hastings to Chunar before it was put down. He was deposed and a relative installed in his place.
Dynasty: Banaras raj. Seat: Ramnagar
Took command of the mutinied regiments at Danapur on 25 July 1857 at the age of nearly eighty, occupied Arrah two days later, and campaigned for nine months across Bihar, Awadh and the Rewa border before returning to defeat a British force near Jagdishpur on 23 April 1858. He died three days later.
Dynasty: Ujjainiya Rajputs of Jagdishpur. Seat: Jagdishpur
Kunwar Singh's brother, who took over the command in April 1858 and ran a parallel administration in Shahabad district for months afterwards — the longest-surviving rebel civil authority in eastern India.
Dynasty: Ujjainiya Rajputs of Jagdishpur. Seat: Jagdishpur
A portable foodway, and the portability is the point. Sattu needs no fire; litti is baked in embers with no vessel; chura keeps for months; achar carries its own preservative. This is the kitchen of a region whose men have been leaving to work for two hundred years, and much of what it makes is designed to travel a week in a cloth bundle. Over that base sits Banaras — a temple-and-pilgrim city with an entirely separate register of sweets, chaat, thandai and winter milk foam that exists only where a large idle crowd needs feeding.
Primary cooking medium
Dominant sour agents
Spice register
Panch phoran in mustard oil, with ajwain, whole dried chilli, and a heavy pickle-masala register. Raw mustard oil, raw onion and green chilli are added at the table. Banaras cooks with a hing-and-ginger base and no onion or garlic in its temple-facing kitchens, which is why the city's most famous savoury food is a kachori and a potato curry rather than anything with meat in it.
Staple grains and carbs
Preservation methods
Signature techniques
Wheat dough balls stuffed with sattu, ajwain and pickle masala, baked directly in cow-dung-cake or wood embers, then cracked and dipped in ghee. No vessel, no oil, no fuel beyond what is already burning — a food for people on the move, which is how it got here and why it stayed.
Also found in: Magadh, Marwar & the Thar
Gram, rice and maize roasted in hot sand in an iron pan and sieved out. Ground it becomes sattu, which is drunk, stuffed and eaten dry, and which the indenture ships carried.
Also found in: Magadh, Mithilanchal
Mutton, mustard oil, garlic and whole spice sealed into an earthen handi with dough and cooked slowly over dung-cake fire, the pot broken or unsealed at the table. The Champaran version has spread across eastern India in the last twenty years.
Also found in: Magadh
Milk whipped to a foam and left under winter dew overnight, skimmed at dawn and sold within hours. Banaras makes it from November to February and calls it malaiyo; Lucknow calls the same thing nimish.
Also found in: Awadh, Antarved Doab
Not a food technique but the region's other great slow process — silk woven with gold-wrapped thread on a pit loom, with the kadhua method working each motif with a separate needle so no float runs behind the cloth. A single sari can take months.
Also found in: Anga & Seemanchal
Two kitchens again. The village kitchen is sattu, litti, chokha, ghugni, rice and a thin dal, with mutton in a sealed pot for occasions. Banaras, thirty kilometres away, eats fried breakfast at dawn, chaat in the afternoon, a milk foam in winter, and paan after everything — a pilgrim city's diet, worked out over centuries of feeding people who have nowhere to be.
Sattu-stuffed wheat balls baked in embers, drowned in ghee, eaten with a mash of roasted brinjal, tomato and potato dressed with raw mustard oil. In Bhojpur it is as likely to be eaten with mutton as by itself.
Roasted gram flour drunk with black salt and lemon, or stuffed into a paratha with pickle masala. The region's answer to a working summer.
A fried, hing-scented kachori with a thin potato curry and a jalebi, eaten before seven in the morning, standing in a lane. The city's most durable institution after the ghats.
Where to try: Kachori Gali near Vishwanath, and the Ram Bhandar and Chachi ki Dukan counters.
Banaras chaat, which is sweeter and softer than Delhi's — crushed tomato cooked down with spice and served in a leaf bowl, and curd-soaked cheese dumplings.
Winter milk foam set under dew and skimmed at dawn, sold from head-carried trays in the old city and gone by mid-morning. Made only between November and February.
Where to try: The lanes around Kachori Gali on a winter morning.
Mutton sealed in a clay handi with mustard oil, garlic and whole spice, cooked slowly and served from the pot. A north Bihar dish that now defines meat-eating across the whole region.
Black gram or peas cooked with ginger and served over flattened rice — the standard village morning meal.
Steamed lentil-stuffed rice dumplings, and fried sweet pancakes made at festivals and at Chhath.
Moulded wheat-and-jaggery biscuit fried in ghee — the principal Chhath offering, and the thing the diaspora most often asks visiting relatives to bring.
A khoya-filled pastry sealed with a clove and steeped in syrup, alongside the city's rabri, malai gilori and lal peda.
River fish in a thin mustard gravy, eaten on both banks of the Ganga; the diara villages fish and farm the same land in different seasons.
Steamed gram-flour dumplings, plain or in a gravy, made when there is nothing else in the house.
Almond, fennel, pepper and rose ground into cold milk, with a bhang variant sold openly at licensed shops and drunk at Holi and Shivratri.
Staples
Sweets
Street food
Drinks
The region weaves what the rest of India gets married in. Banarasi brocade — silk with gold and silver thread — is the standard north Indian wedding textile, woven overwhelmingly by Muslim weaving families in Varanasi, Mubarakpur and Mau and sold overwhelmingly through Hindu trading houses, an arrangement that has held for centuries and remains the region's most consequential economic fact.
What is worn
Silk brocade in katan, organza, georgette or shattir, worked with zari in jangla, tanchoi, cutwork, tissue and butidar patterns. The wedding sari of northern India, and increasingly of the south too.
Worn for: Weddings and formal
White or checked cotton with a gamchha over the shoulder. In Bhojpur the gamchha is close to an identity marker and travels everywhere its wearer does.
Worn for: Everyday and ritual
Cotton for daily wear, drawn over the head, with silk for weddings and Chhath.
Worn for: Everyday
The dress of Varanasi's Ansari weaving quarters — Madanpura, Alaipura and Lallapura — where much of the brocade is actually made.
Worn for: Everyday and Friday
Weaves and textiles
Silk brocade woven with zari on pit and jacquard looms, with the kadhua technique working each motif separately so nothing floats behind the cloth. A registered geographical indication covering the sari, the brocade, and several allied products.
Hand-knotted wool carpets from a belt that is India's largest carpet cluster and a major exporter. A registered geographical indication.
Not a textile but the region's other distinctive product — clay fired in a smothered kiln to a deep black and inlaid with silvery zinc-and-mercury patterns. A registered geographical indication.
Flat-woven cotton and wool dhurries in geometric patterns, made alongside the knotted carpet trade.
Jewellery
Dance
Boys and men dressed as women dance and act at village weddings and in Bidesiya theatre. It is the oldest continuous performing tradition of the region, and its performers, drawn mostly from the poorest communities, live with a stigma that has never lifted.
Performed by: Male dancers in women's roles, with a small orchestra. Occasion: Weddings, fairs, all-night performances
A women's night-long performance of mock marriages, role reversal and bawdy song.
Performed by: Women of the household. Occasion: Weddings, after the baraat leaves
Circling dances shared with Mithila and the Jharkhand plateau, danced to dhol and jhaal.
Performed by: Village groups. Occasion: Navratri, monsoon, harvest
Caste-associated dance forms of the Bhojpur villages, performed with dholak, jhaal and a lead singer, and full of topical satire.
Performed by: Community troupes. Occasion: Weddings and fairs
Music
Three lineages at once — the tabla school founded by Ram Sahai with its distinct baj, carried by Kanthe Maharaj, Samta Prasad and Kishan Maharaj; the shehnai tradition of the temple naubat, which Bismillah Khan took to the concert stage; and the thumri and tappa singing of the city, which Girija Devi carried into the recording era.
A song form associated with Mahendar Misir of Saran, built on the theme of the woman left behind when the men go east to Calcutta and beyond. It is the diaspora's own genre, composed at the moment the migration was at its height.
Bhikhari Thakur's cycle about a man who leaves for the city and the wife who waits — the songs are sung independently of the play and are the region's most quoted verse.
Sung narrative in a high open voice, historically the Ahir herdsmen's form, now a competitive stage genre with professional singers, long improvised passages and enormous night audiences.
Monsoon and spring song respectively, both existing in a village form and a classicised light-classical form. Mirzapur's kajri is the standard, and the Mirzapur kajri competitions are the genre's home ground.
Songs of the formless divine sung at deaths and night gatherings, in a tradition that runs straight back to Kabir's own city.
Theatre
Bhikhari Thakur's early twentieth-century play about labour migration, performed with launda naach, song and comic interlude. It is theatre made by and for the class it describes, and it is still performed.
A thirty-one-night Ramlila staged across the town of Ramnagar since the nineteenth century, in which the whole town becomes the set — separate locations for Ayodhya, Lanka and the forest, and audiences walking between them nightly by lamplight.
Touring sung folk-opera performed at fairs, in the same tradition as the Uttar Pradesh companies.
Crafts
The largest handloom silk cluster in India, employing several lakh people. Most weavers are Muslim Ansari families; most traders are Hindu; and power looms, Chinese silk yarn and Surat copies have squeezed the craft hard over the last two decades.
Material: Silk, gold and silver zari. Technique: Pit-loom and jacquard weaving with supplementary weft; in the kadhua method each motif is worked with its own needle so no thread floats behind, which is what separates a hand-woven sari from a power-loom copy.
India's largest carpet-making belt and a substantial export earner, built on a village outwork system with a long-scrutinised child-labour history and a certification regime that grew out of it.
Material: Wool, silk, cotton warp. Technique: Hand-knotted on vertical looms, Persian and Indo-Tibetan knot structures, then clipped and washed.
A rose-pink enamelling technique held by a small number of families in Varanasi, distinct from the Jaipur blue-and-green tradition it descends from.
Material: Gold and silver, enamel. Technique: Pink enamel fired into engraved metal in successive firings, the pink applied last and lowest-fired.
Temple vessels, lamps and images in beaten metal, and the bright lacquered wooden toys sold in every ghat lane.
Material: Brass, copper, koraiya wood. Technique: Repousse hammering from the reverse; turned wooden toys lacquered on the lathe with coloured shellac.
A pottery tradition of a single town, and among the most distinctive-looking ceramics in India.
Material: Local clay, zinc and mercury amalgam. Technique: Fired in a smothered kiln so carbon penetrates the body and turns it black, then burnished and inlaid with silvery patterns.
The quarry that supplied the stone for the Ashokan pillars, including the lion capital at Sarnath. It is still worked, mostly for building stone.
Material: Buff Chunar sandstone. Technique: Quarrying, dressing and carving; historically polished to a high finish.
A whole social institution rather than a product — the paan shop is where the city's conversation happens, and the fold and filling are adjusted per customer.
Material: Betel leaf, katha, chuna, supari, and dozens of fillings. Technique: The leaf is cured for days until it softens and pales, then filled and folded to order. The Magahi leaf from Bihar is the preferred base.
Songs to the sun and to Chhathi Maiya, sung on the walk to the ghat and through the night. This is the festival's heartland, and the songs are among the most widely recognised in north India.
Sung at: Chhath, Kartik and Chaitra.
The man who leaves for Calcutta and the wife who waits. Composed by Bhikhari Thakur in the early twentieth century, when the migration he describes was at its peak.
Sung at: Performed year-round, and at weddings.
Separation and eastward migration, associated with Mahendar Misir of Saran — the region's own account of what indenture and labour migration did to its households.
Sung at: Sung as a concert and village form.
Monsoon songs of longing, sung on swings by women and, at Mirzapur, in competitive all-night sessions with professional singers.
Sung at: Sawan.
Spring songs addressed to Rama's birth month, sung in a distinctive descending line.
Sung at: Chaitra.
Separation, cattle, caste pride and current affairs, sung solo at volume with a chorus refrain — a folk form that became a professional stage industry.
Sung at: Night gatherings and stage competitions.
Household life-cycle song, with a large gaari repertoire of ritual abuse aimed at the groom's party.
Sung at: Births and weddings.
The formless divine and the body's impermanence, in the Kabir line — sung at cremations, including at Manikarnika itself.
Sung at: Deaths and night vigils.
Bhojpuri has more speakers than several official languages of Europe and no place in the Eighth Schedule, which has been contested for decades. Outside India it has done better: it is a national language of Fiji in its Fiji Hindi form, an official-adjacent language in Mauritius, and the base of Sarnami in Suriname and the Netherlands and of Caribbean Hindustani in Trinidad and Guyana. In several of those places it has state support, a standardised orthography and university teaching that it lacks at home.
Speech varieties
The Ara, Buxar, Ballia and Varanasi register — the base of the film and music industry that carries the name.
Speakers: About 5.05 crore in the 2011 Census, and several million more overseas
Gorakhpur, Deoria, Siwan and Gopalganj, shading into Bajjika and, across the border, into the Bhojpuri of Nepal's Bara and Parsa districts.
Rohtas, Kaimur and the plateau edge, shading into Nagpuri and Sadri.
Descended from the Bhojpuri and Awadhi of nineteenth-century indentured migrants, levelled into new standards with English, Dutch, Fijian and Creole vocabulary. Fiji Hindi is a national language; Sarnami has a written literature in the Netherlands.
The city's own register — famously blunt, dense with address terms like guru and bhaiya, and the medium of the literature that made modern Hindi prose.
Indigenous terminology
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Girmitiya गिरमिटिया | An indentured emigrant — from a Bhojpuri pronunciation of the English "agreement" they signed. The word became the diaspora's own name for itself. |
| Bidesiya बिदेसिया | One who has gone abroad, and by extension the whole genre about it. The word carries loss, not adventure. |
| Sattu सत्तू | Roasted gram ground to flour — drunk, stuffed and carried; the food of anyone travelling for work. |
| Diara दियारा | The sandy island and bank land inside the Ganga's channel, cultivated between floods and held under customary rather than settled tenure — which has made it the setting for a great deal of the region's violence. |
| Kadhua कढ़ुआ | The brocade technique in which each motif is worked with its own needle so no thread floats behind the cloth — the mark of a hand-woven Banarasi. |
| Gamchha गमछा | A thin checked cotton cloth used as towel, headwrap, sling and belt. Outside the region it is the single most reliable marker of where its wearer is from. |
| Akhara अखाड़ा | A wrestling ground, and in Banaras also a singing society — the akharas of the city compete at Kajri and Holi in a tradition older than the concert stage. |
| Ghat घाट | A stepped riverbank. Varanasi has around eighty-four, each with a name, a function and an owner, two of them for cremation and the rest for everything else. |
| Masaan मसान | The cremation ground — and, at Manikarnika, the site of the Masaan Holi in which ash from the pyres is thrown like colour. |
| Banarasipan बनारसीपन | Banaras-ness — a self-described attitude of unhurriedness, irreverence and refusal to be impressed, which the city treats as its principal export. |
Sayings
| Saying | Literally | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| Raand, saand, seedhi, sanyasi — inse bache to seve Kashi | Widows, bulls, stairs and ascetics — survive these and you may serve Kashi | Banaras's most quoted description of itself, and still an accurate list of what obstructs a walk through it. |
| Ghar ke bhedi Lanka dhaye | The insider brought down Lanka | Betrayal from within — a proverb from a region whose Ramlila runs for a month. |
| Jaan hai to jahan hai | If there is life, there is a world | Used to justify leaving — for Calcutta, Mumbai, the Gulf or, once, Fiji. The most consequential sentiment in the region's modern history. |
| Bhojpuri mati ke laal | A son of the Bhojpuri soil | The standard claim of belonging, used equally by a Chapra villager and by a fourth-generation Trinidadian — which is what makes this region unusual. |
Around eighty-four stepped ghats along a five-kilometre crescent where the Ganga flows north. Dashashwamedh for the evening aarti, Manikarnika and Harishchandra for cremation, Assi at the southern end — and the best way to see them is from a boat at dawn.
Best time: October–March.
One of the twelve jyotirlingas, rebuilt in 1780 by Ahilyabai Holkar, and since 2021 approached through a broad corridor cut from the ghats to the temple — a change that transformed the old city's fabric and remains contested locally.
Where the Buddha gave his first sermon. The Dhamek stupa, the excavated monastery, and in the museum the Ashokan lion capital that became the emblem of the Republic of India.
The Kashi Naresh's eighteenth-century fort across the river, and the town whose thirty-one-night Ramlila turns its streets and ponds into the sites of the epic, with audiences walking between them each evening.
An octagonal sandstone mausoleum standing on a plinth in the middle of an artificial lake, completed around 1545. Among the finest pre-Mughal buildings in India, and startlingly little visited.
A vast hill fort on the Kaimur plateau above the Sone, with a circuit of several kilometres, reached on foot. Held in turn by local chiefs, Sher Shah and the Mughals.
An octagonal stone temple on a hill, with an inscription read as fourth or fifth century, and claimed locally as the oldest continuously functioning Hindu temple in India. Goats are offered here and released alive.
The seat of Kunwar Singh, the eighty-year-old zamindar who led the 1857 revolt in this region and won his last engagement after crossing the Ganga under fire.
A Shakti peetha on the Ganga, with the Vindhyavasini temple and a triangular circuit taking in Ashtabhuja and Kali Khoh. Enormous crowds during Navratri.
A fort on a sandstone spur above the Ganga, beside the quarries that supplied the Ashokan pillars — held by Sher Shah, Akbar and the Company in turn.
The principal seat of the Nath sampraday, the yogic order founded by Gorakhnath, with a large Makar Sankranti khichdi mela and a monastic lineage that reaches across north India and into Nepal.
Where the Buddha died. A reclining Buddha of the fifth century in the Parinirvana temple, the Ramabhar stupa over the cremation site, and monasteries built by half a dozen Buddhist countries.
Where Kabir chose to die, because popular belief held that dying at Kashi guaranteed liberation and dying at Maghar denied it. His samadhi and his mazar stand side by side in one compound, maintained by Hindus and Muslims respectively.
A Neolithic mound on the Ghaghara, occupied from around 2500 BCE, with bone tools and a long unbroken stratigraphy — one of the earliest settled sites in eastern India.
On the northern fringe — a colossal brick stupa at Kesariya, among the tallest in India, and an Ashokan pillar with a lion capital still standing in place at Lauria Nandangarh.
| Festival | When | What happens |
|---|---|---|
| Chhath | Kartik (October–November) and Chaitra (March–April) | Four days of fasting and offerings to the setting and rising sun. No priest, no image, no temple. The region empties of its migrant workers in the week before it, and every railway line into Bihar and eastern Uttar Pradesh runs full. |
| Ramnagar Ramlila | Ashwin to Kartik (September–October), thirty-one nights | Staged across the whole town of Ramnagar with fixed locations for each episode, no amplification, and audiences who follow the action on foot by lamplight — running annually since the 1830s. |
| Dev Deepawali | Kartik Purnima (November) | Lakhs of oil lamps set along every step of every Varanasi ghat on the full moon after Diwali, with the river lit end to end. The single most photographed night in the region. |
| Masaan Holi | A few days before Holi, at Manikarnika | Ash from the cremation pyres is thrown like colour at the burning ground, on the reasoning that Shiva plays Holi with the dead. It is exactly as unsettling and exactly as celebratory as it sounds. |
| Sonepur Mela | Kartik Purnima (November), for a fortnight or more | A cattle and horse fair at the Ganga–Gandak confluence, historically the largest animal fair in Asia, with a bathing festival attached and a trade that once included elephants. |
| Nag Nathaiya and Bharat Milap | Kartik (October–November) | Two Varanasi enactments with fixed sites and centuries of continuity — Krishna subduing the serpent at Tulsi Ghat, and the reunion of Rama and Bharat at Nati Imli, watched by lakhs for a few minutes. |
| Buddha Purnima at Sarnath | Vaishakh (April–May) | Processions and all-night observance at the site of the first sermon. |
| Khichdi Mela at Gorakhnath | Makar Sankranti (January) | Pilgrims offer khichdi to Gorakhnath over several days, in one of the largest winter fairs of eastern Uttar Pradesh. |
| Name | Years | Field | Known for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Kabir | c. 1440–1518 | Poet and mystic | A weaver of Banaras whose verse rejected both Brahminical ritual and formal Islam, and who is claimed by Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs alike — his verses are in the Guru Granth Sahib. He died at Maghar, deliberately. |
| Ravidas | Fifteenth century | Poet and saint | A Chamar leatherworker of Banaras whose verse became foundational for Dalit religious assertion; his birthplace at Seer Govardhanpur is a major pilgrimage centre, particularly for Punjabi Ravidassias. |
| Bhikhari Thakur | 1887–1971 | Playwright and performer | A barber from Saran who wrote and performed Bidesiya and a dozen other plays about migration, dowry and caste, in Bhojpuri, for village audiences. Called the Shakespeare of Bhojpuri, and the only major Indian dramatist of his century to come from the class he wrote about. |
| Mahendar Misir | 1886–1946 | Poet and composer | Created the Purvi song form, and was jailed for counterfeiting currency — a story the region tells with some relish and a good deal of sympathy. |
| Bharatendu Harishchandra | 1850–1885 | Writer | From Varanasi; regarded as the founder of modern Hindi literature and of Hindi theatre and journalism, all within a life of thirty-four years. |
| Munshi Premchand | 1880–1936 | Writer | Born at Lamhi outside Varanasi; wrote in Urdu and then Hindi, and made the peasant, the moneylender and the village the subject of Indian fiction. Godaan and his short stories remain the standard. |
| Ustad Bismillah Khan | 1916–2006 | Musician | Born at Dumraon in Buxar and based at Varanasi; took the shehnai from temple and wedding processions to the concert platform, played at the Red Fort on the first Independence Day, and refused to leave Banaras. |
| Girija Devi | 1929–2017 | Singer | Of the Banaras gharana; carried thumri, kajri, chaiti and tappa through a period when the light-classical forms were losing their patronage, and taught most of the generation that sings them now. |
| Pandit Ravi Shankar | 1920–2012 | Musician | Born at Varanasi; trained at Maihar under Allauddin Khan, and became the musician through whom most of the world first heard Indian classical music. |
| Veer Kunwar Singh | 1777–1858 | Rebel leader | Zamindar of Jagdishpur, who took up the 1857 revolt in his eighties, fought a campaign across three provinces, and died days after his last victory. |
| Rajendra Prasad | 1884–1963 | Politics | Born at Ziradei in Siwan; president of the Constituent Assembly and the first President of India, and Gandhi's principal organiser during the 1917 Champaran satyagraha. |
| Jayaprakash Narayan | 1902–1979 | Politics | From Sitab Diara on the Ghaghara; socialist, then Sarvodaya worker, then the figure around whom the movement against the Emergency organised in 1974–75. |
| Rahul Sankrityayan | 1893–1963 | Scholar and traveller | From Azamgarh; travelled to Tibet four times and brought back manuscripts of Sanskrit Buddhist texts lost in India, and wrote across a dozen fields in Hindi. |
| Kaifi Azmi | 1919–2002 | Poet | From Azamgarh; Urdu poet of the Progressive Writers' movement, film lyricist, and later the rebuilder of his own village as a development project. |
Two things distinguish resistance here. In 1857 the region produced a command that outlasted its commander: Kunwar Singh took the field at nearly eighty, and after his death his brother kept a parallel administration going in Shahabad for months, which is why the Bhojpuri ballad repertoire still carries him by name. And in the twentieth century this region supplied both of the mass movement's sharpest turning points — Chauri Chaura in Gorakhpur district in February 1922, after which Gandhi called off Non-cooperation nationally, and Ballia in August 1942, one of the few places where the administration was actually displaced, if only for days. The emigrant half of the region has no comparable political record, because indentured labourers had no political rights in the colonies they were taken to; what they carried instead was language and song. One attribution should be stated carefully: Mangal Pandey, whose action at Barrackpore in March 1857 is conventionally treated as the opening of the revolt, is claimed for Nagwa in Ballia district, but the evidence is contested and another birthplace is also cited.
Risings and revolts
Warren Hastings demanded successive war levies and cavalry from Raja Chait Singh and, when they were not met, had him placed under arrest at Banaras in August 1781. The company detachment sent to hold him was overwhelmed, the raja's men secured him at Ramnagar, and Hastings withdrew to Chunar while the rising spread across the districts.
Outcome: Suppressed by early October 1781. Chait Singh was deposed and a relative installed; the tribute was raised, and the confiscation of funds during the affair later formed part of the impeachment charges against Hastings.
Kunwar Singh took command of the regiments that rose at Danapur on 25 July 1857 and occupied Arrah on 27 July, where a small fortified house held out until a relieving force arrived. Jagdishpur was destroyed on 3 August and he moved west, fighting through Awadh, Rewa and Azamgarh before recrossing the Ganga in April 1858 — the crossing at which a bullet shattered his wrist.
Outcome: He defeated a British force near Jagdishpur on 23 April 1858 and died on 26 April. Amar Singh continued the campaign and held a parallel administration in Shahabad into late 1858.
A Non-cooperation procession in Gorakhpur district clashed with the police; after the police fired, the crowd set fire to the station and twenty-two policemen were killed.
Outcome: Gandhi suspended the Non-cooperation movement nationally on 12 February 1922. Of 225 people tried, the Allahabad High Court on 30 April 1923 confirmed nineteen death sentences, carried out between 2 and 11 July 1923, and fourteen sentences of life imprisonment.
During the Quit India movement, crowds at Ballia obtained the release of imprisoned Congress workers and the district collector handed over authority; a local administration was declared under Chittu Pandey.
Outcome: Troops re-entered the district within about a week and the leaders went into hiding.
People
| Name | Years | Movement | Known for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Kunwar SinghJagdishpur, Shahabad district | 1777–1858 | 1857 | Led the rebel forces of western Bihar from July 1857 through a nine-month campaign across three regions, returning to win an action near Jagdishpur on 23 April 1858.Died at Jagdishpur on 26 April 1858 of a wound received crossing the Ganga. |
| Amar SinghJagdishpur, Shahabad district | — | 1857 | Kunwar Singh's brother; succeeded to the command in April 1858 and maintained a parallel administration in Shahabad district for months after the main campaign had ended. |
| Mangal PandeyClaimed for Nagwa in Ballia district; the attribution is contested | 1827–1857 | 1857 | A sepoy of the 34th Bengal Native Infantry who attacked his officers at Barrackpore on 29 March 1857. The episode is conventionally treated as the opening of the revolt, and his regiment was disbanded.Tried and hanged on 8 April 1857. |
| Bandhu SinghDumri, Gorakhpur district | 1833–1858 | 1857 | Led an irregular resistance in the forest country of Gorakhpur district during 1857 and 1858.Hanged publicly at Ali Nagar in Gorakhpur on 12 August 1858. |
| Chittu PandeyRattuchak, Ballia district | died 1946 | Quit India | Congress organiser in Ballia who headed the administration declared there on 19 August 1942 after the district authorities handed over charge.Went into hiding when troops re-entered the district; imprisoned repeatedly through the 1930s and 1940s. |
| Raj Kumar ShuklaChamparan, at the northern edge of the region | c. 1875–1929 | Champaran satyagraha | An indigo cultivator who followed Gandhi from the Lucknow Congress of 1916 until he agreed to come to Champaran, producing the inquiry and agitation of 1917 that ended the tinkathia obligation.Died in 1929 in poverty. |
| Rajendra PrasadZiradei, Siwan district | 1884–1963 | Congress; Champaran, Civil Disobedience, Quit India | Left legal practice to work on the Champaran inquiry of 1917 and remained a principal Congress organiser in the Bhojpuri districts; president of the Congress in 1934, 1939 and 1947.Imprisoned repeatedly, including from 1942 to 1945 after Quit India. |
Hand-woven kadhua brocade
Buy from the weaver or a cooperative if you can. Turn the sari over — if the motifs float on threads across the back, it is not kadhua.
Kachori-sabzi, jalebi and launglata
Open early and finished by mid-morning; the queue starts before seven.
Thick lassi in clay cups
Winter milk foam sold from head-carried trays
November to February only, and gone by ten in the morning.
Banarasi paan, cured and folded to order
Hand-knotted wool and silk carpets
Ask for the knot count and whether the piece is loom-certified; the belt's child-labour history produced the certification systems now used across the industry.
Black clay ware inlaid with silvery patterns
By air
By rail
By road
By water
Getting around
Autos, e-rickshaws and boats; the Varanasi old city is walkable only, and deliberately so. Trains are the sensible way between towns — Varanasi to Ara is about two hours, to Gorakhpur about five. In the week before Chhath, book anything at all as far ahead as possible.
Traditions that continue past an administrative line. Written once at the corridor level and referenced from every region it crosses, never duplicated.
Bhojpuri and Awadhi speech, Ramcharitmanas recitation, Chhath, the wedding song repertoire and the caste and kin vocabulary, carried by indentured migrants to Mauritius, Fiji, Trinidad, Guyana, Suriname, Natal and Réunion between 1834 and 1917 — and returned since the 1970s as a diaspora tourism and marriage circuit.
How it diverges: Overseas the languages levelled into new standards — Fiji Hindi, Sarnami, Caribbean Hindustani — and caste largely collapsed on the ships and the estates; the Ramayan mandali became the central religious institution in a way it never was at home.
The four-day sun fast, its song repertoire and its ghat infrastructure, carried by migrants to Delhi's Yamuna banks, Mumbai's beaches, Kolkata's ghats, and to Mauritius, Fiji and the Gulf.
How it diverges: At home Chhath is a domestic observance organised by household; away from home it has become a public assertion of Bihari and Purvanchali identity, with organising committees and political attention.
Silk brocade woven at Varanasi, Mubarakpur and Mau, sold through wholesale networks to Surat, Mumbai, Chennai and every wedding market in India, on yarn that now largely arrives from China through Bengaluru.
How it diverges: Surat's power looms produce a visually similar sari at a fraction of the cost and time, which has driven thousands of Varanasi weavers out of the trade — the GI protects the name against them, imperfectly.
Kabir's verse and the nirgun singing tradition, from Varanasi and Maghar to the Kabir Panth's large following in Chhattisgarh, into the Guru Granth Sahib in Punjab, and into the Malwa nirgun folk repertoire.
How it diverges: Chhattisgarh's Kabir Panth built an institutional religion with monasteries and a hereditary head; Punjab absorbed the verse into Sikh scripture; Banaras kept it as a singing tradition and a set of arguments.
The yogic order of Gorakhnath, with its principal seat at Gorakhpur and monasteries from Nepal and Punjab to Maharashtra, carrying a shared initiation, repertoire of songs and the khichdi offering.
How it diverges: In Nepal the order held royal patronage into the modern era; in Rajasthan and Punjab it survives as a householder-adjacent sect; at Gorakhpur it became a large institution with an educational and political footprint.
Seasonal and permanent labour migration from these districts to Kolkata's mills, Punjab's fields, Mumbai's industry and Delhi's construction sites — and back, twice a year, carrying money, dialect and the birha and Bhojpuri music industry with it.
How it diverges: Calcutta's nineteenth-century Bhojpuri quarters produced their own akharas and birha singers; the Punjab migration is agricultural and seasonal; the Gulf migration since the 1980s has changed village housing and marriage economics more than any of them.
Last reviewed 2026-08-30