# Bhojpur & Purvanchal (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.

- Source: https://bharatsangraha.com/regions/bhojpur
- Language: en
- Tier 1 macro cultural realm: Middle & Lower Gangetic Plain
- Tier 2 cultural region: Bhojpur & Purvanchal
- Indigenous scope: The Bhojpuri-speaking country on both banks of the Ganga where the river turns east — from the Sone confluence and the Kaimur scarp in the west to the Gandak and the Ghaghara in the north, and up to the Vindhyan edge at Mirzapur in the south. It is flat, densely populated alluvium with more people per square kilometre than almost anywhere else in India, and its boundary is drawn by speech alone: Awadhi to the west, Magahi across the Sone, Maithili and Bajjika beyond the Gandak, Nagpuri and Sadri on the plateau below. The region's most important feature is not on the ground at all — for two centuries it has exported people, and the culture it built overseas is now half of it.
- Overlapping administrative units: Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Jharkhand, Nepal
- Tier 3 micro-regions: Bhojpur Core (Ara–Buxar) (Sone–Ganga interfluve); Banaras Fringe (Ganga terrace and the Vindhyan edge); Saran Doab (Ganga–Gandak–Ghaghara interfluve)
- Languages: Bhojpuri, Hindi, Urdu, Bajjika on the northern edge

## Terrain and eco-zones

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:** Level Gangetic alluvium, among the most densely settled agricultural land on earth, Diara — the sandy island and bank land in the Ganga's channel, cropped between floods, Kaimur scarp and the Vindhyan edge in the south, rising to Chunar and Rohtas, Terai and the Someshwar hills on the far northern fringe, at the Nepal border, Ravines along the Sone and Karmanasa

**Rivers and waters:** Ganga — the axis, and at Varanasi the only stretch where it flows north, Sone — the western boundary, sandy and seasonal, Ghaghara and Gandak — the northern boundaries, both Himalayan and both violent in flood, Karmanasa, Gomti, Tons and Rapti, Chandra Prabha and the Vindhyan streams in the south

- **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 visit:** October 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.

## History

## Foodways

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:** Mustard oil, dominant and often used raw, Ghee for litti, festival food and the Banaras sweet trade, Til oil in winter

**Dominant sour agents:** Amchur and dried mango, Lemon and kagzi lime, Tamarind, Curd, Pickle masala used as a seasoning in its own right

**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:** Rice, including the aromatic Kalanamak landrace of the Gorakhpur belt, Wheat, Chana, and the sattu made from it, Chura and lai, Marua and other millets on the southern edge

**Preservation:** Sattu, which keeps for months and needs no cooking, Chura and parched rice, Mango, lemon and chilli achar in mustard oil, Badi and tilauri, sun-dried, Til and gur sweets made through the winter

### Ember baking of litti
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

### Sand roasting for sattu and bhuja
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

### Ahuna and handi meat
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

### Dew-set malaiyo
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

### Zari and kadhua brocade weaving
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

## Dishes

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.

### Litti-chokha
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.

### Sattu ka sharbat and makuni roti
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.

### Banarasi kachori-sabzi with jalebi
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.

### Tamatar chaat and chena dahi vada
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.

### Malaiyo
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.

### Champaran-style ahuna mutton
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.

### Ghugni with chura
Black gram or peas cooked with ginger and served over flattened rice — the standard village morning meal.

### Dal-pitha and pua
Steamed lentil-stuffed rice dumplings, and fried sweet pancakes made at festivals and at Chhath.

### Thekua
Moulded wheat-and-jaggery biscuit fried in ghee — the principal Chhath offering, and the thing the diaspora most often asks visiting relatives to bring.

### Launglata and Banarasi sweets
A khoya-filled pastry sealed with a clove and steeped in syrup, alongside the city's rabri, malai gilori and lal peda.

### Machh-bhaat and diara fish
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.

### Bafauri and bari
Steamed gram-flour dumplings, plain or in a gravy, made when there is nothing else in the house.

### Banarasi thandai
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:** Rice and roti, Sattu, Arhar and masoor dal, Potato, brinjal, gourd and greens, Mustard oil

**Sweets:** Malaiyo, Launglata, Thekua, Lal peda, Balushahi, Til-gur and lai in winter

**Street food:** Kachori-sabzi and jalebi, Litti-chokha, Tamatar chaat, Ghugni-chura, Banarasi paan

**Drinks:** Sattu sharbat, Thandai, Lassi in clay tumblers, Tadi in season, Banarasi chai in kulhads

## Dress and textiles

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.

### Banarasi sari
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 by: Women
Worn for: Weddings and formal

### Dhoti, kurta and gamchha
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 by: Men
Worn for: Everyday and ritual

### Sari with a red border
Cotton for daily wear, drawn over the head, with silk for weddings and Chhath.
Worn by: Women
Worn for: Everyday

### Kurta-pyjama and topi
The dress of Varanasi's Ansari weaving quarters — Madanpura, Alaipura and Lallapura — where much of the brocade is actually made.
Worn by: Men, in the weaving mohallas
Worn for: Everyday and Friday

### Banaras brocades and sarees (GI tag)
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.

### Bhadohi handmade carpet (GI tag)
Hand-knotted wool carpets from a belt that is India's largest carpet cluster and a major exporter. A registered geographical indication.

### Nizamabad black pottery (GI tag)
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.

### Kalamkari-style Mirzapur dhurrie
Flat-woven cotton and wool dhurries in geometric patterns, made alongside the knotted carpet trade.

**Jewellery:** Gulabi meenakari from Varanasi — pink enamel on silver and gold, Silver hansuli and payal, Nose ring and jhumka, Lac and glass bangles, Rudraksha and stone malas, sold in every ghat lane

## Arts and artisanal heritage

### Launda naach — folk
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.

### Domkach — folk
A women's night-long performance of mock marriages, role reversal and bawdy song.

### Jhijhiya and jhumar — folk
Circling dances shared with Mithila and the Jharkhand plateau, danced to dhol and jhaal.

### Dhobiya naach and Farrua — folk
Caste-associated dance forms of the Bhojpur villages, performed with dholak, jhaal and a lead singer, and full of topical satire.

### Banaras gharana
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.

### Purvi
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.

### Bidesiya songs
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.

### Birha
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.

### Kajri and chaiti
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.

### Nirgun and Kabir bhajan
Songs of the formless divine sung at deaths and night gatherings, in a tradition that runs straight back to Kabir's own city.

### Bidesiya
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.

### Ramnagar Ramlila
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.

### Nautanki and swang
Touring sung folk-opera performed at fairs, in the same tradition as the Uttar Pradesh companies.

### Banarasi silk weaving (GI registered)
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.

### Bhadohi carpet knotting (GI registered)
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.

### Gulabi meenakari (GI registered)
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.

### Varanasi metal repousse and wooden lacquerware (GI registered)
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.

### Nizamabad black pottery (GI registered)
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.

### Chunar sandstone carving (GI-worthy)
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.

### Banarasi paan (GI-worthy)
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.

## Folk songs

### Chhath geet (Bhojpuri)
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

### Bidesiya (Bhojpuri)
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

### Purvi (Bhojpuri)
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

### Kajri (Bhojpuri)
Monsoon songs of longing, sung on swings by women and, at Mirzapur, in competitive all-night sessions with professional singers.
Sung at: Sawan

### Chaiti and Ghato (Bhojpuri)
Spring songs addressed to Rama's birth month, sung in a distinctive descending line.
Sung at: Chaitra

### Birha (Bhojpuri)
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

### Sohar and vivah geet (Bhojpuri)
Household life-cycle song, with a large gaari repertoire of ritual abuse aimed at the groom's party.
Sung at: Births and weddings

### Nirgun (Bhojpuri and Hindi)
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

## Dialect and oral traditions

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.

### Standard (Western) Bhojpuri — Indo-Aryan, Eastern (Bihari group)
The Ara, Buxar, Ballia and Varanasi register — the base of the film and music industry that carries the name.

### Northern Bhojpuri — Indo-Aryan, Eastern
Gorakhpur, Deoria, Siwan and Gopalganj, shading into Bajjika and, across the border, into the Bhojpuri of Nepal's Bara and Parsa districts.

### Southern Bhojpuri — Indo-Aryan, Eastern
Rohtas, Kaimur and the plateau edge, shading into Nagpuri and Sadri.

### Fiji Hindi, Sarnami and Caribbean Hindustani — Indo-Aryan, Eastern — overseas varieties
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.

### Banarasi Hindi and Urdu — Indo-Aryan, Hindustani
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

- **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

- "Raand, saand, seedhi, sanyasi — inse bache to seve Kashi" — literally: 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" — literally: The insider brought down Lanka — Betrayal from within — a proverb from a region whose Ramlila runs for a month.
- "Jaan hai to jahan hai" — literally: 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" — literally: 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.

## Places

### The Varanasi ghats, Varanasi
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

### Kashi Vishwanath Temple, Varanasi
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.

### Sarnath, Varanasi
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.

### Ramnagar Fort and the Ramlila, Varanasi
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.

### Sher Shah Suri's tomb, Sasaram, Rohtas
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.

### Rohtasgarh Fort, Rohtas
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.

### Mundeshwari Temple, Kaimur
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.

### Jagdishpur, Bhojpur
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.

### Vindhyachal, Mirzapur
A Shakti peetha on the Ganga, with the Vindhyavasini temple and a triangular circuit taking in Ashtabhuja and Kali Khoh. Enormous crowds during Navratri.

### Chunar Fort, Mirzapur
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.

### Gorakhnath Temple, Gorakhpur
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.

### Kushinagar, Kushinagar
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.

### Maghar, Sant Kabir Nagar
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.

### Chirand, Saran
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.

### Kesariya and Lauria Nandangarh, East Champaran, West Champaran
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.

## Festivals

- **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.

## People

- **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.

## Freedom fighters

## Shops and premises

- **The Banarasi silk weavers of Madanpura and Mubarakpur**, Varanasi, Azamgarh: 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.
- **Ram Bhandar and the Kachori Gali counters**, Varanasi: Kachori-sabzi, jalebi and launglata Open early and finished by mid-morning; the queue starts before seven.
- **Blue Lassi and the Thatheri Bazaar lassi shops**, Varanasi: Thick lassi in clay cups
- **The malaiyo sellers**, Varanasi: Winter milk foam sold from head-carried trays November to February only, and gone by ten in the morning.
- **Keshav Tambul Bhandar and the old paan shops**, Varanasi: Banarasi paan, cured and folded to order
- **The Bhadohi carpet lofts**, Bhadohi: 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.
- **Nizamabad black pottery workshops**, Nizamabad, Azamgarh: Black clay ware inlaid with silvery patterns

## How to reach

**By air:** Lal Bahadur Shastri International Airport, Varanasi (VNS); Gorakhpur Airport (GOP); Kushinagar International Airport (KBK); Jay Prakash Narayan International Airport, Patna (PAT)

**By rail:** Varanasi Junction (BSB); Pandit Deen Dayal Upadhyaya Junction (Mughalsarai) (DDU); Ara Junction (ARA); Chhapra Junction (CPR); Gorakhpur Junction (GKP)

**By road:** NH 19 — the Grand Trunk alignment through Sasaram, Mughalsarai and Varanasi, NH 31 — Patna to Ara and Buxar along the Ganga's south bank, Purvanchal Expressway — Lucknow to Ghazipur, NH 27 — Gorakhpur towards Muzaffarpur and the north

**By water:** Boats on the Ganga at Varanasi — the standard way to see the ghats, and still a working crossing, Ganga ferries at Buxar, Ballia and the diara villages, National Waterway 1, with a freight terminal at Varanasi

**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.

## The small things

### A region with an overseas half
Between 1834 and 1917 hundreds of thousands of people left these districts under indenture. Their descendants are a large share of the populations of Mauritius, Fiji, Trinidad, Guyana and Suriname, and Bhojpuri-derived languages are spoken there daily. The word they used for themselves, girmitiya, is a Bhojpuri rendering of "agreement".

### Geet-gawai, recognised by UNESCO
The Bhojpuri wedding song-and-dance tradition of Mauritius, geet-gawai, was inscribed on UNESCO's Intangible Cultural Heritage list in 2016 — a Bhojpur village form protected as the heritage of another country, two thousand kilometres of ocean away.

### The festival with no priest
Chhath requires no temple, no image and no officiant. The devotee stands in the water and makes the offering herself, after a fast that includes a full day without water. It is kept most strictly by women, and it is the one occasion for which the region's migrants return regardless of cost.

### A play about leaving, performed by people who left
Bhikhari Thakur's Bidesiya is about a man who goes to Calcutta for work and the wife he abandons. Its performers were themselves labourers, its audiences were the families of migrants, and it is still staged in the same villages a century later.

### Thirty-one nights, no microphone
The Ramnagar Ramlila runs for a month across the town, with permanent locations standing in for Ayodhya, Lanka and the forest. There is no amplification; the audience moves between sites on foot with lamps, and some follow the whole cycle every year of their lives.

### The town where Kabir went to die
Popular belief held that death at Kashi granted liberation and death at Maghar denied it. Kabir moved to Maghar to die, to refute the idea. His followers then quarrelled over the body, and today a samadhi and a mazar stand a few metres apart in the same compound.

### Turn the sari over
In genuine kadhua Banarasi weaving each motif is worked with its own needle, so there are no long threads floating across the reverse. A power-loom or fekua sari has them. It is the single most useful thing to know before buying one.

### Holi with the ashes of the dead
At Manikarnika, a few days before Holi, ash from the cremation pyres is thrown like colour, on the reasoning that Shiva plays Holi with the dead after the living have finished. Cremations continue during it.

### Ash and silk in the same city
Varanasi's two largest hereditary trades are cremation, run by the Dom families who hold the fire at Manikarnika, and silk weaving, run largely by Muslim Ansari families. The city that is famous for its temples is economically organised around neither of them.

### The stone that carries the national emblem
The Ashokan lion capital at Sarnath — the emblem of the Republic of India — was carved from Chunar sandstone quarried thirty kilometres upriver, on a spur where the quarries are still worked.

## Cross-border corridors

### Girmitiya Corridor (crosses an international border)
Spans: Bihar, Uttar Pradesh

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.

Divergence: 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.

### Chhath Corridor (crosses an international border)
Spans: Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Jharkhand, Delhi, Maharashtra, West Bengal

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.

Divergence: 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.

### Banarasi Silk Trade
Spans: Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu

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.

Divergence: 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 and Nirgun Corridor
Spans: Uttar Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Bihar, Punjab

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.

Divergence: 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.

### Nath Sampraday Corridor (crosses an international border)
Spans: Uttar Pradesh, Nepal, Rajasthan, Punjab, Maharashtra

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.

Divergence: 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.

### Ganga Labour Corridor
Spans: Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal, Maharashtra, Delhi, Punjab

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.

Divergence: 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.

## Sources

- [Uttar Pradesh Tourism — official portal](https://uptourism.gov.in/)
- [Bihar Tourism — official portal](https://www.bihartourism.gov.in/)
- [UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage — Bhojpuri folk songs in Mauritius, Geet-Gawai](https://ich.unesco.org/en/RL/bhojpuri-folk-songs-in-mauritius-geet-gawai-01178)
- [Geographical Indications Registry, India — registered GI list](https://ipindia.gov.in/registered-gls.htm)
- [Archaeological Survey of India — Sarnath](https://asi.nic.in/)
- [Census of India 2011 — language tables](https://censusindia.gov.in/)

_Last reviewed 2026-08-30._