Bhojpur & Purvanchal · Middle & Lower Gangetic Plain
The small things
- A region with an overseas halfBetween 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 UNESCOThe 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 priestChhath 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 leftBhikhari 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 microphoneThe 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 diePopular 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 overIn 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 deadAt 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 cityVaranasi'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 emblemThe 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.
Small local details of Bhojpur & Purvanchal — customs, quirks and things that are not in any guidebook. (10)