Anti-colonial politics in Mithila have to be read against the fact that most of the region was one enormous landed estate. The Darbhanga Raj sat inside the colonial order - legislative council, knighthoods, railway concession - and at the same time helped finance the early Congress, so the region produced patronage before it produced agitation. The sharper conflicts were agrarian: indigo in the Tirhut districts, and rent everywhere else. Organised nationalist activity arrived through Muzaffarpur and Begusarai rather than through Darbhanga, and two of the actions the region is best known for were carried out by young men who had come in from Bengal. The mass phase was 1942, and it was rural.
The Muzaffarpur bombing and its aftermath30 April 1908
Khudiram Bose and Prafulla Chaki, sent from Bengal to kill the magistrate Douglas Kingsford, threw a bomb at a carriage outside the Muzaffarpur club. Kingsford was not in it; two Englishwomen, Mrs and Miss Kennedy, were killed. Chaki died at Mokama station on 1 May while being pursued and Bose was arrested at Waini in Samastipur district.
Outcome: Bose was tried at Muzaffarpur and hanged there on 11 August 1908, at eighteen. The case, and the Alipore trial that followed in Calcutta, defined the first revolutionary decade in eastern India.
The indigo system in Tirhut19th century to 1917
Planters across Tirhut, including Darbhanga and Muzaffarpur, held cultivators to indigo contracts on a share of their holdings. The system was already breaking down commercially when Gandhi's enquiry into it opened in Champaran, immediately west of this region, in 1917.
Outcome: The Champaran Agrarian Act of 1918 ended the compulsory element; several of the Bihari lawyers who ran the enquiry were from Mithila.
The Garhpura salt satyagraha1930
The principal civil disobedience action in the region, at Garhpura in what is now Begusarai district, where volunteers made salt in defiance of the law and were beaten and arrested.
Outcome: Shri Krishna Sinha, injured during the arrests, was imprisoned for six months and then again during the wider civil disobedience campaign.
Quit India in TirhutAugust 1942
Following the arrests of 9 August, crowds across Muzaffarpur, Darbhanga and the Kosi districts cut rail and telegraph lines and took over police stations and post offices. At Minapur on 16 August a police station was seized and its officer-in-charge killed.
Outcome: The movement was suppressed by the end of the year. Jubba Sahni accepted responsibility for the Minapur action, was tried by a special court and hanged at Bhagalpur Central Jail on 11 March 1944.