Gulariya

This corner of the western Terai was forest and grassland for most of its history, worked by Tharu communities who farmed clearings along the rivers and had a long resistance to malaria, which kept outsiders away. Politically it changed hands twice in the 19th century: the far-western plains were ceded to British India after the war of 1814–16, and a block of districts including Bardiya was returned to Nepal in 1860 as a reward for help during the Indian Rebellion of 1857. The returned territory became known as the Naya Muluk, the "new country", and the state granted large holdings in it to landlords from the hills.

The decisive change came in the middle of the 20th century, when malaria control opened the Terai to settlement. Families moved down from the hills in large numbers, forest was cleared for rice and sugarcane, and market towns grew at the road junctions. Gulariya, near the southern border, became the administrative centre of Bardiya district, gathering offices, a court, a hospital, schools and a bus park, and its bazaar served both the new farms and the older Tharu villages.

The last fifty years have been harder than the growth suggests. Many Tharu families lost land to incoming owners and were bound into kamaiya bonded labour, a system the government abolished in 2000, leaving thousands of freed households needing land and work. Bardiya was among the districts worst affected by the Maoist insurgency of 1996–2006 and has one of the country's highest numbers of unresolved wartime disappearances. Floods on the Karnali and Babai have repeatedly damaged villages and roads. Alongside this, the wildlife reserve gazetted to the north-west in 1976, and made a national park in 1988, has turned the district into a destination for wildlife travel.

Bardiya is one of the strongholds of Tharu culture. The Dangaura Tharu, who moved into the district from the Dang valley, keep their own language, dress and ritual year, and their villages of long mud-walled houses with steep thatched roofs, often painted around the doors, are the characteristic landscape between the town and the park. Maghi in mid-January is their new year and the biggest festival of the western Terai, a time for feasting, dancing and village meetings that choose the headmen who organise irrigation, paths and communal work for the year to come.

The town itself is mixed. Hill migrants brought Nepali, the festivals of Dashain and Tihar and the caste patterns of the middle hills; Awadhi-speaking families and a Muslim community trade in the bazaar; and proximity to Uttar Pradesh shapes music, film-watching, clothing and food. Holi and Chhath, the Terai festival honouring the sun by river and pond, are both observed here.

Manners are those of the plains: greetings with palms together, shoes left at the door, modest dress, and hospitality offered as tea first. Shamanic healers, the gurau, still have a role in Tharu villages alongside clinics. Visitors are welcomed with real curiosity in a district that sees few of them outside the park lodges, but photographing people, houses and rituals without asking is resented.

About 68,000 people live in Gulariya municipality, most of them in farming wards rather than the bazaar itself, and the district around it is overwhelmingly rural. The town works as Bardiya's service centre: district administration, courts, banks, the hospital, secondary schools and a campus, and the market where villages buy and sell.

Agriculture carries the economy — rice above all, with wheat, mustard, lentils, sugarcane and vegetables, and buffalo, goats and poultry. Landholdings are small and many households depend on labour on other people's fields. Remittances from work in India and the Gulf are a mainstay, and seasonal migration across the open border is a normal part of the year. Tourism reaches only the western edge of the district, where lodges, guides, drivers and homestays around Thakurdwara employ a growing number of families.

The day starts before dawn and pauses in the afternoon heat; the bazaar is busiest early in the morning and again after five. Power cuts, dust, and the annual fear of flooding shape practical life, and winter fog can close the roads for hours. The issues people raise are land rights for freed kamaiya families, jobs for young people who would otherwise leave, river control, and the damage crop-raiding elephants and rhinos do to farms near the park.

Gulariya eats like the western Terai. Daal bhaat is the foundation: rice with lentils, a seasonal vegetable such as potato and cauliflower or mustard greens, and a chutney of chilli, tomato and mustard oil sharp enough to carry a whole plate. Roti and paratha appear at breakfast, and the influence of Uttar Pradesh across the border is everywhere in the frying pans — samosa, pakora, puri with potato curry, and jalebi coiled into hot syrup.

Tharu cooking is the district's distinctive tradition. Dhikri, dumplings of rice flour shaped by hand and steamed, are eaten with chutney and made in quantity at festivals; ghonghi, river snails simmered in a spiced broth and sucked from the shell, are a delicacy; and fish and crab from the rivers and paddy channels, crab chutney, and wild greens are village staples. Pork and duck appear at Maghi, and bagiya, steamed rice-and-lentil dumplings, are made for feasts.

Sweet shops sell milk-based barfi, rasbari and thick sweetened curd, and the drinks are tea boiled with milk and sugar, lassi and sugarcane juice in the hot months. Jaand, a home-brewed rice beer, and raksi, distilled from grain, are part of Tharu hospitality and festivals, though they are not generally sold in the bazaar.