Janakpur

Janakpur's identity rests on the Ramayana. Hindu tradition places here the capital of Videha, the kingdom of King Janaka, and makes it the home of his daughter Sita and the setting of the contest in which Rama strung and broke Shiva's bow to win her hand. The region, Mithila, was a centre of learning in the first millennium BCE, associated with the philosophical debates recorded in the Upanishads and later with Sanskrit and Maithili scholarship under the Karnat and Oiniwar rulers of Mithila.

No archaeological evidence has been found for an ancient city here: accounts from ascetics, pandits and bards place the founding of Janakpur in the early 18th century, after saints of the Ramanandi and other orders identified the site with Janaka's city. The temples and tanks that define the city largely date from that time onwards, and until the 1950s Janakpur was a cluster of hamlets working land held by the monasteries. Its best-known building, the Janaki Mandir, was completed in 1910 with money given by Vrisha Bhanu, queen of Orchha in central India, a great temple of stone and marble whose domes and arcades belong to north India rather than to Nepal.

Under Nepal's kings the town was a district centre in a region whose trade, language and family ties ran south into Bihar. A narrow-gauge railway to Jaynagar, opened in 1937 to carry freight and later passengers, connected it to the Indian network. After 2008 the Madhesi movements pressed for representation and provincial autonomy for the plains; the 2015 constitution created a province of the central plains, and in January 2022 its assembly adopted the name Madhesh and declared Janakpur the capital. The railway, closed in 2014 for conversion to broad gauge, reopened in 2022.

Janakpur is the cultural capital of Mithila, and Maithili — a language with its own literature, script tradition and a poetic canon running back to the poet Vidyapati — is what people speak at home and in the market. Nepali is the language of government and school, Hindi widely understood, and the border with Bihar is a line on a map rather than a cultural boundary.

Its best-known art form is Mithila painting, made by women who traditionally decorated the walls and floors of houses for weddings and festivals with figures of gods, fish, peacocks, lotuses and geometric borders in bright natural colours. From the 1960s the paintings moved onto paper and cloth for sale, and workshops and cooperatives around Janakpur have given many women an income and a public voice; the style is known internationally, and is shared with Madhubani in India.

Religion is the city's daily business. Sadhus in the orange of the Ramanandi order, pilgrim groups from India, temple musicians and priests keep the temples busy year round, and the ritual calendar peaks at Vivaha Panchami, when the marriage of Rama and Sita is re-enacted and a groom's procession arrives from Ayodhya. Chhath draws whole neighbourhoods to the ponds before dawn. Social life remains conservative: caste and community matter in marriage, dowry practices are a live public argument, and women in the older quarters are often seen in sarees with a covered head, even as the city's colleges fill with students in jeans.

About 195,000 people live in Janakpur, which has been the capital of Madhesh Province since 2022, giving it provincial ministries, offices and the politics that come with them. The surrounding Dhanusha district is flat, intensively farmed land growing rice, wheat, sugarcane, mustard and pulses, and much of the city's trade is in agricultural produce, cloth, hardware and religious goods.

The other pillars of the economy are pilgrimage, which supports lodges, priests, stalls and transport, and migration: large numbers of young men from the district work in India, the Gulf states and Malaysia, and the money they send back pays for houses, schooling and weddings. There is little industry beyond food processing and small workshops, and youth unemployment is a constant subject.

The day begins early, with temple bells, tea shops opening before sunrise and vegetables coming in from the villages by cycle and cart. Heat empties the streets in the middle of the day from April onwards, and the evening brings people back out to the pond steps and the bazaar. Rickshaws thread between motorbikes, cattle and stalls; power cuts and water supply remain unreliable in parts of the city; and monsoon flooding regularly puts low-lying wards under water. Cross-border movement to Jaynagar for shopping, medical care and family visits is routine.

Janakpur eats as Mithila does, which is to say close to the food of Bihar across the border. The everyday meal is rice with daal, a vegetable curry cooked in pungent mustard oil, greens such as saag, and a sour pickle, often with fried bari, small dried lentil dumplings, and a piece of river fish, which Maithil Brahmins eat and which is regarded as auspicious at weddings.

Litti chokha is the dish visitors are most often told to try: balls of wheat dough stuffed with roasted gram flour and spices, baked over coals and crushed with a mash of roasted aubergine, tomato and potato. Chura, beaten rice, is eaten with curd and jaggery, and at Chhath households make thekua, a hard, sweet, deep-fried wheat biscuit offered to the sun. Kadhi bari, dumplings in a spiced yoghurt gravy, and tarua, vegetables fried in gram-flour batter, appear at feasts.

Sweets carry much of the city's reputation, because pilgrims buy them as offerings and as gifts to take home: peda made from thickened milk, khurma, laddu, and curd set in unglazed clay pots. Stalls around the temple square sell samosas, jalebi, chaat and puffed-rice mixtures through the day, with sweet, milky tea, and sugarcane juice and green coconut appear on carts in the hot months. Mangoes and litchis from the surrounding orchards come in from May.