A state named for monasteries where the Buddha woke
Bihar, in eastern India, is the country's second most populous state, split west to east by the Ganges between Nepal and Jharkhand. Its name comes from vihāra, a Buddhist monastery: here, tradition holds, the Buddha reached enlightenment at Bodh Gaya, and Nalanda drew scholars from across Asia.
It covers 94,163 square kilometres, 12th among Indian states by area, and is landlocked, bordered by Uttar Pradesh, Nepal, West Bengal and Jharkhand. The Ganges divides its fertile plain into unequal northern and southern halves. Hindi and Urdu are official, while most people natively speak Maithili, Magahi or Bhojpuri. Since the late 1970s the state has trailed most others in development, which scholars tie to central policies such as freight equalisation and to the British Permanent Settlement of 1793.
Chirand, on the Ganges in Saran district, has Neolithic remains from about 2500 to 1345 BCE. In the late Vedic period the Videha Kingdom of Mithila, whose kings were called Janakas, ranked among South Asia's major centres, and the Vajjika League, based at Vaishali, had a republican government. From 684 BCE the Haryanka dynasty governed Magadha out of Rajgir, and Ajatashatru founded Pataliputra, modern Patna, later capital of Chandragupta Maurya's empire from 321 BCE and birthplace of Ashoka.
The Gupta Empire, also born in Magadha, is remembered as India's golden age in science, mathematics and philosophy. From the fifth to the thirteenth century, thinkers such as Śāntarakṣita and Kamalaśīla studied or taught at Nalanda and Vikramashila, until Bakhtiyar Khalji's invasion destroyed both along with many monasteries. Sasaram became the first capital of Sher Shah Suri's Sur Empire. After the Battle of Buxar in 1764, the East India Company won tax rights over Bihar, which stayed in the Bengal Presidency until 1912.
In April 1917 Mahatma Gandhi came to Champaran to take up the cause of peasants exploited by European indigo planters, launching the Champaran Satyagraha. Swami Sahajanand Saraswati founded the Bihar Provincial Kisan Sabha in 1929, a peasant movement that grew into the All India Kisan Sabha in 1936. After independence, failed land reform fed violent conflict between landless labourers and landed castes, including a caste-shaped Naxalite insurgency, and in 1990 Lalu Prasad Yadav became chief minister.
Source: Bihar
