This part of India(1), in the northeast of the main body of the nation, includes 174 thousand square kilometers. In the north is the Ganga(2) River plain; south of that are plateaus and low mountains.
The Ganga flows across Bihar(3) from west to east, receiving the Gandak and--in multi-threads--the Kosi on its left, and the Son on its right. A set of north to south hills separates the river plain from its delta in Bangla State and beyond.
The southern highlands include the Hazaribag Plateau in their north, which rises to nearly 1,400 meters; the Ranchi Plateau(4) in the middle, and part of the Garhjat Hills, which staddle the Jharkand-Orissa border. The Damodar River valley cuts between the Hazaribag and Ranchi plateaus, and the Subarnarekha River between the Ranchi Plateau and the Garhjat Hills. The Brahmani River begins in the Ranchi Plateau and slips into Orissa west of the Garhjat Hills.
While some of the northern rivers are nearly lake-width, the largest lake-shaped bodies of water are all reservoirs, many of them on the Damodar system, and one on the Mor, one of the many rivers that flow from eastern Bihar into the Ganga's delta.
In 2007, 119 million people live here. There is no majority language, but perhaps eight in ten speak one of the Bihari languages(5). These are Bhojpuri in the west, Maithili in the north and Magahi in the plain's center. The next most important language is Urdu, the Moslem's form of Hindi(6); about one in ten speak it. The remaining six percent speak a miscellany of languages.
As to religion, 17 in 20 are Hindus, more than one in ten Moslems, and the rest a miscellany.
The two state capitals, Patna and Ranchi, are two of the four cities with over a million people. The others are Dhanbad and Jamshedpur in Jharkand.
Prior to the arrival on Indo-Aryans, the area was populated by speakers of Munda and Dravidian languages. There are still a small number of speakers. The Munda religion today probably preserves old elements. There is a pair of key gods (Singbonga and Haram in Mundari) and many natural and ancestral spirits, some good and some bad. There are usually two practitioners in each village, one specializing in ritual and one dealing more with divination and illness. The latter often sacrifice animals as a form of doctoring. People are thought to have two souls, one that becomes an ancestral spirit and another that is reincarnated in an agnatic descendent.
Locally are important places of what were the new religions of India, such as cave monasteries of the Ajivikas; the place of death of the Jain leader, Mahavira, and the location where the Buddha gained enlightenment.
By the beginning of the first millenium C.E., the Ajivika religion was gone and the area had a mixture of Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism. The Sakas and Kusanas, Iranian groups that conquered the western part of the Bihari plains in the early first millenium C.E., did not change this mix, which persisted into the second millenium.
Islam in India Prakits and Hindinorth
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(1) Also called, in transliteration, Bharat.
(2) Also called the Ganges in English.
(3) Sometimes spelled Behar.
(4) This plateau is part of a larger geomorphic unit: the Chotanagpur Plateau.
(5) Most speakers of these languages feel that they speak Hindi, and so does the national government. The literary traditions in the local spoken forms are weak or ambivalent. Some outsiders treat the group as a language. Because the government lumps in these languages with Hindi, the eight in ten figure is approximate; the "Hindi" total is 81% (1991). No reliable break-out among the three languages could exist. Speakers self-identification is influenced by non-linguistic considerations, and the entire plain consists of a dialect continuum, where any boundaries are arbitrary. Were I to attempt a split, I would very arbitrarily say that about one-third of Bhojpuri speakers live here, with most of the rest in Uttar Pradesh. Using that and relative numbers in Ethnologue.com (accessed 2/5/2007), I come up with Bhojpuri, 18% (including Sadri); Maithili, 39% and Magahi, 23%, again assuming a Bihari group total of 80%. Sadri (or Shadri, Nagpuria, Sadan, or Sadani) is sometimes considered a distinct language from Bhojpuri.
(6) The government and many others, including most speakers, treat this as a separate language from Hindi. It is, however, mutually intelligible with it, although it is written with a different script.