The wild side of Bihar.
Tigers, rivers and monsoon forests inside Valmiki Tiger Reserve.
Mention Bihar and “forest” in the same sentence and most people will politely wait for the punchline. It never comes. In the far north-west of the state, hugging the Nepal border, sits Valmiki — Bihar’s only tiger reserve, and one of India’s least visited.
The reserve is 900 square kilometres of sal groves, savannah grassland and the Gandak river bending into oxbow lakes. Leopards. Sloth bears. Barking deer. Fishing cats. The last few tigers in a landscape that also holds the last few Tharu villages.
Locals will point out that Valmiki is named after the poet who wrote the Ramayana — tradition places his hermitage inside this forest. So a state everyone associates with plains and floods is also, quietly, the last stretch of terai before the Himalayas begin.
“A state everyone associates with plains and floods — quietly the last terai before the Himalayas.”
More dispatches.
HistoryThe university the world once came to.
Long before modern campuses, scholars travelled across Asia to study at Nalanda.
Hidden BiharThese caves are more than 2,000 years old.
Polished into raw granite hills, older than most empires you have read about.
CultureWhen walls became a canvas.
Generations of women painted stories on mud walls — long before galleries noticed.