Biratnagar, capital of Nepal’s Koshi Province and headquarters of Morang district, is the great city of the eastern Tarai — long called Nepal’s industrial capital for the jute, sugar and textile mills that grew up beside the Indian border at Jogbani. It has been a cradle of Nepali politics, the home town of several prime ministers and a launch-point of the democratic movements of the twentieth century.
It lies in the Koshi belt where Maithili shades into the eastern Tarai’s mix of tongues — part of the wider Mithila cultural sphere that the region’s festivals and kinship ties still bind to the plains of Bihar.