मिथिला — जिसे मिथिलांचल या तिरहुत भी कहते हैं — भारत के उत्तर बिहार और नेपाल के मधेश मैदानों तक फैला एक प्राचीन सांस्कृतिक क्षेत्र है। यह सीता की भूमि, मैथिली एवं तिरहुता लिपि का उद्गम, और मधुबनी चित्रकला का घर है।
Ahilya Asthan at Ahiyari near Darbhanga marks the spot where, in the Ramayana, Rama is said to have freed the sage's wife Ahalya from her curse of stone.
The world first noticed Madhubani painting after the 1934 Bihar earthquake, when the British officer William Archer saw the wall-art inside cracked-open Maithil homes.
Chhath is one of the few festivals on earth that worships the setting sun before the rising one — the first arghya is offered to the dusk sun, the second to dawn.
Darbhanga got its own airport only in 2020 — and it quickly became one of India's busiest regional airports, ending the Mithila heartland's long isolation by air.
Mithila's favourite folk hero is Gonu Jha, a witty courtier of the Darbhanga court whose trickster tales — outsmarting kings and misers — are the region's Birbal.
On Kojagara, the full-moon night of Ashwin, a Maithil bride's family sends the new groom a 'bhaar' of makhana, paan and sweets — a custom traced back to Janaka and Rama.
The Kosi river is called the 'Sorrow of Bihar' — it has shifted its course over 100 km westward in two centuries, building one of the world's largest inland alluvial fans.
In 2025 India announced a Makhana Board based in Bihar to organise the fox-nut economy — a first for a crop grown almost entirely in the ponds of Mithila.
Maithil weddings are traditionally matched through the Panji genealogical records rather than horoscopes — and the Kohbar painting is central to the rite.
Raja Salhesh, a warrior-hero worshipped especially by Mithila's Dusadh community, has open-air shrines (gahvar) and a whole cycle of folk theatre devoted to him.
In the festival of Sama-Chakeva, sisters mould clay birds and sing for their brothers' long life for days after Diwali — a folk rite found almost only in Mithila.
At Saurath in Madhubani, families once gathered each year at the 'Sabha Gachhi' to arrange marriages — a centuries-old marriage market where Panji genealogists checked that bride and groom were not kin.
Simraungadh, capital of the medieval Karnat kings, was so large that its ruins now lie across the modern India–Nepal border, in both countries at once.
Sita's name means 'furrow': legend says King Janaka found her in a furrow while ceremonially ploughing the earth of Mithila, making her a literal daughter of the soil.
Madhubani art began on mud walls and floors — the kohbar painted in a bride's chamber and the aripan drawn on the ground — and only moved onto paper for sale in the late 1960s.
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