The Nepal Tarai, Rana rule, and the border to 1951

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border to 1951 Tarai as frontier and homeland The Nepal Tarai was never merely an empty frontier awaiting settlement from the hills. Forests, grasslands, wetlands, farms, market towns, pilgrimage centres, estates, and older settlements linked the Himalayan foothills to the Gangetic plain. Its history therefore has to begin with inhabited landscapes and competing claims, not with the administrative language of reclamation. State revenue, timber extraction, disease environments, transport, and cross-border trade changed the density and distribution of settlement over time. These processes affected long-established Tharu and other communities as well as Maithili-, Bhojpuri-, Awadhi-, Urdu-, and Nepali-speaking migrants and townspeople. “Tarai” names a changing ecological and administrative zone, not one timeless social population (Gaige 1975; Whelpton 2005). “Tarai” as an ecological and administrative category The word Tarai could describe lowland terrain, a revenue region, a forest belt, or a frontier of particular districts depending on date and document. Such usages overlap but are not identical. A nineteenth-century treaty clause, a Rana revenue order, a census table, and a modern provincial map therefore cannot be treated as interchangeable maps of the same space. This distinction also prevents the cultural geography of Mithila from being equated mechanically with every administrative tract of the Nepalese plains. Maithili cultural and linguistic networks were especially important in the eastern and central Tarai, while the wider Tarai also contained many other language and social fields. 420 Border before border Before the nineteenth-century treaty regime, routes, political influence, forests, estates, pilgrimage, and kinship crossed what later became an international frontier. The modern India–Nepal boundary is therefore indispensable for colonial and contemporary history but anachronistic when projected unchanged into the Karnata, Oiniwar, or early Shah periods. The frontier became progressively more consequential as treaties, surveys, customs posts, courts, land records, and police practices attached different legal effects to each side. Social crossing and formal sovereignty should be reconstructed together rather than forced into a choice between a “real” border and an “imaginary” one. The Anglo-Nepalese War and the Treaty of Sugauli The Treaty of Su