From malaria forest to rhino country
For centuries the Terai was a belt of sal forest and swamp that hill people called the Char Kose Jhadi, the forest four kos deep. Malaria made it deadly for outsiders, and it served as a natural wall between the hill kingdoms and the plains of India. The people who lived inside it were the Tharu, who farmed clearings, fished the rivers and built houses of mud-plastered reed. Medical studies later showed why they survived: malaria strikes Tharu about seven times less often than their neighbours, linked to thalassemia genes found in nearly all Tharu tested.
From the late 19th century Chitwan became the winter hunting ground of Nepal's rulers. Rana prime ministers set up grand camps for weeks at a time and hosted foreign royalty, including King George V in December 1911, when dozens of tigers and rhinos were shot. The forest stayed thick because few others could live in it. In 1950 Chitwan's forests and grasslands still covered more than 2,600 square kilometres and held about 800 rhinos. Tharu families lived on the forest's edges, working for the hunting camps and farming their clearings.
Then everything changed quickly. DDT spraying in the 1950s and 1960s cleared malaria, a resettlement programme brought thousands of families down from the hills, and by the end of the 1960s about 70 per cent of the jungle was gone and only 95 rhinos were left. The government sent out the Gaida Gasti, an armed rhino patrol, and gazetted Chitwan National Park, established in 1973. Tharu villages inside the new boundary were cleared, a loss many families still speak about. The rhinos came back: Nepal has since marked full years with no rhino poached at all.
East of Chitwan the story is older and written in stone and verse. From 1097 to 1324 the Karnata kings ruled Mithila from the fortified city of Simraungadh in today's Bara district, and the first known work of Maithili prose, the Varna Ratnakara, was written under them. Janakpur grew in the 18th century around the place pilgrims honour as Sita's birthplace, and in 1910 to 1911 Queen Vrisha Bhanu of Tikamgarh completed the Janaki Mandir there. Today Maithili, Bhojpuri, Tharu and Nepali are all spoken within a day's drive of each other.
