Janakpur: The City That Faces India, Not Kathmandu

The first thing that tells you where you are in Janakpur is the air. Not the dust, though there is plenty. It is that the wind comes from the south, from the Ganges plain, not from the mountains. Janakpur Nepal sits at seventy-eight metres above sea level in the middle of a flat, green, politically crowded country most travel coverage does not describe. The city is the capital of Madhesh Province and the second holiest site in the country after Pashupatinath, and the second is not a consolation. The Janaki Mandir holds the throne of Sita, wife of Ram, daughter of King Janak. Pilgrims have walked here for two thousand years, most of them from what is now Bihar, across a border that in practice does not exist. One traveller wrote after a first visit: "From India, visited Nepal (Janakpur) for first time and without a doubt one of the greatest experience of my life."

The Janaki Mandir is younger than you think

The temple at the centre of the city was built in 1911. That fact surprises people who arrive expecting something ancient. The site is ancient. The building is a little over a century old. It was commissioned by Brisabhanu Kunwar, queen of Tikamgarh in Madhya Pradesh, who paid nine hundred thousand rupees to build a three-storey palace-temple over the place her tradition told her was Sita's birthplace. The architecture is Mughal and Rajput. The marble is white. The courtyard is enormous. A visitor put it plainly: "The temple looks beautiful in the late evening with all the lights lit up... The temple has a huge courtyard and it's fun to just sit there and feel the positivity."

What is older than the temple is the reason it is here. The Ramayana names King Janak's kingdom as Mithila, and Mithila, in the geography of the epic, is the plain on which the city sits. For most of its history there was no temple building. There was a swayambhu stone, a priestly lineage, a grove. The queen from Tikamgarh built the mandir over the idea. She did not invent the pilgrimage.

Why Janakpur belongs to two countries

If you want to understand Janakpur Nepal you have to accept that most of the worshippers in the courtyard are not Nepali. They are from Bihar, from Uttar Pradesh, from Madhya Pradesh, from Delhi. The temple's calendar is the north Indian Hindu calendar. Its priests chant in Sanskrit with a Maithili inflection. Its revenue in December runs on pilgrims who travelled overnight by bus from cities a thousand kilometres south.

The political geography makes this normal. In 2014, two prime ministers, one from each country, inaugurated a direct bus route connecting Janakpur to Ayodhya. An analyst wrote at the time that "the two prime ministers also launched a bus service from Janakpur, the alleged birthplace of goddess Sita to Ayodhya which is fabled to be the birthplace of Hindu god Ram." The word alleged is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Inside the tradition, nothing is alleged. The bus runs because the marriage runs.

What Mithila actually is

Mithila is not a district. It is not even a country. It is a cultural region that extends from the Kosi river in the east to the Gandak in the west, and from the foothills in the north to somewhere past Darbhanga in the south. About half of it sits in Nepal. About half of it sits in Bihar. The people on both sides speak Maithili, eat the same food, marry each other, attend each other's funerals, and understand the border as an administrative fact the older generation did not grow up with.

The language has around fifty million speakers. It has its own script, Tirhuta, although most writing is now in Devanagari. The painting tradition that carries the region's name is still practised by women on the outer walls of houses and on the inside of courtyards, usually at weddings, with pigments that in the past were mineral and vegetable and today are sometimes acrylic. The figures are flat, geometric, saturated. The subjects are Ram and Sita, fish, suns, gods, the occasional aeroplane.

The Border at Ground Level

The Birgunj-Raxaul crossing is eighty kilometres south of Janakpur. It is the largest land border between Nepal and India. Trucks queue there for hours in both directions. Sugarcane, cement, motorbikes, grain, textiles, people. Sugarcane from Terai families has crossed that border for three generations. The trade survived the 1989 blockade, barely, and continues today under conditions the older traders do not recognise.

The border is open in the sense that Nepalis and Indians do not need visas to cross. It is closed in the sense that commerce across it is taxed, tracked, sometimes halted. For most people along the Terai, the border is not a place you arrive at. It is a condition of your day. You have cousins on the other side. You send a child to school there. You buy petrol there when it is cheaper there. You come back. One visitor warned others online that "if you're not used to strong pollution, bring really good masks. It's super dusty and the city old and because of the geographic make up, car exhaust stays low." That is also a border condition. The haze over the Terai is continental. It belongs to the whole plain.

The city Kathmandu forgets

Kathmandu looks north. Janakpur looks south. That is not a metaphor. The capital's attention, its infrastructure, its media coverage, its policy-making weight have tilted towards the hills for as long as the nation-state has existed. The Terai provides a disproportionate share of the country's tax revenue, its grain, its industrial output, and its labour migration. In return it gets the federal government's late attention and uneven roads.

The resentment is not hidden. A resident on r/Nepal wrote, "Janakpur has huge potential like pashupatinath. But corruption eaten the whole province. Its basically bihar of Nepal." The phrase is meant to sting in the capital. It does not sting here, where the comparison to Bihar is accurate on food, language, political economy, and climate, and where being compared to Bihar is description, not insult. Another commenter in the same thread added, "Though it is true that the janakpur city is quite polluted and unmanaged but the vibe visiting there is next level due to the historical and cultural values it carries." Those two sentences hold most of the truth about the city. Both at once.

What Vivah Panchami looks like

Once a year, in late November or early December, the city holds the wedding again. Vivah Panchami is the annual celebration of the marriage of Ram and Sita, staged at the place the tradition says it happened. Pilgrims arrive by the hundred thousand, most of them from across the border. The main processional moves from the Janaki Mandir to the Ram Mandir, a smaller temple less than a kilometre away, and the figures of the bride and groom are carried through streets that have been swept and lit and hung with marigolds.

The other great festival here is Chhath, which is Madhesi more than it is pan-Hindu, and which most Nepali travel coverage misses entirely. "And the chhath celebration is somehow greatest there with lots of people visiting," one commenter wrote, which understates it. Chhath is four days of fasting, river ritual, and offerings to the sun at dawn and dusk, and the ponds around Janakpur fill with women in red and orange saris standing waist-deep in cold water. It is the most demanding festival in the Hindu calendar of the Terai. It is also the one that receives the least state funding.

What the city is asking for

Visitors leave with contradictory impressions, and both are accurate. One reviewer wrote, on the subject of what needed to change, "It needs to be well maintained, preserved and equipped with modern devises to uplift its existence. Cleanliness is a must and a well managed queue during worship hours are a must." The temple administration agrees. The provincial government agrees. The federal government has been saying some version of this for forty years. What the city gets from the state is not enough, and what the city gets from the pilgrim economy goes mostly to priests, hoteliers, and rickshaw unions, in that order.

Walk the lanes behind the mandir at five in the morning, before the crowds. Women are grinding spices on stone. Boys are feeding cows. A Mithila painting is half-finished on a wall, the sun drawn but not yet coloured. This is a city older than the country it belongs to, waking up the way it has woken up for a thousand mornings before this one, facing south, as it always has.