Janakpur and Mithila

Janakpur is in the eastern Terai, twenty-odd kilometres from the Indian border, and it does not feel like the rest of Nepal. The language on the street is Maithili, the food is different, the plains go flat to the horizon, and the town is built around a temple that draws hundreds of thousands of pilgrims.

This is Mithila: an old cultural region straddling the border, with its own script, its own literature and one of the most distinctive folk painting traditions in South Asia.

Janaki Mandir

The reason most people come. A large white marble temple in a mixed Rajput and Mughal style, three storeys, sixty rooms, finished in 1910 and paid for by a queen from Tikamgarh in central India, which is why it is also called Naulakha, after the nine lakh rupees it is said to have cost.

It stands where Sita, in the Ramayana, was found and raised, and where she married Ram. For a very large number of people this is not mythology at a distance; it is the specific place, and the temple is busy from before dawn.

Non-Hindus can enter the courtyard and the outer areas. Shoes off, cover shoulders and knees, and the inner sanctum has restrictions that change and are best asked about at the gate rather than assumed.

Ram Mandir and the Vivah Mandap, where the marriage is commemorated, are a short walk away.

The ponds

Janakpur has dozens of sacred ponds, sagar and kunda, and they organise the town. Dhanush Sagar and Ganga Sagar, next to the Janaki Mandir, are the two central ones, with steps down to the water, bathers at dawn, and rows of shrines around the edge. Sitting on the steps early in the morning is the best free hour in the town.

Vivah Panchami

In November or December, the marriage of Ram and Sita is re-enacted over several days, with a procession bringing the groom’s party from Ayodhya in India. The town fills with pilgrims well beyond its capacity to house them and the atmosphere is enormous.

If you want to see it, book far ahead and accept that accommodation will be poor. If you want a quiet visit, come at any other time.

Mithila painting

The tradition is domestic and it is women’s work: line drawings in natural pigment on the mud walls and floors of houses, made for weddings and festivals, with a fixed vocabulary of fish, peacocks, lotuses, elephants, the sun, and Ram and Sita. Faces are shown in profile with one very large eye.

It moved onto paper in the twentieth century and became an income. Around Janakpur there are women’s cooperatives where the painting is done, sold and taught, and visiting one is straightforward to arrange. The work is signed by the individual painter and the good pieces are not cheap.

Buy at the source. The same images on the roadside are printed or copied and the money goes nowhere near the women who developed the style.

Some villages in the surrounding countryside still paint their house walls. That is worth a half day with someone who knows which ones.

Practical things

• The heat. April to June is brutal on the plains and the monsoon brings flooding to this district most years.
• Winter fog grounds flights into Janakpur regularly between mid-December and mid-January. Build slack into any onward connection.
• The railway to Jaynagar in India runs from here and is one of the few passenger lines in Nepal.
• Accommodation is basic and geared to pilgrims rather than to foreign visitors. Expect simple rooms and vegetarian food near the temple.
• Very little English. Hindi will get you further than English will, and Maithili further still.