Bihar

• 1. Introduction

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  Bihar, a state in eastern India, holds a name that traces back to a Sanskrit and Pali word for monastery. That word, vihara, speaks to something the source material makes plain: this land was once so dense with Buddhist monasteries that the entire region took its identity from them. The Buddha himself, according to Buddhist tradition, attained enlightenment here, at the Mahabodhi Temple in Bodh Gaya. Chandragupta Maurya founded India's first empire in Magadha, the territory at Bihar's heart. Patliputra, which the Mauryas built into their capital, stands today as Patna, still the seat of the state government.

  Yet by 2004, a major international publication described Bihar as a byword for the worst conditions in India, pointing to widespread poverty, corrupt officials, and a feudal caste order. How a place that gave the world Buddhism and the Mauryan Empire arrived at that description, and what happened next, is what the chapters ahead examine.

• 2. Where Empires Were Born

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  Chirand, on the northern bank of the Ganga River in Saran district, carries an archaeological record reaching back to the Neolithic age. Long before the great empires, the region that would become Bihar was already a crossroads of political experiment. The Vajjika League, established as a republic by the sixth century BCE, before the birth of Gautama Buddha in 563 BCE, is recognised as the first known republic in India. The head of state was elected from the rajas, a form of government whose existence predates most of what the ancient world tried.

  From that republican foundation, Magadha's ambitions grew. The Haryanka dynasty, founded in 684 BCE, ruled from the city of Rajgriha. Its king Ajatashatru founded Pataliputra, conquered the Vajjika League, and set in motion a tradition of centralised power that would peak with the Mauryas. The Mauryan Empire, originating from Magadha in 321 BCE, was founded by Chandragupta Maurya, who was born in Magadha itself. Emperor Ashoka, born in Pataliputra, is described by the source as among the most accomplished rulers in world history. His embrace of Buddhism turned what had been a regional religion into something carried across Asia by royal patronage.

  The Gupta Empire, which arose in Magadha in 240 CE, brought the period the source calls the Golden Age of India, covering science, mathematics, astronomy, commerce, religion, and philosophy. The reach of ideas developed in this territory was substantial: scholars from across Asia came to institutions like Nalanda and Vikramashila, two of the early Buddhist universities that grew here before the 13th century CE.

• 3. The Universities and Their Destruction

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  Nalanda Mahavihara, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, stands as the most ancient university of the Indian subcontinent. Its remains, from stupas and shrines to residential buildings and metal and stone art works, document an institution active from the third century BCE to the 13th century CE. Scholars including Kamalaśīla, Ratnākaraśānti, Śāntarakṣita, Abhayakaragupta, Udayana, and Gaṅgeśa worked or studied there between the fifth and 13th centuries.

  Vikramashila, founded in 783 CE, was the other great pillar of Buddhist learning in the region. The invasion led by Muhammad bin Bakhtiyar Khalji in the 12th century brought both universities down. The source records that many viharas were destroyed in this period. Historian D. N. Jha, however, suggests these events resulted from Buddhist-Brahmin skirmishes over religious supremacy rather than a single military campaign.

  Nalanda was established, according to the source, around 450 CE, and Odantapura around 550 CE. Together these three institutions formed a constellation of learning that drew students from Japan, Korea, China, and Central Asia. When Bakhtiyar Khilji's forces destroyed Nalanda and Vikramashila in 1200 CE, the flow of scholars that had sustained Bihar's intellectual reputation for centuries came to an end. The Khuda Bakhsh Oriental Library, established in 1891 by Sir Khan Bahadur Khuda Bakhsh during the later period of British rule, now holds more than five million items and represents a partial recovery of that tradition of preservation.

• 4. Land, Caste, and Conflict

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  After the Battle of Buxar in 1764, the British East India Company obtained the rights to administer and collect tax revenue for Bihar, Bengal, and Odisha. The Permanent Settlement of 1793, which the source identifies as one of the direct causes of Bihar's later developmental lag, locked in a landlord structure that would constrain the state for generations.

  The post-independence period intensified those pressures. Land reform laws passed by the Indian National Congress government in the 1950s were systematically undercut. Landed castes used political influence to obstruct redistribution. Rumela Sen, a lecturer at Columbia University, documents how upper-caste landlords used kinship ties to prevent the distribution of about 9,000 acres of land intended for the poor, even while the Zamindari abolition act of 1952 was on the books.

  In the Bhojpur district, the failure of land reform produced the first large-scale naxalism in Bihar's plains. Master Jagdish Mahto, a school teacher, led the initial armed struggle. Between 1950 and 2000, several massacres took place across the state. The landlords' response was the formation of caste-based private armies called senas. One of the most feared was the Ranvir Sena, which was involved in massacres of Dalits in Laxmanpur Bathe. The Dalit resistance was organised through the Indian People's Front and later the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Liberation.

  The year 1989-90 marked a shift. V. P. Singh's government implemented the Mandal Commission's recommendation, reserving 27% of seats in government jobs and educational institutions for members of Other Backward Classes. Political scientist Sanjay Kumar identifies the 1995 Bihar Legislative Assembly election as the moment when the caste divide was most visible not between Forward and Backward Castes, but between two rival groups of Backward Castes themselves, with Yadavs in one camp and Koeri and Kurmi communities in the other.

• 5. Economic Revival and Persistent Gaps

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  Bihar's gross state domestic product for the fiscal year 2024 was around 9,765.67 billion rupees, with a growth rate of 13.5% in the fiscal year 2024-25. That figure places it among the fastest-growing state economies in India. Nitish Kumar, who served as chief minister for 13 years between 2005 and 2020, built his platform around economic development, crime reduction, and social equality rather than caste divisions. Since 2010, properties of corrupt officials were confiscated and redeveloped into school buildings.

  The gap between growth and welfare remains wide. Bihar has only 50% of the sub-health centres, 60% of the primary health centres, and 9% of the community health centres required by national supply-to-population standards. The number of public hospital beds actually decreased between 2008 and 2015. For physicians and specialists, the shortfall reaches 75% according to Ministry of Health statistics. The state relies heavily on privatised hospitals and has the second-highest ratio among Indian states for private to public healthcare spending.

  In terms of per capita income, Patna records 1.85 lakh rupees, which is far below cities like Gurugram at 7.41 lakh, Mumbai at 6.43 lakh, and Hyderabad at 6.58 lakh. About 80% of Bihar's population is employed in agriculture, well above the national average, and the southern parts of the state endure annual droughts that affect paddy crops. Bihar is the fourth-largest producer of vegetables in India and the eighth-largest producer of fruits, with litchi among its signature agricultural products. In May 2022, a gold mine was found in Jamui district, accounting for more than 44% of the country's gold reserve at approximately 223 million tons. Bihar is also the principal holder of the country's pyrite reserves, possessing 95% of all known resources.

• 6. Art, Music, and Festival Life

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  Mithila painting, also called Madhubani art, has been practised primarily by women in the Mithila region and passed down generation to generation. Traditionally executed on the plastered walls of mud huts during festivals, births, marriages, and religious events, it depicts human beings and their relationships with nature, deities, celestial objects, and scenes from ancient epics. Famous Mithila painters named in the source include Smt Bharti Dayal, Mahasundari Devi, the late Ganga Devi, and Sita Devi.

  The Patna School of Painting, sometimes called Company Painting, flourished from the early 18th to the mid-20th century. Its practitioners were descendants of Hindu artisans from the Mughal painting tradition who fled persecution under Emperor Aurangzeb, finding refuge in Patna via Murshidabad. They expanded the subject matter from court scenes to bazaars, daily life, and ceremonies, working in watercolours on paper and on mica.

  Bismillah Khan, awarded the Bharat Ratna, is among the musicians Bihar has produced. The dhrupad tradition is maintained through gharanas at Darbhanga and Bettiah. Gaya is a distinct centre for the Tappa and Thumri varieties of classical music. Kumar Shyamanand Singh of the Banaili estate was considered so accomplished in classical vocal music that, as recorded by founding Sangeet Natak Academi secretary Gajendra Narayan Singh, the singer Pandit Jasraj was moved to tears after hearing him perform.

  The Sonepur Mela, held at the confluence of the Ganga and Gandak rivers, is Asia's largest cattle fair. Chhath Puja, a four-day festival of devotion to the Sun, brings all of Bihar to riverbanks, ponds, and lakes with fruit and thekuaa carried in bamboo baskets, a tradition that has spread with the Bihari diaspora to multiple countries. Mahavir Jayanti honours the 24th Tirthankara Mahavira, born in Vaishali around the sixth century BCE. Vaishali, as noted earlier, is in Mithila, the same region that gave its name to Mithila painting, that produced the Vajji republic, and that the source identifies as the birthplace of Sita of the Ramayana.

• 7. Learning From Ancient to Present

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  Patna University, established in 1917, is the seventh oldest university on the Indian subcontinent. Before it, under British rule, Patna College was established in 1839, and the institution now known as the National Institute of Technology Patna was founded as a survey training school in 1886 before becoming Bihar College of Engineering in 1932, making it the second oldest engineering college in India.

  Today Bihar is home to eight Institutes of National Importance, including IIT Patna, IIM Bodh Gaya, AIIMS Patna, and the NIT Patna. Nalanda International University was re-established in 2014 with investment from Japan, Korea, and China, a direct attempt to restore the international scholarly tradition that ended with Bakhtiyar Khilji's raids. The central government in 2015 also proposed the re-establishment of Vikramshila in Bhagalpur and designated 500 crore rupees for the effort.

  The National Employability Report of Engineering Graduates from 2014 placed graduates from Bihar in the top 25 per cent nationally and rated Bihar as one of the three top states for producing engineering graduates in terms of quality and employability. With Bihar's literacy rate growing to 79.8% by the 2023 caste survey from 61.18% in the 2011 Census, the trajectory of educational recovery has measurable speed behind it. The Bihar Startup Policy 2022-2027 backs this with a Startup Bihar Fund Trust holding an initial corpus of 500 crore rupees, targeting agritech, healthcare, edtech, and e-commerce as sectors of focus.