Jhanjharpur

Jhanjharpur is now the place of a melagne of people who although pretend to be different , but are all alike in habits. For example you will find in the villages of jhanjharpur, people defecating along the road side, spitting anywhere they like and a majority of them beating their wives for petty stuffs. There is one community ,though, which is contrastingly different among them - they are the shotriya brahmins of madhubani. They have developed a unique system of cultural elegance, which, though great, is confined to their own group and whose one of important sustaining principle is to condescend on others. Its inherent rustic nature is visible for all to see yet the egoist maithils cant help cripping about their antiquated and oblique culture. Understanding these people will lead to nothing else than frustration.

This is the contemporary situation of jhanjharpur region but it has not always been like this, not because people were different before but because population was less, hence entropy was less. However the topography of this place is beautiful and the land is immensely fertile which is the reason it is still surviving without any financial and economic structure. It is located on the foothills of the Himalayas, the impact is visible in its climate. If you walk straight from this place towards north on the globe , you will reach Mt. Everest.The place receives plenty of rainfall due to its geographical position, and is embedded with many local rivers almost one through every village , some of which are rain fed.Yet the locals don't derive any significant benefit out of it due to absence of a planned irrigation structure, as a result the whole of this region gets flooded every alternate year.

The language spoken in this region is Maithili hence the people are called maithil (after the language).The irony of the situation is that the pride(if any) associated with being called a maithil, has no significance for the the lower cast people and a lot of them don't seem to be even aware of this epithet. The gloomy faces of the poor say it all who until recent past struggled to make one meal a day for they were subjugated to the level of insignificant and their existence made precarious by the upper castes.A significant section of people were always kept deprived to sub human levels with the help of state and a classical system of slavery where people were free to choose between death and selling their labor at a price already fixed. Their houses were(and still are) located on the fringes of the villages as their contact or even pass by touch would dirty them to sprinkling stored water of Ganges. Out of such exploitation of human beings, a section of people thrived in certain pockets of Jhanjharpur. They savored pursuit of philosophy and kept themselves oblivious to the exploitation of the servitude.

For thinking minds to blossom, for arts and sciences to flourish, the first condition necessary is a settled society providing security and leisure. A rich culture is impossible with a community of nomads where people struggle for life and die of privation. Helped by natural conditions, and provided with the intellectual scope to think out the implications of things, the people of mithila achieved great advancement in natural sciences, medicine,arts and not to mention the 'Philosophy'(दर्शन ) Today, the people of mithila have remained nomads, in the acute sense of the word, only united in conscience with the fragile 'Jha' tail. The maithil nomadism , which eventually culminates as registered forum of villegers from specific villages, working most often as financial outfits, can be located in different parts of the country. This is more so because of our poverty of character, to live more perfectly in the spirit during the times of eclipse.

Lalganj, sarisab and the catchment villages of this region have been the land of great thinkers of the nyaya and other philosophical traditions in indian philosophy. It is not exactly known as to when the initial inhabitants settled here, primarily because of their indifference to historiography yet through stories it can be derived that the initial settlers were the brahmins of jha(shotriya) descent who acquired the place from an itinerary tribe of dancers (called 'नट.).As the time progressed , the other smaller hindu castes, who found easy employment on the lands of the Jha's, including other brahmins of of lower descent, settled. Later,some shotriya brahmins of Mishra descent ,who were generally academicians ,were respectfully inhabited on this land by the Jha's.It can established from the fact that till recent past , the Mishra's had meager or no land while the Jha's prospered primarily because of their connection with the Raj Darbhanga. This historical reduction of lalganj has wide coloquial streaks for the lack of any documented history ,however should not be regarded as apocryphal for it has travelled through the filter of scrutiny. The source for this derivation might be obscure but not oblique.

The maithils today are either those who are heavy occupied with the hangover of middle-class elitism, or either those who somehow manage to scrap a living and feel content with whatever meager resources. Apart from these two , there are also those who spend their life eating the produce of their land acquiring new lands with the money they get from the harvest and selling the land when they want hard cash.Or those who rapidly sprint towards poverty by selling whatever they have to fulfil basic requirements, because of their popular restraint of physical