The Food of the Old Terai — Rivers, Fields and Forests on the Terai Plate

A rice country shaped by water

The gazetteer is clear that rice was Kheri's main crop. It records 166,811 acres under rice, a total second only to neighbouring Gonda in the province ^{[1, p. 177]}.

In the northern pargana of Khairigarh, it says, the low hollows were either swamps or, where slightly higher, rice-fields ^{[1, p. 142]}. Rice grew on clay land that needed a shower before it could be ploughed, so a late monsoon shrank the area sown. If floodwater covered the plants' tops for more than a few days, the crop died ^{[1, p. 178]}. Wild rice, it adds, was common in all the jhils, the shallow lakes and marshes ^{[1, p. 178]}.

Farming here was a negotiation with water. The gazetteer notes that transplanting was almost unknown and that rice was grown "carelessly", by which it means without the intensive methods used elsewhere ^{[1, p. 178]}. Read today, the same detail suggests farmers who had learned not to invest heavily in fields the river might take.

The calendar followed the rains. Kharif crops, including rice, were sown from early June, or whenever the rains began, until the end of August, and ripened in three to four months. The late rice, jarhan, was cut in early November ^{[1, p. 180]}.

The insurance of millets

Alongside rice, the gazetteer gives remarkable prominence to kodo, a small, hardy millet. It calls kodo the principal kharif crop and the first to be cut, around late September ^{[1, p. 180]}.

Farmers often sowed rice and kodo together, the gazetteer explains, because rice needs damp ground and kodo dry. A drought would ruin the rice and two heavy rains would ruin the kodo, so planting both protected against an uncertain season ^{[1, p. 200]}. It is a precise record of a risk-spreading strategy, and it is worth remembering before anyone calls such farming primitive.

What people ate

The district account sketches ordinary diets, in the flat language of an official estimating famine relief:

• Grains of the poor. Kodo, jowar, bajra and sanwan (another small millet) are listed among the staple grains eaten by the people ^{[1, p. 206]}.
• Everyday meals. Poorer peasants are said to live mainly on cakes of kodo and jowar meal eaten with dal, with little wheat ^{[1, p. 209]}.
• Variety by the day. The diet rotated between grains, with rice on one day of a four-day cycle ^{[1, p. 207]}.
• A labourer's ration. A strong labourer was reckoned to eat about one and a half seers a day of kodo or sanwan, or of jowar, bajra or urd, together with about a seer of gram ^{[1, p. 207]}.
• New rice. Much of the peasants' food in season was new rice, which the gazetteer considered unwholesome unless carefully harvested ^{[1, p. 209]}.

These are a colonial administrator's generalisations, written to work out how much food a family needed to survive. They are not a description of a meal. Still, they make one thing plain. The everyday food of this country was built on millets and pulses as much as on rice, and wheat was a luxury for many households.

Sugar, trade and scarcity

Kheri was also cane country. The gazetteer says the district produced more sugarcane than any other, largely because of its closeness to the sugar market at Shahjahanpur. Cane was grown mainly in the southern and central parganas, and cultivators were often in debt to moneylenders against their crop ^{[1, pp. 178–179, 216]}.

Trade moved food in both directions. In 1873, kodo was exported to Bengal for the first time in living memory ^{[1, p. 211]}. Boats on the rivers brought Bengal rice and salt up from Patna ^{[1, p. 211]}.

That same year the monsoon failed. The gazetteer estimates that the northern parganas, including Khairigarh, received ten inches of rain or less, and the rice crop failed across the region ^{[1, p. 203]}. It records that relief distributions of rice drew crowds of hungry people, and that thousands died on the way ^{[1, p. 205]}. Any honest history of food in the Terai has to include scarcity as well as plenty.

Rivers and forests

The gazetteer lists the principal fish of the Kauriala, the river that today flows past Katarniaghat, as rohu, mahseer, mullet, a fish it calls "hill trout", and bichwa ^{[1, p. 138]}. It notes that the mahua tree, whose flowers are widely used elsewhere in India, grew wild in Kheri's forests. It says mahua was not then being distilled into spirit in Kheri, and it does not record any use of mahua as food ^{[1, p. 162]}.

Of the Tharu living in the grassland clearings of Khairigarh, the gazetteer says their staple crop was rice and that they distilled a liquor from it ^{[1, p. 143]}. Elsewhere it says the Tharu ate meat and fish ^{[1, p. 226]}. Beyond these few lines, the colonial record is close to silent on Tharu cooking.

What we cannot claim

It is tempting to fill that silence with dishes now served to visitors in Tharu villages in Nepal, or with the rich Awadhi cuisine of Lucknow. Neither should be presented as the historic food of Khairigarh without evidence.

Tharu communities are not one people with one cuisine. Practice differs between groups, between India and Nepal, between households and across generations. Documented ethnobotanical work on the Tharu of Kheri district exists, notably a 1981 study by the National Botanical Research Institute ^[2], and there are studies of Tharu plant use in Balrampur ^[3]. But we have not found a published, community-reviewed record of Tharu cooking in the Dudhwa area that we could responsibly summarise here.

For that reason this story offers no recipes. Instead, it ends with a glossary of what is documented, and with a recommendation: the right way to tell the story of Tharu food is with Tharu cooks, recorded with consent and credited by name.

Glossary of documented ingredients

• Rice (dhan). Kheri's main crop in 1877. The gazetteer mentions jarhan (late rice), karmand (described as the best quality, grown in small amounts in a few villages) and wild rice in the jhils ^{[1, pp. 178, 180]}.
• Kodo. A hardy millet; the principal early kharif crop, often sown mixed with rice ^{[1, pp. 180, 200]}.
• Sanwan. A small millet named among the staple grains of the poor ^{[1, pp. 206–207]}.
• Jowar and bajra. Sorghum and pearl millet, eaten as meal cakes ^{[1, pp. 206, 209]}.
• Urd and gram. Pulses in the labourer's ration ^{[1, p. 207]}.
• Barley. With rice, a main crop of Khairigarh pargana ^{[1, p. 145]}.
• Sugarcane and gur. Kheri's great cash crop; raw sugar (gur) was traded out of the district ^{[1, pp. 178–179]}.
• River fish. Rohu, mahseer, mullet, "hill trout" and bichwa from the Kauriala ^{[1, p. 138]}.
• Mahua. Grew wild in Kheri's forests; the gazetteer says it was not being distilled there at the time ^{[1, p. 162]}.

Why it matters

Food is where the Terai's ecology and its people meet. The mixed sowing of rice and kodo, the reliance on wild rice and fish, and the danger of a failed monsoon all come from the same floods, soils and forests that shape Dudhwa's wildlife. Understanding them makes the landscape legible as a home, not only a habitat.

What this story tells us about Dudhwa today

Farmland still presses against the edge of the forest, and the same river system still floods the lowlands each monsoon. Many of the region's people still farm the margins of a protected landscape. Their food knowledge is a living heritage, and it is better learned from them than reconstructed from colonial ledgers.

In closing

The old records give us the bones of the Terai's food: rice in the hollows, kodo on the rises, fish in the river, and the ever-present risk of a failed monsoon. The flesh of the story, the cooking, the seasons of the kitchen, the dishes made for festivals, belongs to the people who still live here, and is theirs to tell.