What is Madhesi?

Madhesi (also spelled Madheshi) is the collective term for the communities native to or long settled in the Madhesh — the flat, fertile southern plains of Nepal that stretch along the border with India. "Madhesh" is the Nepali name for this lowland belt, which in geographic terms forms part of the Terai, the strip of plains south of the Siwalik (Chure) Hills. Madhesi people share strong cultural, linguistic, religious and familial ties with the adjoining Indian states of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, and are distinguished within Nepal by language, dress, cuisine and social custom from the Pahari (hill) communities of the country's mid-hills and mountains.

Rather than naming a single ethnic group, "Madhesi" is an umbrella identity covering a wide range of plains communities. It includes speakers of Maithili, Bhojpuri, Awadhi and Bajjika; numerous Hindu caste groups (Brahman, Kshatriya/Rajput, trading castes such as Bania, agricultural castes such as Kurmi and Yadav, and Madhesi Dalit communities); Terai Muslims, who make up the large majority of Nepal's Muslim population; and trading communities such as the Marwaris. The defining common threads are residence in the plains and a shared Indo-Gangetic cultural background, rather than descent from one ancestor or adherence to one language.

The term is best understood as both a geographic and a political-cultural label. As a geographic term it simply means "of the Madhesh" — of the plains. As a cultural-political identity it expresses a sense of common interest and shared grievance among plains-dwellers who have historically felt marginalised within a Nepali state long dominated by hill elites. Importantly, not every plains community accepts the label: the indigenous Tharu people, and Pahari communities who have migrated down into the Terai, generally do not identify as Madhesi, which has made the precise boundaries of the term a matter of ongoing debate.

The word Madhesh is generally traced to the Sanskrit madhya desh (मध्य देश), meaning "the middle country" — historically a central region of the Indian subcontinent. Applied to Nepal, the name came to denote the plains country between the high Himalaya to the north and the Indian plains to the south, with the inhabitants of that belt being called Madhesi.

As an everyday Nepali identity, the term is comparatively modern. From the mid-20th century, politicians in the Terai began using "Madhes" to mark out the distinct interests of plains-dwellers as against those of the hills. The label became a widely recognised name for Nepali citizens of Indo-Gangetic cultural background especially after 1990, the year Nepal restored multi-party democracy, when questions of identity, representation and inclusion moved to the centre of national politics. Before then, plains people were more often identified by their specific caste, community or language than by the single pan-Terai term Madhesi.

Human settlement of the Terai is ancient, but the modern Madhesi population was shaped heavily by migration and land policy over the last two and a half centuries. From the late 18th century the Shah rulers of Nepal promoted the clearing of Terai forests for farmland and offered incentives to draw cultivators from northern India, and immigration of Indian farmers and labourers was especially heavy during the Rana period (1846–1951). These settlers joined long-resident plains peoples such as the Tharus, Rajbanshis and Dhimals. The Nepal Citizenship Act of 1952 enabled many of these residents to obtain Nepali citizenship.

Today the heartland of the Madhesi population is Madhesh Province, established under the 2015 Constitution of Nepal initially as Province No. 2 and renamed Madhesh Province on 17 January 2022, with Janakpur as its capital. Covering roughly 9,661 km² — a small share of Nepal's land area — it is the country's smallest province by area yet, with a 2021-census population of about 6.1 million, the most densely populated province in Nepal. It comprises eight plains districts: Saptari, Siraha, Dhanusha, Mahottari, Sarlahi, Rautahat, Bara and Parsa. By language, Maithili is the most widely spoken in the province, followed by Bhojpuri and Bajjika; Hinduism is the majority religion, with a substantial Muslim minority. Madhesi communities, however, are not confined to this province alone and live across the Terai districts from the far west to the east.

From the mid-2000s the Madhesi identity became the focus of a major political movement demanding federalism, proportional representation, inclusive citizenship and an end to perceived discrimination against plains-dwellers in the bureaucracy, the Nepal Army and political life. The first Madhes Movement (Madhes Andolan) erupted in early 2007 after the interim constitution was felt to ignore demands for federal restructuring along identity lines; protests spread across the plains, dozens of people were killed, and the unrest produced agreements committing the state to federalism. Further agitation followed in 2008.

Tensions flared again with the promulgation of the new Constitution in September 2015. Many Madhesi and Tharu groups objected to the demarcation of the seven provinces — arguing the boundaries split the plains and diluted their representation — and to citizenship provisions seen as discriminatory toward families with cross-border marriages. The resulting protests in the Terai, met with a police crackdown, left dozens dead, and overlapped with a months-long disruption of trade across the India–Nepal border in 2015–16. The grievances have driven the rise of numerous Madhes-based parties (among them the Nepal Sadbhawana Party and the Madhesi Jana Adhikar Forum and their successors), and the question of Madhesi rights and representation remains a live issue in Nepali politics.

Madhesh vs Terai: the two are often used interchangeably, but they are not identical. "Terai" is a broad geographic term for the whole strip of plains running the length of southern Nepal, while "Madhesh" carries a cultural-political sense of the plains as the homeland of the Madhesi people and is also the formal name of one specific province. Hill communities who have settled in the Terai live in the Terai but are not Madhesi.

Madhesi vs Tharu: the Tharu are an indigenous people of the Terai with their own distinct language, culture and Adivasi/Janajati status, and they generally do not regard themselves as Madhesi; conflating the two is a frequent error and a politically sensitive one. Madhesi vs Pahari: Pahari ("of the hills") refers to the hill-origin communities — including the Khas-Arya groups historically dominant in the state — and is in many ways the contrasting category against which Madhesi identity is defined.

Madhesi vs Indian: because Madhesi communities share language, religion and kinship with Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, they have at times been wrongly dismissed as "Indian" or as recent migrants — a characterisation Madhesi activists reject, since the great majority are Nepali citizens whose families have lived in the country for generations. Finally, the Madhesi label spans many internal divisions of caste, religion and language (Maithil, Bhojpuri, Awadhi, Bajjika; Hindu and Muslim; high caste and Dalit), so it should be read as a coalition of plains identities rather than a single homogeneous community.