Bhojpuri

The Bhojpuri people live in the Bhojpur and Purvanchal country of the middle Ganges, around Arrah, Sasaram and Varanasi, where eastern Uttar Pradesh meets western Bihar. Their language, Bhojpuri, is an Eastern Indo-Aryan tongue of the Bihari group, descended from Magadhi Prakrit and written in Devanagari and Kaithi scripts; its folk epics, above all the Lorikayan, took shape between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries.

The region takes its name from Bhojpur, the seat of the Ujjainiya Parmar Rajputs, who claim descent from King Bhoja of Ujjain and in the fourteenth century under Hunkar Singh drove the Chero rulers out of Shahabad. The Ujjainiyas then fought the Jaunpur Sultanate, founded in 1394, for more than a hundred years from their forest strongholds.

Saints such as Kabir preached in Bhojpuri between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries. Sher Shah Suri, founder of the Sur Empire in 1540, was born at Sasaram, and the word Bhojpuri itself is first recorded in 1789.