Tharu

The Tharu are the indigenous people of the Terai, the marshy forest belt along the southern foot of the Himalayas. The Persian chronicle Tabaqat-i Nasiri lists them among the inhabitants of the country between Gauda and Tibet in 1205, and Alberuni places them in the eastern Terai as early as the tenth century. They speak Indo-Aryan Tharu dialects and are split into many endogamous groups.

Their villages combined settled rice cultivation with forest gathering, and their religion centred on forest deities beneath a growing Hindu influence. The Rana Tharu of the far west claim descent from Rajputs who took refuge in the Terai forests in the sixteenth century.

After the Gorkha unification of Nepal in the late eighteenth century, land grants to the hill elite turned many Tharu into bonded Kamaiya labourers on their own former lands.