The tourist brochures about Nepal invariably look to the hills, and the rhetoric of the national identity is derived from the mountainous regions of the country. Nepal's southern lowlands, the tarai, does not fit the image most people have of the country. Says a Himalayan anthropologist, 'The Kingdom of Nepal is…art archetypal Hill and Mountain society."
Many Nepalis themselves think of the tarai merely as a strip of sub-tropical flatlands bordering India, inhabited by the gracious Tharus. Until recently, the tarai for some was nothing more than a place to go hunting. Still others were aware only of its unbearably high summer temperatures.
These attitudes are part ignorance and part geo-centricity, rooted in the belief that the hills contain the soul of Nepal. But the tarai is neither small nor insignificant. It includes 20 of Nepal's 75 districts, slightly under half the country's total population of 18 million and 15 per cent of the total land.
The tarai people with their diverse background form an integral part of the national mosaic. The region has become the nation's bread-basket, its industrial heartland, and a pressure valve for the over-populated hills. The tarai is being increasingly described as Nepal's new economic frontier.