Tharu

Clans and Kinship

Srivastava (1958) compares the Tharu kuri with the Hindu got: a section named after a real or imagined ancestor. In the Naini Tal Tarai he found twelve kuris. The census report of 1931 had grouped them in two halves that married only within themselves, and by the 1950s five kuris intermarried freely, while the rules about marrying and dining with the others had narrowed under the influence of the surrounding caste order. Crooke (1896) found the divisions named so differently from district to district, with 73 sections in the census returns, that he judged Tharu organisation to be still changing; a bride, he records, must not be a blood relation of the groom nor of his village. The family is patrilineal and patrilocal, with both joint and single households, and some sons-in-law (gharjamai) live with the wife's father (Srivastava).

The twelve kuris of the Tharus of the Naini Tal Tarai, in the order of the 1931 census report as Srivastava (1958) gives them. Elsewhere the divisions differ: Crooke (1896) records the Dangariya (Dangwariya) and Kathariya as the two main divisions in Gonda and other lists for Kheri, Gorakhpur and Bahraich, while the Kumaon list he quotes (Thar, Batta, Mahtam, Rawat and Barwaik) is close to Srivastava's.

In the Official Lists

• Scheduled Tribe

  Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Bihar

  Listed as: Tharu

Odisha lists a 'Tharua' community (Census 2011: 'Tharua, Tharua Bindhani'), which the sources used do not connect with the Tharu of the Tarai; it is not counted here. Most Tharus live in Nepal, where the Indian lists do not apply. Checked against the Census 2011 tables and Wikipedia's compilation of the order.

Checked on 2026-11-07 against the sources below. The lists are amended from time to time and can differ by district; for a certificate, the current order or the state's list is what counts.

Name and Origin

Crooke (1896) and Srivastava (1958) list many derivations of the name, from tahre, 'they halted', from the swampy country, from a hill word for a paddler and from thar, forest, without settling on one. Crooke records Tharus saying they were Rajputs who fled after a great battle at Hastinapur. The Tharus of the Naini Tal Tarai told Srivastava that their ancestors were Sisodia Rajputs of Chittor who fled into the Tarai after Akbar's siege of 1567, and by the 1950s the leaders of five kuris there called themselves Rana Thakurs; Srivastava treats the story as tradition rather than history.

History

Crooke (1896), drawing on Nesfield, found Tharus from the Kosi river in the east to the Sarda in the west, beyond which lay the country of the Buksas. Srivastava's figures for the Naini Tal Tarai show the Tharus there rising to 20,753 and then falling by a third, to 15,495, at the census of 1941. After independence the Tarai forests were cleared and settled, among others by ex-servicemen, and the Tharus moved towards permanent villages and wet-rice farming. Srivastava's study of 1958 rests on a house-to-house census of thirty-three Tharu villages.

Faith and Worship

Each Tharu village has a than, a place of worship of the village deity Bhumsen, at its edge, and the village priest and healer, the bharara, keeps the rites and treats illness (Srivastava). Crooke records the worship of Devi among the Tharus of Gonda, where Jogi Tharus served at the Devi temple at Tulsipur.

Deities named in the sources: Bhumsen

Customs

Crooke records that a marriage was arranged by the fathers, with a bride-price and a drink of liquor to seal the bargain, and that the old form of marriage by capture survived in the way the bride was brought to her new home. Srivastava collected many Tharu Holi songs and describes the Holi dances of the Naini Tal Tharus. Houses are built in April and May, before the rains, on a site chosen by the bharara, who makes a fire offering (hom) and fixes the day for laying the foundation; a house must face east (Srivastava).

Festivals