There was something about summer evenings in Muzaffarpur that got residents complaining in Bajjika, the local dialect: “Muzaffarpur ke saanjh bari beekh hoyee chhai ho (Muzaffarpur evenings are toxic)”. That wasn’t long ago, but far earlier than the last 12 months that have kept the headquarters of the Tirhut Division in national news—ranging from tales of human depravity in a shelter home last year to a deadly disease claiming the lives of children this month.

This was a time when the sound and fumes of power generators from affluent houses and shops filled the air around the town and a swarm of oversized mosquitoes was typical to its evenings. The sweltering heat of the summer months was made worse by the hopelessly erratic power supply, so much so that the expanding town had evenings that tested even the most loyal of Muzaffarpuriyas.

While mosquito nets and repellants continue to be part of any plan for a peaceful night in the town, the vastly improved power supply has made the once-flourishing power generator cartels in its residential colonies mostly redundant. So, “line cut gael“—as power outages are announced in Bihar—is now useful information indicating that those who have generators can use them. Meanwhile, the phrase “line aa gael“—power has been restored—is not heard much and hardly elicits a reaction.

Whether it is the present or the recent past, Muzaffarpur, like many district towns, didn’t have its share of chroniclers. Except human tragedies, like the current outbreak of Acute Encephalitis Syndrome (AES), which invite spells of parachute journalism, the town hasn’t been of much journalistic or academic interest for metropolitan India. In fact, it was the last decade of the last century that witnessed some sporadic interest in the town.

Perhaps this interest was guided by the need to analyse the northern site of the non-Patna urban scene of Bihar in the context of post-liberalisation India. In the late 90s, Dileep Padgaonkar reflected on the processes of change and continuity in Muzaffarpur through a visitor’s lens. In his observations about the town, published in The Times of India, he couldn’t go beyond the usual confines in which Muzaffarpur restricts visiting journalists—especially those unfamiliar with Bajjika, a distinct dialect of Maithili, which is spoken in Muzaffarpur in addition to Khari Boli Hindi.

It could be assumed that Padgaonkar’s take on Muzaffarpur was shaped by his friend and collaborator in a short-lived Doordarshan show First Edition, Arvind N Das. Despite being Bihar-born, Das had seen Muzaffarpur with a similar prism in his work The Republic of Bihar (1992). In his work, Das sees urban and rural sides of Muzaffarpur differently. As a town, he sees it as a specimen of an urban jungle and a case study of distorted urbanisation in contemporary Bihar.

The forces of urbanization  manifesting themselves in Bihar today are nowhere more visible than in Muzaffarpur, the largest town north of the Ganga. And Muzaffarpur stinks … The headquarters of the famous Tirhut division, the seat of some of the most powerful Bhumihar landowner-politicians of the state, the electoral staging post of George Fernandes, assaults the visitor with the overpowering reek of putrid garbage. The open sewers by the side of houses,huts and shanties overflow with black, stagnant filth. The monsoon rains transform the dust into slush which becomes indistinguishable from the muck oozing out from the nallahs (gutters).

From a visitors’ perspective, he cites the advisory in an Australian tourist guide published in the early Nineties that dismissed the town with these words, “Apart from being a bus and train changing point, Muzaffarpur is of no real interest. This is a poverty-ridden and agriculturally backward area.” Das argues, however, that unlike foreign tourists there are groups of people who can’t be dismissive of the place for different reasons: villagers from the district who come daily to litigate in the courts of Muzaffarpur, cloth traders from what was then Bombay, medical representatives from Calcutta, agricultural machinery sellers from Faridabad, bureaucrats from Patna and agents of Green Revolution states like Punjab and Haryana who come to either lure or retain labourers every year from Muzaffarpur and adjoining districts.

Along with residents of the town and what he calls the brashness (chiefly of landowning Bhumihars) and mercantile prosperity (chiefly of Marwaris), Das includes these visitors as elements in setting the cultural and economic tone of the town.

However, the changing face of the agricultural economy, which is the base of a district town like Muzaffarpur, couldn’t be missed back then too. His work notes technological, economic and infrastructural change seen in greater use of agricultural machinery, zamindars seeing themselves as commodity-producers, baagichas owned by rich landlords being replaced by mango and litchi orchards owned by Marwari traders, and so on. The base for such developments, however, was traced to growth in agriculture: a difficult proposition in a region that is exposed to the danger of floods in its agricultural production cycle.

What, very significantly, changed Muzaffarpur’s relationship with the rest of Bihar could be traced to the 1982 inauguration of 5.7-kilometre-long Mahatma Gandhi Setu, the bridge over the mighty Ganga that connected south and central Bihar to its northern part.

Many historically conscious commentators saw it as an event as significant as the only step forward in the integration of the region with its political centre since Ajatashatru crossed the Ganga in the fifth century BC to defeat Lichachvi republics. That act integrated those republics, one of the earliest in the ancient world, with Magadhan state—the great empire south of the Ganga river, which had Patliputra (modern Patna) as its centre.

In eliminating the need to navigate the river with steamers, the bridge reduced the travel time between the state capital and Muzaffarpur drastically. With parallel growth in road transportation, particularly buses, what one saw in the 1990s was the workforce daily commuting to Patna and vice-versa. An indicator of the popularity of the route could be seen in the fact that the 1990s saw growth of Patna-Muzaffarpur daily passengers’ associations.

What, however, hasn’t changed is that since the beginning of the twentieth century, the place has hogged national headlines for violent or tragic reasons. During the national freedom movement, it made the news as the site of Khudiram Bose’s bombing of English magistrate’s carriage and his subsequent hanging. It was also known as one of the chief urban casualties of the massive Bihar earthquake of 1934, the aftermath of which saw Muzaffarpur reconstructing itself resolutely.

The town was the stopover for Mahatma Gandhi on his way to starting the first satyagrah in Champaran. It also saw Congress stalwart and later a towering socialist leader J B Kriplani teaching at the town’s premier college from 1912 to 1917—the period in which Gandhi visited the town.

That wasn’t the end of Muzaffarpur’s link with the socialist stream of national politics. In the post-Independence electoral politics, the Lok Sabha constituency of Muzaffarpur elected the Lohiaite trade union leader George Fernandes five times (1977, 1980, 1989, 1991 and 2004).

The fact that a Mangalore-born leader, who made his political career as a trade union leader in Bombay, had electoral stakes in north Bihar constituency of Muzaffarpur is in itself a testimony to George sahab‘s remarkable journey. Though largely seen as an outsider, he had the affection of his voters in Muzaffarpur for the greater part of the last three decades. He once promised to turn the sleepy Bihar town into the Mumbai of the east. The town saw a thermal power station in Kanti as a gift from their MP. It has been named after him in 2014, as an afterthought.

What has been a very significant change in recent years is the shift in the social base of political power in Muzaffarpur. The strong emergence of Nishads, mallahs (boatman community) as claimants as well as holders of power in recent years is visible in Lok Sabha results of last few elections, though the upper caste Bhumihars continue to be influential in the Assembly segment. That’s partly because Bhumihars are crucial as a voting group in Muzaffarpur town and adjoining areas constituting the Assembly seat, while parties prefer Nishad candidates in the larger Lok Sabha constituency where the caste group has the numerical edge. As a result, in Assembly polls for Muzaffarpur constituency in recent years, the MLAs have come from either Bhumihar or Baniya caste group, while Nishads have strengthened their grip over Lok Sabha seat.

Despite dwindling political clout, the imprint of Bhumihar leadership could still be seen in the erstwhile as well as current names of two best known key public institutions in the town. Grierson Bhumihar Brahmin College (established in 1899), where J B Kriplani once hosted Mahatma Gandhi on his way to Champaran satyagrah, was later named after Babu Langat Singh, a prominent Bhumihar figure associated with setting up of the college. The college is now known as Langat Singh College.

Similarly, Shri Krishna Medical College (SKMC), making news as the centre attending the current outbreak of AES cases, was set up in 1970 by efforts of prominent Bhumihar leaders like Laliteshwar Prasad Shahi and Raghunath Pandey, with the valuable contribution of nationally known surgeon Dr S M Nawab. Though it isn’t officially stated, it’s popularly believed that the college has been named after Shri Krishna Sinha, Bihar’s first chief minister and a highly respected figure in Bhumihar community of the state.

However, Muzaffarpur’s urban landscape is also dotted with a long-standing institution of disrepute – Chaturbhuj Sthan – the red-light district which is said to have centuries of history. It’s one of the few hubs of sex work in urban centres of Bihar. Besides soliciting for commercial sex, the trade here also morphs into sleazy dance performances. The latter aspect has asserted itself, particularly after the orchestra got into the lucrative market of arkestra in Bihar—a shorthand for the raunchy, dirty dancing performances.

There stands another lesser known institution in the town, though it’s important as a reminder of Muzaffarpur’s engagement with the world of letters. Nirala Niketan, a centre developed by well-known Hindi and Sanskrit writer-scholar Janaki Ballabh Shastri in memory of his literary inspiration Suryakant Tripathi Nirala, is a unique site of literary pilgrimage. Besides making the visitors remember Nirala, the place also makes one think of the great literary legacy of Shastri whose work includes almost every major genre of contemporary literature.

However, it doesn’t stop there. In a function held in December 2013, noted Hindi poet Arun Kamal had referred to Muzaffarpur as “tapobhumi” (loosely translated as land of penance) of Hindi literature. He recalled the work of  Ayodhya Prasad Khatri, a pioneering writer in Khari Boli, Ramvriksh Benipuri and Rajendra Singh among other literary figures.

Last two decades have seen some old attractions of the town lose their appeal. Among other places, one thinks of Bharat Jalpaan, with a tinge of sadness that nostalgia brings. The modest yet once famous eatery isn’t even a fraction of how popular it once was and the same goes for a number of theatres that had earned the town the strange reputation of a town of movie watchers. Perhaps investing in cinema halls was the only viable outlet for the town’s bahubalis: running a cinema theatre in Bihar has been an exercise in muscle power as much as it has been in economic and political clout. Muzaffarpur had a three-in-one theatre (Jawahar-Mini-Deluxe) system much before the multiplex culture arrived in bigger cities of the country. As a sign of changing times, they are now succumbing to new-age multiplexes or opting to screen Bhojpuri films.

Beyond the horrors that keep revisiting it, Muzaffarpur has its own pace of dealing with the banalities of its continuities and remains an important address for urban encounters with north Bihar. The duality of poverty and disease co-existing with apparent pockets of prosperity in new malls and multiplexes is no different from the parallels that run across the country. In a way, Muzaffarpur is an authentic microcosm of that. As they would say in Bajjika: “Muzaffarpur aaiseine chhai (Muzaffarpur is like this only)”.