Introduction: Experiencing the Extraordinary and the Ordinary

Abstract

On 15 January 1934, at around 2.13 p.m. an earthquake struck north India and Nepal. In the chronicles of states, popular writers and scientists, the earthquake would be known as ‘the Indian earthquake’, ‘the great Indian earthquake’, ‘the Bihar–Nepal earthquake’, ‘the Bihar earthquake’ and in Nepal as ‘the Great Earthquake’. As some of these titles reveal, Bihar, which the present study focuses on, was the worst-affected region in India: the districts Muzaffarpur, Darbhanga and Champaran in north Bihar, and Monghyr, south of the Ganges, suffered the most extensive human losses and damages. In India somewhere between 7,253 and 20,000 people succumbed and approximately 8,500 died in Nepal in the upheaval measuring M w 8.1 to 8.4 according to re-evaluated historical data. The epicentre located about 10 kilometres south of Mt Everest caused severe damage to infrastructure, agricultural land and a large number of houses in an area extending from the foothills of the Himalayas in Nepal to the southern bank of the Ganges (Map 1.1).