WE, THE People of the Bihari Homeland, stand for the sum of all that our ancestors living here through ages past have thought and done. We are also, in part, the product of influences and pressures exerted from our mainland the Indian Sub-continent as well from other worlds. Many and varied, therefore, are the strands out of which the fabric of our social structure been woven.

Other cultures have a history as long as ours perhaps, but where is the continuity between the past and the present? Do the Egyptians of today in any way resemble their ancestors who built the Great Pyramids? The Chinese in their hurry, or so it seems, to learn the modern language of material advancement are now in the process of repudiating waht once made their civilisation illustrious in the eyes of the world. Where are Sumer and Chaldea and Babylon, the old contemporaries. Where are the glories even of the younger Greece and Rome? We gaze curiously at fragments of their broken vases and other remnants of their dead civilizations, neatly ticketed in museums.

But with a strange vitality, Bihar lives. After each devastating wave of conquest, the people have somehow rises again, their inner life miraculously intact. Does this mean that changes have never come through the centuries or the social life is fossilized, like the shells found high up on the Himalays, carried there million of years ago when a vast continental pressure first squeezed the primeval ooze of the ocean-bed into the folds of gigantic mountains? On the contrary, the secret of the vitality lies in its wonderful capacity to tolerate different views, different customs, different levels of understanding.

So here we are, the people of Bihar, born of many vicissitudes of a long history, each of the many strands adding its own special note of colour, or a sudden flash of gold, to the intricate pattern of the social life. Even before recorded history began, dimly understood migrations of human beings had begun to pour streams into Bihar. The process has gone on even up to quite modern times, though with an ever dimininshing force.

Followed down is the list of eminent personalities, the True Sons of Bihar who have made their motherland proud.