New Delhi, Aug. 17 -- What is wrong with the "Hindi heartland"? Like a lot of Bihari professionals living in Delhi, Mumbai and Bengaluru, I have often been asked variants of this question. A colleague once used the term "bimaru" ("diseased" in Hindi; BIMARU is the derogatory acronym used to describe Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh) while asking me why Biharis always voted along caste lines.

The episode reminded me, once again, of the extent to which my home state has been caricatured in popular imagination, a fate that it shares with Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan, sometimes referred to as "the Hindi belt" for clarity. I would recommend Ghazala Wahab's new non-fiction book, The H...