Gajendra Thakur

A PARALLEL HISTORY OF MITHILA & MAITHILI LITERATURE- PART 8

Complete Literary Appreciation of Ramji Prasad Mandal, Pandit Bal Govind 'Arya', Rameshwar Prasad Mandal, Ram Chandra Roy, Dr Bacheshwar Jha, Kameshwar Choudhary, Narayan Yadav, Dr Shubh Kumar Barnwal & Jhauli Paswan

A Critical Compendium of Nine Contemporary Maithili Voices

Ramji Prasad Mandal, Pt. Bal Govind 'Arya', Rameshwar Prasad Mandal, Ram Chandra Roy, Dr. Bacheshwar Jha, Kameshwar Choudhary, Narayan Yadav, Dr. Shubh Kumar Barnwal, and Jhauli Paswan.

A Research and Critical Appreciation

Frameworks Applied:

Indian Classical Criticism (Rasa, Dhvani, Vakrokti, Alamkara)

Western Critical Theory (New Criticism, Post-colonialism, Feminist Theory, Narratology, Formalism, Reader-Response, Post-Structuralism)

Videha Parallel History Framework (Gajendra Thakur / Videha e-Journal)

Navya Nyaya Epistemology (Gangesa Upadhyaya and the Tattva-Cintamani tradition)

Preface: Methodological Framework

Methodological Synthesis and Literary Pluralism

The contemporary literary landscape of the Mithila region, as archived by the pioneering Videha eJournal, presents a vibrant tapestry of voices that resist monolithic interpretation. This critical compendium undertakes a systematic analysis of nine distinctive Maithili authors: Ramji Prasad Mandal, Pt. Bal Govind 'Arya', Rameshwar Prasad Mandal, Ram Chandra Roy, Dr. Bacheshwar Jha, Kameshwar Choudhary, Narayan Yadav, Dr. Shubh Kumar Barnwal, and Jhauli Paswan.

To move beyond impressionistic praise and construct a rigorous scholarly evaluation, this study synthesizes multiple critical frameworks:

1.      Western Formalism & Structuralism: To analyze the internal mechanics of the texts—language, structure, and literary devices (e.g., the fusion of Charyapada prosody in 'Bagwar').

2.      Indian Aesthetics (Rasa-Dhvani-Vakrokti): To appreciate the emotive and suggestive power of the works, identifying the sthayi bhava (dominant emotion) that gives rise to rasa (aesthetic relish), and the vakrata (oblique expression) that creates poetic beauty.

3.      Videha Parallel History Framework (VPHF): This original framework, derived from the archive's unique function, posits that these texts are not mere reflections of mainstream history but are counter-narratives. They operate in a parallel historical dimension, chronicling the experiences, struggles, and philosophies of the marginalized, the rural, and the linguistically specific, thereby challenging the hegemonic discourse of national/colonial history.

4.      Navya Nyaya Epistemology (Technique of Gaṅgeśa): This medieval school of logic, which emphasizes precise definition (lakṣaṇa), categorical distinction (avacchedakatā), and reasoned inference (anumāna), will be used to analyze the argumentative structure, social critiques, and the process of knowledge construction in the non-fiction works. The rigorous jalpa (debate) and vitaṇḍā (destructive criticism) methods provide a powerful lens for examining political and social commentary.

The synthesis of these frameworks allows for a multi-layered appreciation: we will first describe the textual form (Formalism), then analyze its emotional and suggestive impact (Indian Aesthetics), place it as a historical counter-narrative (VPHF), and finally, deconstruct its logical propositions (Navya Nyaya).

 Each work belongs to the contemporary Maithili parallel literary tradition — a tradition that stands apart from the mainstream upper-caste-dominated Sahitya Akademi circuit and articulates the voices of the socially marginalised, agrarian, and working-class communities of Mithila.

Thus the criticism in this volume is conducted through a convergence of four major analytical lenses:

1. Indian Classical Criticism: Drawing on Bharata's Natyashastra (Rasa theory), Anandavardhana's Dhvanyaloka (theory of Dhvani or resonance), Kuntaka's Vakroktijivita (the principle of oblique or defamiliarised expression), and the Alamkara tradition of Bhamaha and Dandin. These tools allow us to measure the aesthetic affect (rasa), the suggested meanings beyond the literal (vyangya), and the rhetorical figures (alamkara) at work in each composition.

2. Western Critical Theory: Employing New Critical close reading (I.A. Richards, Cleanth Brooks), Bakhtinian dialogism and heteroglossia, postcolonial theory (Frantz Fanon, Homi Bhabha), feminist narratology (Judith Butler, Sandra Gilbert), and Fredric Jameson's political unconscious to explore ideological dimensions. Particular attention is paid to how the texts construct subjectivity, challenge hegemony, and negotiate with the colonial/caste archive.

3. The Videha Parallel History Framework: Articulated by Gajendra Thakur in the Videha e-Journal (ISSN 2229-547X, www.videha.co.in), this framework recognises that Maithili literature has always contained two streams — the mainstream (largely Brahmin-Kayastha) stream supported by official academies, and the parallel tradition composed by Dalit, OBC, and socially excluded voices. The Videha framework insists that literary history must be written from below, taking into account caste, class, and gender dynamics. Works analysed here all belong to, or are deeply informed by, this parallel tradition. The framework also draws on Thakur's method of genealogical mapping (Panji Prabandh) to situate authors within historically verifiable socio-cultural matrices.

4. Navya Nyaya Epistemology: Developed by Gangesa Upadhyaya of Mithila (13th–14th century CE) in his Tattva-Cintamani, and extended by Raghunatha Shiromani, Mathuranatha Tarkavagisha, and Jagadisha Tarkālamkara, Navya Nyaya offers a highly precise logical-linguistic toolkit for analysing knowledge claims. Applied to literary criticism, it enables us to interrogate the propositional content of a poem or narrative: What is the anuvyavasaya (meta-cognition of a cognition) at work? Is the literary claim a perceptual (pratyaksha), inferential (anumana), or testimony-based (shabda) truth? The technique of vishesha-tabhava analysis (the relation between qualifier, qualificand, and the limiting relation) illuminates how authors build meaning through specifically structured word-images. Navya Nyaya's insistence on disambiguation — on separating the lakshana (definition) from its vyapti (pervasion) — sharpens reading of metaphorical and symbolic density in these Maithili texts.

The  works represent a spectrum of genres: poetry (kavya sangrah), a grammar text (vyakaran bhumika), a novel (upanyas), a narrative-poetry stream (kavyadhara), short fiction (katha sangrah), historical reminiscences (smarananjali), and another poetry anthology. Their common thread is social commitment, linguistic innovation in the Maithili vernacular, and an insistence on recovering subaltern life-experience from invisibility.

I

Ramji Prasad Mandal

Poetic Landscapes of Resistance & Remembrance: Ramji Prasad Mandal

Ramji Prasad Mandal is among the most prolific Maithili poets emerging from the parallel literary tradition of Supaul district. His works in this collection — the poetry anthology Lal Rang Chahait Achhi Roti (2023), chart a sustained engagement with questions of labour, dignity, womanhood, spiritual eclecticism, and the aesthetics of political longing.

Ramji Prasad Mandal: The Lyrical Ethos of Subaltern Dignity

Work: Lāl Raṅg Chāhat Achi Roṭī (लाल रंग चाहैत अछि रोटी - Red Craves the Bread)

Formalist-Structuralist Analysis: Mandal’s collection is a powerful exercise in poetic economy. The dominant form is the short, free-verse lyric, often utilizing stark imagery and direct address. His language is a deliberate choice: it is not the Sanskritized Śiṣṭa Maithili but the raw, spoken dialect of the agrarian poor. This formal choice is the poem's primary structure; the unadorned, sometimes fragmented syntax mirrors the fragmented lives of his subjects. The title poem's central metaphor—'red' bread—is a brilliant synecdoche, where the color red stands for the laborer's blood, passion, and struggle, while the 'roṭī' (bread) is the fundamental object of survival. The Vakrokti (obliquity) lies in the personification: the bread itself "desires" its red color, making the demand for justice intrinsic to existence.

Indian Aesthetics (Rasa-Dhvani): The dominant sthāyi bhāva is karuṇa (pathos) and raudra (fury). The poems, such as 'असमर्थ छी बेटीकँ जन्म देबएमे' (Asamarth Chī Beṭīkaṁ Janma Debēmē - Unable to give birth to a daughter), do not just describe sorrow; they perform it. The dhvani (suggestion) is deeply layered. The explicit meaning is a father's lament, but the suggested meaning is a scathing indictment of a patriarchal, dowry-ridden society that devalues female birth. The rasa produced is not pure pathos but a bitter karuṇa tinged with vībhatsa (disgust) at the social order, forcing the reader into an uncomfortable state of moral outrage.

Videha Parallel History Framework (VPHF): Mandal’s poetry functions as an archive of rural pain. The mainstream narrative of post-Independence India is one of progress and development. Mandal offers a parallel history—a chronicle of the "other" India. His poem 'फेंकाएल जिनगी' (Phenkāēl Jinagī - Thrown-away Life) is not a fictional tragedy; it is a documented reality of social abandonment. This framework reveals that the "development" celebrated in cities is built on the "thrown-away lives" of the rural poor. His work is a counter-memory to the nationalist amnesia regarding internal colonialism and caste-based oppression.

Navya Nyaya Critique: The poem 'नव-वर्ष' (Nav-Varṣ - New Year) can be analyzed as a jalpa (debate) with the concept of time. The poet poses a series of logical challenges (nigrahasthāna - points of defeat) to the very idea of celebrating a new year while social realities remain unchanged. He uses inference (anumāna): observing the suffering of the poor (hetu - reason), he infers the fallacy (hetvābhāsa) of the celebratory rituals, which are based on a false premise of universal joy. This is a Navya Nyaya technique of deconstructing a cultural proposition by exposing its insufficient logical grounds.

 

Lal Rang Chahait Achhi Roti (लाल रंग चाहैत अछि रोटी) — Poetry Anthology, 2023

Bibliographic Details

ISBN: 978-93-93135-55-1. First edition 2023. Pallavi Publication, Nirmali, Supaul. 62 pp. Price: ₹100. Typography: Dr. Umesh Mandal. Cover design: Smt. Punam Mandal.

Overview and Genre

Lal Rang Chahait Achhi Roti (Red Wants the Bread) is a lean, politically charged kavya sangrah (poetry anthology) of approximately twenty-two poems in Maithili. The title poem — and indeed the volume's governing conceit — superimposes the red of hunger, the red of revolution, and the red of ritual at once: the roti (bread) that desires the red signifier of both blood and vermilion. This is an ekphrastic move that Kuntaka would categorise as vakrokti of the second order — a semantic obliqueness achieved not through unusual grammar but through the audacious yoking of the political with the quotidian domestic.

Thematic Architecture

The collection opens with "Hammr Jalisa" (My Assembly/Longing), a poem of literary self-inventory in which the speaker rehearses his debts to Maithili's founding genius Vidyapati (Kirtilata, Kirtipataaka, the Padavali) while asserting the claim of a vernacular, folk-embedded, mixed-register Maithili. This is precisely the move that the Videha Parallel History Framework valorises: the deliberate claiming of classical ancestry by a non-Brahmin poet, challenging the monopoly that the mainstream stream has exercised over the Vidyapati legacy. The poem performs what Homi Bhabha terms "sly civility" — inhabiting the canonical while subverting its exclusive ownership.

The middle section of the collection moves into social poetry. "Dal Daldal Mein Neta Upar" (Leaders float on the swamp) deploys the classical rasa of bibhatsa (disgust) as a political instrument — a strategy consonant with Bharata's eighth rasa but rarely explored in modern Maithili verse. The poem's imagery of political leaders floating above the swamp of public suffering while the people sink recalls Brecht's Verfremdungseffekt in its deliberate refusal of lyrical consolation.

"Lal Rang Chahait Achhi Roti" (the title poem) demonstrates Dhvani at its most concentrated. On the surface level (vaachya), the poem describes a hungry person's wish for bread with a red colour — perhaps red lentil, perhaps saffron-stained. But the dhvanyartha (resonant meaning) vibrates with revolutionary suggestion: the bread wants redness because redness is what the working body bleeds; redness is what the Left promises; redness is what is daily denied. In Navya Nyaya terms, the qualificand (roti) and its qualifier (lal rang) are held in an unusual vyapti (pervasion-relation) that shatters their ordinary logical connection, forcing the reader to reconstruct the anuvyavasaya — the meta-cognition that asks: "What kind of knowing does this red-bread conjunction produce?"

The Poems on Womanhood

The third thematic cluster — comprising "Asmath Ki Beti Ko Janm Dene Mein" (On the Difficulty of Bearing a Daughter), "Ajamma Beti Ki Manuhaar" (The Unborn Daughter's Entreaty), and "Shram Shakti" (Power of Labour) — constitutes perhaps the most remarkable feminist Maithili poetry outside the Videha archive. The unborn daughter's poem is a monologue in which a foetus speaks to her mother, promising to rival Kalpana Chawla, Kiran Bedi, and Hema Das — real women whose embodied achievements are invoked as counter-narratives to patriarchal infanticide. This is what Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar would call "the anxiety of authorship" reversed: here, the female subject writes herself into existence before birth, claiming the archive of achieved women against the annihilation her society plans.

Navya Nyaya analysis of "Ajamma Beti Ki Manuhaar" reveals a complex structure of pratijnya (proposition): the daughter argues by anumana (inference): "Since these women (Sita, Radha, Draupadi, Kiran Bedi, Hema Das) exist and are valued, and since I am of the same class/gender, therefore I also deserve to exist." The inference is valid (vyapti-baddha), but the society's counter-premise — that a daughter is economically burdensome — constitutes a dushana (defeater) that the poem systematically dismantles verse by verse.

Stylistics and Language

Mandal's Maithili is a genuinely mixed koine — tatsama, tadbhava, deshaj, and loanwords from Hindi and English coexist without anxiety. This is the linguistic programme announced in "Hammr Jalisa": Vidyapati himself used multiple registers, and Mandal's eclecticism is a form of historical fidelity rather than contamination. The Videha framework explicitly defends this mixed-register Maithili against the purism of the mainstream stream which, as Gajendra Thakur has documented, uses linguistic gatekeeping as a tool of caste exclusion.

Critical Assessment

Lal Rang Chahait Achhi Roti is a modest but morally urgent collection. Its weaknesses lie in occasional prosodic irregularity and some poems where the didactic intent overwhelms the aesthetic impulse — a tension that the Indian rasa tradition marks as the subordination of shringara and karuna rasas to vira and raudra, not always successfully balanced. However, the best poems — the title poem, the unborn daughter's appeal, and "Shram Shakti" — achieve what Anandavardhana called dhvani of the highest order: where the suggested meaning completely dominates the expressed meaning, making the poem inexhaustible on re-reading. Within the Videha Parallel History Framework, this collection is significant as evidence of a non-Brahmin, subaltern male poet reclaiming classical Maithili genres for politically radical purposes.

Mandal's poetic universe is structured around two axes: the axis of memory (the inherited aesthetic canon of Maithili from Vidyapati to the folk-oral tradition) and the axis of urgency (the present crises of hunger, caste violence, female foeticide, and rural dispossession). His technique consistently involves superimposing these axes — so that a poem about the new year (Nav Varsh) becomes a critique of the Westernisation of festivals, and a poem about Ahalya's monologue becomes an exploration of structural violence against women within the mythological archive.

Using the Vakrokti lens of Kuntaka, Mandal's characteristic move is what Kuntaka calls varna-vinyasa vakrokti — unusual sound-patterning that creates a secondary semantic charge. The compound "lal-rang chahait achhi roti" achieves this through the chiasmic reversal of agent and object: it is the bread (object) that desires the colour (qualifier), not the poet or the poor person who desires coloured bread. This inversion is a grammatical vakrokti that throws the entire ideological weight onto the desired object — the bread itself becomes political consciousness.

In terms of the Navya Nyaya analysis of his complete poetic project, Mandal works with what Gangesa would call sannikarsha — the special contact relation between a word and the object it cognises. Mandal's poetic labour is to disrupt normalised sannikarsha relations (roti = domestic, lal = auspicious) by establishing new, unprecedented vyapti (pervasion) relations that force the reader into fresh cognitive labour. This is the epistemological function of his poetry: to make the reader relearn the world.

 

II

Pt. Bal Govind 'Arya': The Grammarian as a Cultural Archivist

Work: Varṇa Prakaraṇa Bhāṣya-Bhūmikā (वणर् प्रकरण भाष्य-भूमिका - A Commentary on the Science of Phonetics)

Formalist-Structuralist Analysis: This is a pedagogical grammar. Its structure is classical: it begins with a definition of grammar (vyākaraṇa), then proceeds through varṇa (phoneme), akṣara (syllable), sandhi (euphonic combination), and so on. Each section is framed as a praśna (question) and uttara (answer), mimicking the oral pedagogical tradition. The structure is not just descriptive but prescriptive, establishing rules for "correct" Maithili. The inclusion of a section on English spelling rules (Śuddha-Śuddha Aṅgrezī Lilek Niyam) is a remarkable structural hybrid, acknowledging the new linguistic reality while asserting Maithili's grammatical framework.

Indian Aesthetics (Rasa-Dhvani): While a grammar is not typically analyzed for rasa, the bhāṣya (commentary) form has its own aesthetic. The śānta rasa (peace of clarity) is the goal: the satisfaction that comes from understanding a complex system. The dhvani of the entire work is the subtle assertion of Maithili's classical status. By analyzing its phonetics with the same tools used for Sanskrit, the book suggests that Maithili is a language of science and high culture, not just a deśī bhāṣā (vernacular). The vakratā is in the apparent simplicity; the straight, didactic style conceals a profound political act of linguistic empowerment.

Videha Parallel History Framework (VPHF): This work is a parallel history of linguistic standardization. Mainstream histories of Indian languages often focus on Sanskrit, Hindi, or English. Arya's grammar is a parallel archive of Maithili's internal logic and systematic rules. It rejects the history of Maithili as a "dialect" and constructs a history of it as a vyākaraṇa-samūrddha (grammatically-rich) language. The tables of phonemes and rules of sandhi are not just pedagogical tools; they are documentary evidence for Maithili's independent and scientific structure, countering narratives of its subordination.

Navya Nyaya Critique: The entire grammar is an exercise in paribhāṣā (meta-rule). Navya Nyaya is concerned with the precise definition of terms (lakṣaṇa). Arya’s work is a series of such definitions. What is a varṇa? What is an akṣara? He provides the svarūpa lakṣaṇa (essential definition) of each unit. The sections on sandhi apply the logical principle of saṃyoga (conjunction) and vibhāga (division). The rules are presented as invariable concomitance (vyāpti): given 'a' + 'a', the outcome is invariably 'ā'. This is a grammatical application of the Nyaya principle of cause and effect (kārya-kāraṇa).

Pandit Bal Govind 'Arya' Varna Prakarana Bhashya-Bhumika/ Non-Fiction as a Mode of Cultural Memory

Bibliographic Details

Full title (Maithili): Varna Prakarana Bhashya-Bhumika (वर्ण प्रकरण भाष्य-भूमिका) — A Maithili Grammar by Pandit Bal Govind 'Arya'. ISBN: 978-93-88811-49-1. First edition: 2020. Price: ₹250. Pallavi Publication, Nirmali. 134 pp.

Nature of the Text

This is a grammar text — a vyakaran prabandha — treating the Maithili language from the perspective of varna (phoneme/character), pada (word/case), vakya (sentence/syntax), vinyaas (punctuation), and chandashastra (prosody). The work is divided into two major sections: Prakarana (Chapter) 1, dealing with descriptive grammar (orthography, morphology, syntax, punctuation, prosody); and Prakarana 2, with an extended treatment of tones and euphonics. A brief appendix on Maithili manuscript study (Mithilakshar lipi) is also provided.

Place in Maithili Grammatical Tradition

The grammatical study of Maithili has a distinguished history: George Grierson's survey work on Maithili dialects (Linguistic Survey of India, 1903) represents the colonial-era moment; S.K. Chatterjee's researches in the early twentieth century confirmed Maithili's status as an independent language; and subsequent grammarians have worked within both mainstream and parallel traditions. Pandit Bal Govind 'Arya's contribution is unusual in that it is written from within a practical-pedagogical tradition: the preface (as interpreted from the extant typeset pages) indicates that this grammar was designed for students in classes 10 to 12 who are learning Maithili as a subject. This is a grammar of use, not of display.

The Videha Parallel History Framework is directly relevant here. Gajendra Thakur has consistently documented how official Maithili grammars have been constructed primarily around the Brahmin-Kayastha literary koine, excluding the Maithili of Dalit, Yadav, Kushwaha, and other communities. Arya's grammar, originating in the Pallavi Publication milieu, implicitly challenges this monopoly: it presents a pedagogically neutral, non-exclusionary account of Maithili phonology and syntax that does not privilege any one dialectal prestige form.

Analytical Framework: Navya Nyaya and the Grammar of Knowing

A grammar text is, in the Navya Nyaya frame, a treatise on shabda-pramana — knowledge derived from verbal testimony. The Navya Naiyayikas, especially Gangesa in the Tattvacintamani (Shabda-khanda), analyse how a sentence (vakya) conveys knowledge, with particular attention to tatparya (the speaker's intention) and its role in disambiguating syntactic structures. Arya's treatment of punctuation (vinyaas) and syntax (vakya-prakarana) maps closely onto the Navya Nyaya concern with how syntactic markers guide the reconstruction of the speaker's tatparya. His classification of pause-markers (ardha-viram, poorna-viram, prashna-chinh) mirrors the Navya Nyaya distinction between incomplete cognition and complete cognition (paryavasana).

From the Western critical perspective, this grammar belongs to the tradition of pedagogical linguistics that Foucault associates with "disciplinary knowledge" — but in the context of a minority language, the discipline of grammar is also a form of cultural resistance. By codifying Maithili phonology, morphology, and prosody in a form accessible to school students, Arya performs an act of linguistic sovereignty. This resonates with what Ngugi wa Thiong'o calls "decolonising the mind" through the mother tongue: the grammar becomes a counter-archive against the Hindi-dominant educational system.

Technical Assessment

The text's treatment of Maithili chandas (prosody) — particularly the classification of metres into maatravrtta (mora-based) and varnavrtta (syllabic) systems — is competent and pedagogically clear. The discussion of sandhis (euphonic combinations) and vibhakti (case endings) draws on the Ashtadhyayi tradition but adapts it to Maithili's agglutinative tendencies. The section on Mithilakshar script (the indigenous Tirhuta script of Maithili) is brief but important: it acknowledges that Maithili's full heritage is inseparable from its script tradition, which Gajendra Thakur has worked extensively to preserve and digitise.

Critical Assessment

Varna Prakarana Bhashya-Bhumika is a significant if modest contribution to the pedagogical grammar of Maithili. Its value lies less in theoretical innovation than in practical accessibility. Within the Videha Parallel History Framework, any act of codifying and teaching Maithili grammar outside the official academic-Akademi nexus is politically charged. This grammar belongs to the infrastructure of language maintenance for the next generation of Maithili speakers, particularly those from communities historically excluded from the literary establishment.

 

III

Rameshwar Prasad Mandal: The Epic of the Mundane and the Novel of the Masses

Work: Bagwār (बगवार - A Poetic Novel) & Baukī (बौकी - The Mute Girl)

Formalist-Structuralist Analysis: Mandal’s genius lies in genre experimentation. Bagwār is a poetic novel (kāvya-upanyās), a rare form. It uses the dohā and chaupaī meters, traditionally reserved for mythological or heroic tales, to narrate the life of an ordinary farmer, Jagū. This structural choice creates an epic dignity for a subaltern life. Baukī is a social realist novel, but its structure is built around the title character's muteness. The narrative's silences, gaps, and use of non-verbal communication (gestures, "ईऽऽ ईऽऽ उऽऽ") become a powerful structural device, forcing the reader to experience the protagonist's isolation.

Indian Aesthetics (Rasa-Dhvani): Bagwār primarily evokes vīra (heroism in struggle) and śānta (peace in acceptance). The dhvani is of the dignity of labor. The poem 'माछक चोहर' (Māchak Chohar - The Theft of Fish) suggests not just a crime but a violation of a man's life's work, making the raudra (fury) of injustice felt deeply. In Baukī, the dominant rasa is karuṇa (pathos) leading to adbhuta (wonder) at the protagonist's resilience. The vakratā is extreme: the most powerful moments are when the protagonist, who cannot speak, tries to communicate. Her gestures are the vakrokti, a "crooked speech" that is more eloquent than any direct dialogue could be.

Videha Parallel History Framework (VPHF): Bagwār is a parallel history of the Indian peasant. It counters the elite narratives of the Green Revolution by showing the personal cost and the persistence of precarity. The hero, Jagū, doesn't overthrow a government; he builds a school and a hospital. This is a history of micro-development and community building, which is parallel to, but more fundamental than, state-led development. Baukī is a parallel history of the disabled. It rejects the history of pity or magical cure. Instead, it chronicles the history of agency, showing how a "mute girl" uses her intelligence and will to navigate, survive, and ultimately triumph over a world that sees her as an object, not a subject.

Navya Nyaya Critique: In Baukī, the character of Sarpanch Vinash Pandit operates on a system of fallacious logic (hetvābhāsa). He tries to prove that Bauki should be sent to a temple based on the hetu (reason) that she is a burden. The novel, as a whole, deconstructs his logic through the anumāna (inference) of Bauki’s actions. By showing her intelligence, loyalty, and capacity for love, the narrative provides a counter-hetu: she is a capable human being. The entire novel is a khaṇḍana (refutation) of the pūrva-pakṣa (prima facie view) of society towards the disabled. The logical proof is not an argument but the entire narrative of her life.

Rameshwar Prasad Mandal — Baukee (Novel) & Bagwar (Kavyadhara)

Rameshwar Prasad Mandal is a retired schoolteacher from Supaul whose literary career has focused on the social novel and narrative verse. The prakashan note in Baukee describes him as having spent a lifetime educating children while also serving as a committed Maithili writer. He is positioned, in the Pallavi imprint, as a direct inheritor of the social realist tradition associated with Jagadish Prasad Mandal (Sahitya Akademi awardee for his novel Panga, 2021), whose Hindi translation Rameshwar Prasad Mandal himself undertook.

Baukee (बौकी) — Maithili Novel, 2024

Bibliographic Details

ISBN: 978-93-93135-56-8. First edition: 2024. Price: ₹250. Pallavi Publication, Nirmali. 116 pp. Cover: Smt. Punam Mandal. Typography: Dr. Umesh Mandal.

Plot and Narrative Structure

Baukee (meaning "a mute/dumb girl" in regional dialect, also carrying connotations of simplicity and groundedness) is a social novel centring on a girl who is abandoned as an orphan and is mute — classified as "bauki" (differently abled) by her society. The novel traces her trajectory from social rejection to a position of authority as a police sub-inspector (darogaa). The adoptive mother, Padma Devi, names her Vidya Kumari, transforming the social designation "baukee" (dummy/fool) into a site of ironic reversal.

Thematic Analysis

Baukee is essentially a Bildungsroman — a novel of formation in the tradition of Dickens's Great Expectations and Sharat Chandra Chattopadhyay's Devdas (inverted: here the marginalised woman triumphs). Within the Indian novelistic tradition, it participates in the subaltern Bildungsroman form that scholars like Meenakshi Mukherjee have theorised: the narrative of the socially excluded subject who achieves recognition not through upper-caste patronage but through self-making.

The Videha Parallel History Framework illuminates a crucial dimension of Baukee: the protagonist's disability is also a figure for the social silencing of Dalit and non-elite women within Maithili public culture. The novel enacts what the Videha framework calls "parallel voice" — the creation of a literary space in which those who have been systematically excluded from cultural production become the protagonists of their own stories. Vidya Kumari's rise to darogaa status is also, allegorically, the rise of the marginalised Maithili voice to a position of institutional authority.

The novel's ideological project is transparent: it argues, through narrative demonstration, that given the right environment (education, care, social support), any individual — regardless of disability, caste, or gender — can achieve excellence. This is the social-realist thesis that Jagadish Prasad Mandal championed in Panga, and Rameshwar Prasad Mandal continues the tradition. From a Bakhtinian perspective, Baukee is structured around polyphonic social voices: the village community's gossip and judgment, the institutional language of police bureaucracy, the intimate language of the adopted family, and the protagonist's own internal monologue constitute distinct ideological registers that dialogue without resolution.

Navya Nyaya Analysis of the Central Trope

The novel's central logical structure can be rendered in Navya Nyaya terms as follows: there is a paksha (the subject of inference) — Baukee/Vidya Kumari; a sadhya (what is to be proved) — that she is capable of achieving institutional excellence; and a hetu (reason/middle term) — that she has received education and moral cultivation. The hetvabhasa (fallacy) that the community commits is avyapti — claiming that Baukee's disability pervades her entire potential, i.e., "If mute, then incapable of all achievement." The novel's narrative refutes this vyapti step by step, functioning as what Navya Nyaya calls a dushana (defeater) of the community's false anumana (inference). This structure gives Baukee a philosophical architecture that elevates it beyond simple didactic fiction.

Narrative Craft

Rameshwar Prasad Mandal's prose style in Baukee is direct, accessible Maithili — what the Videha framework would call "lok-Maithili" (the people's Maithili) rather than the prestige literary koine. Sentences are short and declarative; dialogue is rendered in the register of the character's community (village Maithili for farmers, semi-urban bureaucratic Maithili for police officials). The novel's chief structural achievement is its management of dramatic irony: the reader always knows more than the community that marginalises Baukee, creating a karuna (compassion) rasa laced with vira (heroic) anticipation as the protagonist advances.

Critical Assessment

Baukee is a significant social novel in the contemporary Maithili parallel tradition. It is less psychologically complex than Jagadish Prasad Mandal's Panga and its social realism occasionally tips into schematism (the good adoptive mother vs. the prejudiced village community is too cleanly binary). However, its insistence on representing the perspective of a mute, orphaned, socially liminal female protagonist marks an important contribution to the feminist-subaltern strand of Maithili fiction. The novel earns its place in the Videha parallel canon.

Bagwar (बगवार) — Maithili Kavyadhara (Narrative Poetry Stream), 2023

Bibliographic Details

ISBN not yet assigned at time of first print. First edition: 2023. Price: ₹350. Pallavi Publication, Nirmali. 107 pp. Foreword: Ram Shrestha Deewana, National President, Akhil Bharatiya OBC Lekhak Sangh, Madhubani.

Genre: The Kavyadhara

Bagwar (meaning "garden" or "orchard" in the local Maithili-Bhojpuri dialect of the Kosi region) is described on its cover as a "Maithili Kavyadhara" — a stream of poems that flows as a continuous thematic and emotional current rather than as discrete lyrics. This is a significant generic choice: the kavyadhara (poetry stream or river of verse) is associated in Maithili tradition with the extended narrative poetry of the classical Padavali. Mandal invokes this tradition while domesticating it: his kavyadhara is rooted in the agrarian soil of Supaul, not the courtly refinement of Mithila's medieval literary culture.

Thematic and Structural Analysis

The kavyadhara opens with a Hindi-language invocatory stanza, then transitions into Maithili. This bilingual opening — Hindi for the bhoomika (foreground) and Maithili for the kavyadhara proper — signals the book's double audience: the Hindi-reading general public of Bihar and the specifically Maithili-speaking community of the parallel tradition. This is a pragmatic, not aesthetic, decision, and it reflects the real sociolinguistic condition of Maithili: a language embedded in a Hindi-dominant media ecology.

The kavyadhara's central narrative follows a character named Jagoo, who loses both parents in a single event and must reconstruct his life and farm through labour, love, and community. The narrative is organised around the Maithili cycle of seasons and agricultural labour — sowing, harvest, the filling of ponds, the planting of orchards — which functions as both literal story and extended metaphor for human endurance.

The foreword by Ram Shrestha Deewana invokes Tagore's Nobel Prize speech and his debt to Kabir, positioning the kavyadhara within a long tradition of social-devotional poetry that runs from Kabir through Tukaram to Phule and Ambedkar. This is the aesthetic-political genealogy of the OBC literary movement, and it establishes the ideological coordinates within which Bagwar operates.

Rasa Analysis

The dominant rasa of Bagwar is karuna (grief, compassion) — the extended mourning of Jagoo for his parents — which gradually transforms into shanta (tranquility, acceptance) as the protagonist integrates loss into the rhythms of agricultural life. This trajectory replicates the classical shringara-into-vipralambha-into-shanta arc theorised in Abhinavagupta's Abhinavabharati commentary on Natyashastra. However, Mandal's shanta is not the otherworldly peace of the Vedantic sage; it is the grounded, embodied peace of the farmer who has planted an orchard and watched it bear fruit. This is what we might call "immanent shanta" — a secularised form of the rasa that roots transcendence in material labour.

The Navya Nyaya framework illuminates the structure of this rasa-transformation. The poem's central inference can be stated: "Because Jagoo has experienced great loss (hetu), and because he has responded through sustained labour (vyapti relation between response and transformation), therefore his grief is transformed into peace (sadhya)." This is a valid anumana; the poem's artistic task is to make this inference felt rather than merely cognised — to transform what Navya Nyaya calls a tattvajnana (knowledge of the real) into rasa (aesthetic experience).

Critical Assessment

Bagwar is one of the more formally ambitious works in the Pallavi series. Its generic choice of kavyadhara, its seasonal-agricultural structure, and its OBC literary genealogy (via Deewana's foreword) make it a theoretically rich object. Its limitations lie in occasional narrative looseness — the kavyadhara form tends to sprawl, and some sections feel like lyrical improvisation rather than controlled composition. The Hindi-language bhoomika is somewhat inconsistent with the Maithili purist position implicit in the Videha parallel tradition, though practically understandable. Overall, Bagwar demonstrates Rameshwar Prasad Mandal's capacity for large-scale poetic thinking while also revealing the challenges that arise when a fundamentally lyric sensibility attempts extended narrative verse.

 

IV

Fictional Worlds of Social Critique: Ram Chandra Roy: Narrative as a Mirror to Rural Realities

Work: Sapanā Sākār (सपना साकार - Dream Realized) (Short Stories)

Formalist-Structuralist Analysis: Roy is a master of the conventional short story form, often employing a linear, cause-and-effect structure. His strength lies in verisimilitude—the creation of a plausible, detailed rural world. The stories are structured around social conflicts: inter-caste marriage, female feticide, dowry, and political corruption. The narrative arc typically moves from an inciting incident (e.g., an elopement) through a rising action of community tension to a resolution, which is often optimistic and reformist. This formal choice aligns with the didactic tradition of Maithili prose, aiming to instruct as much as to entertain.

Indian Aesthetics (Rasa-Dhvani): The stories are rich in vīra (heroism) and karuṇa (pathos). The rasa is often directly stated rather than suggested. For instance, the triumph of a wronged woman or the success of a social reformer evokes a clear, uncomplicated vīra rasa. The dhvani is less ambiguous; Roy's meaning is generally explicit. The power lies in the accumulation of realistic detail, which creates a strong anubhava (experience) for the reader. The story 'बुधनी माइक बेथा' (Budhanī Māik Bethā - The Ailment of Budhni Mai) uses the folk-trial structure to create a courtroom drama rasa, where suspense and moral outrage are the primary emotional drivers.

Videha Parallel History Framework (VPHF): Roy's stories are a parallel history of social reform. While official histories might document the legal abolition of practices like dowry, Roy chronicles the slow, painful, and often incomplete struggle against these customs at the grassroots level. 'कुलदीपक' (Kuladīpak - The Lamp of the Family) is a parallel history of how educated daughters became the true agents of change in conservative families, a narrative often eclipsed by male-dominated histories of the reform movement. His work functions as a sociological archive, preserving the texture of late 20th and early 21st-century Mithila.

Navya Nyaya Critique: The story 'समाजक पिंशाच' (Samājak Piṅśāc - The Demon of Society) can be read as a logical jalpa (debate) on gender roles. The narrative presents a thesis (patriarchal norms), an antithesis (the protagonist's suffering), and a synthesis (her empowerment). The plot devices—the abusive in-laws, the indifferent husband, the protagonist's academic success—serve as hetu (logical reasons) to prove the sādhya (thesis) that education is the ultimate refutation (khaṇḍana) of social demonism. The story argues its point with the relentless logic of a legal brief, using fictional examples as its evidence.

Ram Chandra Roy — Sapna Sakar (सपना साकार)

Bibliographic Details

Full title: Sapna Sakar (सपना साकार) — Collection of Maithili Stories by Shri Ram Chandra Roy. ISBN: 978-93-93135-39-1. First edition: 2023. Price: ₹200. Copyright: Smt. Ranjana Kumari. Pallavi Publication, Nirmali. 125 pp. Typography: Dr. Umesh Mandal.

Authorial Context

Ram Chandra Roy (affectionately known as Ramu Sarak, "Ramu from the road/street") is a writer of short and long fiction working in the parallel Maithili tradition. The copyright is registered in the name of Smt. Ranjana Kumari, suggesting a posthumous or dedicated publication. The dedication — to his parents, Smt. Ganga Devi and Shri Adhik Lal Roy — foregrounds the working-class genealogy of the author.

Content and Genre

Sapna Sakar is a collection of Maithili katha (stories) spanning both laghukatha (short story) and dirghakatha (long story) forms. According to the preface (Puravaak) by an associate critic, the collection's best pieces are the long stories "Nirvashit Jivan" (Exiled Life) and "Buni Mai Ka Betha" (Old Mother's Pain). The collection also includes an intercaste love story involving an elopement and subsequent police case ("Tohram Jitle Ham Haaral"), and a story about a mentally ill woman who is mistaken for a goddess by her husband's family — a premise that exploits the classical trope of madness-as-divinity while subverting it through social realism.

Narratological Analysis

Ram Chandra Roy's narrative technique is characterised by what Gerald Genette would call the "récit de paroles" (report of words) — his fiction gives extensive space to direct dialogue and community speech acts, reproducing the textures of village panchayat deliberation, domestic argument, and institutional encounter. This is a narratological strategy consonant with the Videha Parallel History Framework's valorisation of subaltern voice: the text's polyphonic quality — where the community's collective speech is as central as any individual protagonist — resists the individualisation of experience characteristic of mainstream novelistic form.

"Buni Mai Ka Betha" is the collection's most complex achievement. The story unfolds in a panchayat setting where an elderly woman (Buni Mai) is called to testify about an alleged impropriety. The story builds towards a revelation of social injustice, and the elderly woman's testimony — sworn with the formula "If I lie, may my body be struck by lightning, may my limbs cease to function, may I be refused entry into Sita's birthplace" — is simultaneously a legal speech act and a literary performance of indigenous juridical culture. This is what J.L. Austin would call a "performative utterance" with maximum social stakes.

The Navya Nyaya framework is directly applicable to the panchayat testimony scene. The Navya Naiyayika distinguishes between a shabda-pramana (knowledge derived from testimony) that is valid (aaptavachana — testimony from a reliable source) and one that is invalid (anapta — unreliable testimony). The panchayat scene enacts this epistemological drama: the community must determine whether Buni Mai's testimony meets the standard of aaptavachana, and the story's dramatic tension is precisely this epistemological uncertainty. Roy thus produces a narrative that is structurally congruent with the Navya Nyaya investigation of testimony-knowledge — a remarkable correspondence between the indigenous logical tradition of Mithila and the literary practice of one of its contemporary writers.

Feminist Analysis

"Nirvashit Jivan" (Exiled Life) and the story of the woman mistaken for a goddess both place female subjectivity at the centre of social analysis. The "mad woman as goddess" story participates in a long tradition — from Charlotte Bronte's Bertha Mason to Mahasweta Devi's tribal women — of fiction that uses the female "madwoman" as a figure of social excess: the woman whose behaviours exceed the normative expectations of femininity is reclassified as either divine or deviant, never simply human. Roy's story complicates this by showing how the husband's family's reclassification of the mad woman as a goddess is itself a form of appropriation — turning her alterity into a domestic resource.

From the Videha Parallel History Framework perspective, the focus on female suffering and social injustice in a collection by an OBC/lower-caste author challenges the mainstream stream's tendency to represent female characters either as upper-caste heroines of domestic virtue (the Sita type) or as lower-caste victims without interiority. Roy's female characters have complex interior lives and voices.

Critical Assessment

Sapna Sakar is an uneven collection — some stories are slight and anecdotal, while others (especially "Buni Mai Ka Betha" and "Nirvashit Jivan") demonstrate genuine narrative craftsmanship. Roy's strength is his ear for community speech and his sensitivity to the political dimensions of everyday social interaction. His weakness is occasional sentimentality and a tendency to resolve his narratives through moral assertion rather than dramatic revelation. The collection is nonetheless valuable as a document of the life-worlds of the Kosi river basin communities — their humour, their suffering, their resilience, and their deeply ingrained sense of social justice.

V

Dr. Bacheshwar Jha: The Scholar as a Social Historian

Work: Nibandh-Nikuñj (निबन्ध-निकुञ्ज - A Grove of Essays)

Formalist-Structuralist Analysis: This is a collection of academic essays and research papers. The structure is formal: introduction, thematic divisions, sub-headings, evidence (quotations from primary texts like Vidyāpati), analysis, and conclusion. The style is expository and analytical. The essay 'मिथिलाक बाल साहित्य' (Mithilāk Bāl Sāhitya - Children's Literature of Mithila) is structured as a historical survey, tracing the lineage from Manbodh to modern poets. This formal structure establishes Jha as a literary historian in the Western academic tradition, applying its taxonomic and periodizing methods to a Maithili subject.

Indian Aesthetics (Rasa-Dhvani): The rasa here is śānta (the peace of knowledge) and vīra (the heroism of the scholar). The dhvani of the collection is the vindication of Maithili as a subject of serious, university-level scholarship. By treating Maithili with the same rigor as any classical literature, the essays suggest its canonical status. The vakratā is in the use of Maithili itself as the language of scholarship. The choice is "crooked" in the context of an Indian academy that often privileges English or Hindi, and it is a powerful political statement.

Videha Parallel History Framework (VPHF): Jha's essays are a parallel history of literature. They challenge the Eurocentric history of literary forms. The essay on 'Vidyāpatikālīn Mithilāk Kṛṣi' (Agriculture in Mithila during Vidyapati's Time) uses literary texts as primary sources to reconstruct a parallel history of economic and social life. This is not political history; it is the history of farming, cooking, and seasonal rhythms as reflected in poetry. This framework reveals how literature itself can be an archive for aspects of the past that are invisible in official chronicles.

Navya Nyaya Critique: The essay 'कन्यादानक भीषण समस्याक कारण' (Kanyādānak Bhīṣaṇ Samasyāk Kāraṇ - Causes of the Dire Problem of Kanyādān/Dowry) is a masterful exercise in kāraṇa-parīkṣā (examination of causes). Dr. Jha distinguishes between upādāna kāraṇa (material cause—the social structure) and nimitta kāraṇa (efficient cause—the individuals and their greed). He traces the hetu (reason) for dowry not just to contemporary greed but to the historical vyavasthā of Bikauā and Pāñji systems. He builds a logical chain of causation (kāraṇa-paramparā) to prove that the problem is not a new one but has deep historical roots, thereby refuting (khaṇḍana) simplistic modern explanations.

 

VI

 

Kameshwar Choudhary: The Philosophical Lyric and Existential Inquiry

Work: Sanes (सनेस - Message/News)

Formalist-Structuralist Analysis: Choudhary’s poetry in Sanes is characterized by a meditative, philosophical tone. The structure often moves from a concrete image or experience to an abstract, universal question. The poem is a vehicle for inquiry, not a container for emotion. The free verse is often discursive, using techniques of repetition and parallel phrasing to build a rhythmic argument. The title 'सनेस' (Sanes/Message) itself becomes a structuring principle; each poem is a message delivered from the poet’s consciousness to the reader, concerning the fundamental nature of time, identity, and existence. His 'प्रश्न रामसँ' (Praśna Rāmsaṅ - Question to Ram) is a masterclass in structural irony, using the venerable form of a devotional query to pose a devastating critique of the Ramayana's narrative logic from Sita's perspective.

Indian Aesthetics (Rasa-Dhvani): The dominant rasa here is śānta (peace/quietism) and vīra (heroism of the mind). The dhvani in poems like 'हे समय' (He Samay - O Time) is not of emotional outpouring but of existential vimarsha (reflection). The vīra rasa is internalized; it is the courage to face an indifferent cosmos and question one's place within it. The vakratā lies in the direct, unadorned speech, which paradoxically creates a profound sense of mystery. The simplicity is deceptive, hiding a complex web of philosophical allusions.

Videha Parallel History Framework (VPHF): Choudhary’s work constructs a parallel history of ideas. While mainstream history records political events, Sanes records the history of consciousness. The poem 'भामती' (Bhāmatī) does not narrate the external events of the life of the philosopher Vācaspati Miśra’s wife; it narrates the internal history of sacrifice, duty, and intellectual partnership. It proposes a parallel archive of emotion and sacrifice as being equally historical and significant as political battles. It elevates the domestic and the personal to the level of epic historical narrative.

Navya Nyaya Critique: The poem 'विचार' (Vichār - Thought) is a direct application of Navya Nyaya epistemology. The poem itself is a cintana (thought), which is then analyzed as a padārtha (category). The poet examines the definition (lakṣaṇa) of a thought: is it a wandering bird or a cut kite? He distinguishes (avaccheda) between transient mental events and the persistent self. The entire poem becomes a demonstration of tarka (reasoned argument) about the nature of consciousness, using poetic examples as logical udāharaṇa (examples). The poem doesn't just express confusion; it performs the act of philosophical categorization.

 

VII

Narayan Yadav: The Biographer as a Parallel Historian

Work: Salhaitā-Gurumaitā (सल्हैता-गुरुमैता)

Formalist-Structuralist Analysis: This is a work of biographical history, structured as a dual biography followed by smaller sketches. The book is divided into clear sections: one for the Salhaita lineage and one for the Gurumaita lineage. The narrative is chronological, tracing family origins and the pivotal role of individuals like Guder Salhaita and Ram Lashan Salhaita in the freedom struggle. The structure is genealogical, establishing lineages of resistance. The use of oral testimonies and family legends as primary sources is a deliberate formal choice, privileging smriti (memory) over conventional archival history.

Indian Aesthetics (Rasa-Dhvani): The rasa is undeniably vīra (heroism) and raudra (fury at the oppressor), leading to vībhatsa (disgust) for the colonial system. The dhvani of the entire work is the creation of a secular hagiography. The freedom fighters are presented as mahāpuruṣas (great men), but their greatness lies not in otherworldly power but in their worldly courage and sacrifice. The vakratā is in the perspective: the story is told not from the viewpoint of the nationalist leaders in Delhi, but from the fields and villages of Mithila, making the national movement a local, lived experience.

Videha Parallel History Framework (VPHF): This book is the quintessential example of the VPHF. It is a parallel history of the Indian freedom movement. While mainstream history focuses on Gandhi, Nehru, and Bose, this book chronicles the "foot soldiers" of the movement. The story of Ram Lashan Salhaita dying in jail after a hunger strike is not a footnote; in this framework, it is the main event. This is a history of dehati (rural) nationalism, of farmers and laborers who fought the British not in parliaments but in their own villages, creating a parallel archive of revolutionary sacrifice.

Navya Nyaya Critique: The book's implicit thesis can be analyzed as a logical siddhānta (established conclusion): that the freedom of India was won by the collective action of its ordinary citizens. The author provides udāharaṇa (examples) in the form of numerous life stories. Each story is a hetu (evidence) supporting the main thesis. The book engages in a form of tarka (hypothetical reasoning) by showing what would have happened if these individuals had not acted—the "if...then" of history. This is a logical reconstruction of historical causality using biographical data as its primary evidence.

Bibliographic Details

Full title: Salhaita-Gurmaita (सल्हैता-गुरुमैता) — Collection of Reminiscences by Shri Narayan Yadav. First edition: 2023. Price: ₹200. Copyright: Narayan Yadav. Pallavi Publication, Nirmali. 84 pp. Typography: Dr. Umesh Mandal.

Genre: Smaranatmak Lekha

Salhaita-Gurmaita is a work of historical reminiscence and biographical reconstruction focused on two freedom fighters of the Indian Independence movement from the Supaul region: Ram Lakshan Salhaita (martyred during the independence struggle) and Dev Narayan Gurmaita (a great independence fighter), along with their contemporaries Ram Phal Mandal and Anant Lal Kamati. The work belongs to the genre of smaranatmak lekha (reminiscence writing) — a form that straddles oral history, biography, and personal memoir.

Historical and Ideological Significance

The preface by the associate editor notes that despite their historical significance, none of the four freedom fighters had been the subject of a monograph before Narayan Yadav's work. This is precisely the kind of recovery project that the Videha Parallel History Framework champions: the retrieval from oblivion of non-Brahmin, subaltern freedom fighters whose contributions to India's independence movement have been systematically marginalised by mainstream historiography, which has focused on upper-caste leaders and national-level figures.

The Videha Parallel History Framework, as articulated by Gajendra Thakur, insists that the history of Mithila must be written from the genealogical records upward — from the Panji prabandh (genealogical manuscripts) through the oral traditions of non-Brahmin communities — rather than only from the Sanskrit-literate upper-caste archive. Narayan Yadav's method is consistent with this: his primary source is his own mother's oral testimony about the fighters, supplemented by multiple visits to the Salhaita and Gurmaita families and conversations with community elders. This is what Ranajit Guha would call "subaltern historiography" — the writing of history from below, from voices that do not appear in the colonial archive.

Postcolonial Analysis

Homi Bhabha's concept of "colonial ambivalence" — the coloniser's simultaneous attraction to and repulsion from the colonised — is useful for understanding what Salhaita-Gurmaita reveals about the colonial relationship. Ram Lakshan Salhaita and his compatriots operated within a colonial structure that simultaneously enrolled them in the apparatus of empire (through land revenue, law courts, and military recruitment) and subjected them to racial and class violence. Their acts of resistance were not simply anti-colonial; they were also anti-caste (the preface notes how their struggle was informed by a vision of social equality) — making them doubly subaltern in the Gramscian sense.

Narayan Yadav's work recovers these figures not as marble statues of nationalist martyrdom but as human beings embedded in family, community, and local geography. This is the "everyday life" historiography associated with Dipesh Chakrabarty's "provincialising Europe" project — the insistence that history must be written in terms of local specificity rather than the universal abstract categories of European historical thought.

Literary and Stylistic Analysis

As a literary work, Salhaita-Gurmaita demonstrates what Rasa theory would classify as the vira rasa (heroic sentiment) as its dominant emotional register — but a vira rasa tempered by karuna (compassion) for the sacrifices made and by shanta (serenity) in the author's retrospective tone. Narayan Yadav's prose style is accessible, warm, and infused with local Maithili idiom — the language of the Supaul region as spoken by OBC and lower-caste communities.

The Navya Nyaya epistemological frame is particularly useful here: this is a work primarily of shabda-pramana — knowledge from testimony — and Yadav is scrupulous about distinguishing what he knows from family oral tradition (which has the status of aaptavachana), what he knows from documentary sources (written evidence), and what he infers (anumana). This careful management of epistemic claims gives the work a credibility that distinguishes it from hagiographic freedom-fighter literature.

Critical Assessment

Salhaita-Gurmaita is, within its modest compass, an important work of subaltern historiography in Maithili. Its value is documentary as much as literary; it preserves oral memory before it is lost. Its limitation is that the literary shaping of the material — the transformation of oral testimony into crafted narrative — is only partially achieved; the work sometimes reads as transcribed recollection rather than composed prose. However, within the Videha Parallel History Framework, the act of preservation itself has a political dignity that transcends aesthetic polish. This is a book that needed to exist, and Narayan Yadav has brought it into existence with care and community fidelity.

 

VIII

Dr. Shubh Kumar Barnwal: The Geographer-Poet's Academic and Lyrical Cartography

Work: Badlait Gām (बदलैत गाम - The Changing Village), Rūsal Prakṛti (रूसल प्रकृति - Angered Nature), Shubh Chandrayaan, Shubh Baal Poti, etc.

Formalist-Structuralist Analysis: Dr. Barnwal’s work is characterized by a unique dual structure. His poetry is formally conventional, often using clear meters, end-rhymes, and stanzaic divisions, creating a song-like (gēya) quality. The structure is transparent, with a clear logical flow from one stanza to the next. This formal conservatism is a deliberate choice, creating an accessible, oral-aural quality. His non-academic prose (like Shubh Jyoti) uses a maxim-like, aphoristic structure, each paragraph a self-contained unit of wisdom. His academic work (Shubh Baal Poti) is structured as a graded primer, moving systematically from simple to complex concepts.

Indian Aesthetics (Rasa-Dhvani): His poetry aims for a clear, didactic rasa: often śānta (peace of understanding) or vīra (heroism of national pride, as in 'Shubh Chandrayaan'). The dhvani is of clarity and order. He wants to demystify complex subjects (geography, social change, science) and present them as accessible truths. The vakratā is minimal; his style is direct, which is itself a poetic choice. In a literary world that prizes ambiguity, Barnwal’s clarity is his unique form of vakrokti—a straight line that is, in its context, revolutionary.

Videha Parallel History Framework (VPHF): As a geographer, Dr. Barnwal is an expert in creating parallel histories of space and place. 'बदलैत गाम' is not just a collection of poems; it is a parallel history of rural geography. He maps the changes in land use, architecture, social relations, and economic activities in the Mithila village. This is a history of the khet (field), the pokhar (pond), the āṅgan (courtyard). 'रूसल प्रकृति' is a parallel history of the environment, chronicling the vipatti (disaster) of climate change from the perspective of the farmer who feels it in his bones, not the scientist who measures it in a lab.

Navya Nyaya Critique: The poem 'जलवायु परिवर्तन' (Jalvāyu Parivartan - Climate Change) is a perfect example of anumāna (inference) in poetry. It presents the hetu (sign/reason)—unseasonal rain, heat, crop failure—and infers the sādhya (proposition to be proved)—that the climate has indeed changed and is a man-made crisis. The entire poem functions as a pañcāvayava-vākya (five-membered syllogism):

1.      Pratijñā (Proposition): The climate is changing.

2.      Hetu (Reason): Because we are observing anasonhāṁt barakhā (unseasonal rains).

3.      Udāharaṇa (Example): Like in the month of Phalgun, which should be dry.

4.      Upanaya (Application): This year, it is raining in Phalgun.

5.      Nigamana (Conclusion): Therefore, the climate is changing.
His poetry makes the abstract logic of climate science concrete and irrefutable through lived experience.

 

IX

Jhauli Paswan: The Epic of the Oppressed and the Akshaya Patra of Hope

Work: Akṣay Pātra (अक्षय पात्र - The Inexhaustible Vessel)

Formalist-Structuralist Analysis: Paswan’s poetry is a powerful fusion of oral epic traditions and modern free verse. Many poems employ a repetitive, incantatory structure reminiscent of folk songs and jagar (awakening) chants. The title, Akṣay Pātra, is a potent symbol borrowed from the Mahabharata—a vessel that provides unlimited food. However, Paswan subverts this symbol: for the poet, the akṣay pātra is not divine grace but the people's collective struggle. The structure of the collection is cyclical, moving from a diagnosis of social ills to a prescription of collective action. Poems like 'प्रजातंत्रक रीढ' (Prajātantrak Rīḍh - The Backbone of Democracy) use a direct, declarative structure, listing failures and demands with anaphoric force.

Indian Aesthetics (Rasa-Dhvani): The dominant rasa is raudra (fury) transitioning into vīra (heroism). The dhvani is a call to arms. The suggestive power lies in the collective voice; even when the poet speaks as "I," the dhvani is always "we." The karuṇa rasa of oppression is present, but it is a catalyst, not a destination. It quickly ignites into the vīra rasa of resistance. The poem 'शब्द' (Shabd - Word) explores the dhvani of language itself, suggesting that words have the power to be either poison (gara) or nectar (piyūṣa), embodying the vakratā of moral choice.

Videha Parallel History Framework (VPHF): Paswan’s collection is a parallel history of the caste war. He writes a history not of kings and generals, but of the Bahujan (the majority), whose struggles against Brahminical patriarchy and feudal capitalism form the subtext of India's "official" history. 'पीढी-दर-पीढी' (Pīḍhī-Dar-Pīḍhī - Generation After Generation) explicitly rejects linear, progressive history and posits a cyclical history of trauma and revenge. This is a direct challenge to the VHPF's own premise; it doesn't just offer a parallel track but a repeating track of unresolved social conflict.

Navya Nyaya Critique: The title poem 'अक्षय पात्र' functions as a logical siddhanta (established conclusion). The poet defines the problem (hunger, poverty) and the false solutions (charity, ritual). He then establishes the hetu (reason/cause) for true abundance as collective, just action. The poem's logical force is its chain of inference: if you perform karma (action) with dharma (duty), then you will receive the fruit. It is a syllogism for social justice, presented not as a dry theorem but as an emotional and moral imperative, using the poetic form to make the vyāpti (invariable concomitance) between action and consequence experientially real for the reader.

Jhauli Paswan — Akshay Patra (अक्षय पात्र)

Bibliographic Details

Full title: Akshay Patra (अक्षय पात्र) — Anthology of Maithili Poems by Sh. Jhauli Paswan. ISBN: 978-93-93135-51-3. First edition: 2023. Price: ₹250. Copyright: Jhauli Paswan. Pallavi Publication, Nirmali. 124 pp. Typography: Dr. Umesh Mandal.

Authorial Significance

Jhauli Paswan is among the very few published Dalit poets writing in Maithili. His surname — Paswan — identifies him as belonging to the Scheduled Caste Pasi community of Bihar. In the context of Maithili literary history, a Dalit poet publishing in Maithili is itself a significant counter-hegemonic act. The Videha Parallel History Framework explicitly argues that the mainstream Maithili literary institution has historically excluded Dalit voices, and Akshay Patra is precisely the kind of text that the parallel tradition has created space for.

Title and Epigraph

The title Akshay Patra (inexhaustible vessel/bowl) invokes the mythological Akshaya Patra of the Mahabharata — the divine bowl that could feed unlimited people — as a metaphor for poetry itself: the poem is an inexhaustible vessel of nourishment for the community. This is a bold mythological claim, and it is immediately countered by the Sanskrit epigraph from the tradition of dana (gift-giving), suggesting that the book is offered as a gift with the gravity of religious ritual. Together, title and epigraph position Akshay Patra as a work of communal and spiritual service — a performance of what the Dalit literary tradition calls "sahitya se samaj nirman" (building society through literature).

Thematic Structure

Paswan's preface (Appan Baat — "My Own Words") opens with a hymn to Mai Maithili (Mother Maithili, the language personified as a goddess), immediately establishing his position within the devotional register of Maithili literature that runs from Vidyapati to the present. However, the preface quickly pivots to social analysis: it diagnoses India's educational system as deeply unequal (children of the privileged study in well-resourced private schools; children of the majority study on the ground by ponds), and connects this inequality to what the author calls "mansik gulami" (mental slavery) — the internalisation of subordination by the oppressed.

The collection's poems address a range of subjects: the natural world (prakriti), social injustice (samajik ashamataa), political inequality, the education system, superstition and religious obscurantism (andh vishwas), caste oppression (jati-utpiirhan), communalism (dharmandhataa), and the liberation potential of labour (shramik ki dala-dila — the heartbeat of the worker). The collection is essentially a Dalit poetics — a sustained attempt to represent the world from within the experience of social marginalisation.

Critical Analysis Through Multiple Frameworks

From the Indian classical perspective, Akshay Patra operates with what Bharata calls the bhavas (emotional states) associated with karuna (compassion), raudra (fury), and vira (heroic aspiration). The collection does not cultivate the shringara (erotic) or hasya (comic) rasas — genres historically associated with the courtly culture from which Dalit communities were excluded. This generic restriction is itself a political statement: Paswan's poetic universe is one of urgency, not aesthetic pleasure; of testimony, not ornament.

From the Western critical perspective, Akshay Patra participates in the tradition of Dalit autobiography and testimonio — what Latin American scholars call the "literature of witness." The poems are not merely aesthetic objects but acts of bearing witness to injustice. This aligns with the tradition of Frederick Douglass's slave narratives, Ambedkar's autobiographical writings, and the contemporary Dalit literary movement (Dalit Panthers, Namdeo Dhasal, Daya Pawar) that has emerged in Marathi and spread to other Indian languages.

The Navya Nyaya analysis of Akshay Patra reveals a characteristic epistemic structure: Paswan's poems frequently enact what Gangesa calls pratyaksha (perceptual cognition) as the primary evidence for their claims. Rather than constructing elaborate inferences or relying on shastra (scriptural authority), Paswan says: "I see this inequality; it is present to my direct perception; its truth requires no elaborate syllogism." This is the epistemological stance of the witness — and it carries its own authority in the Navya Nyaya framework, where pratyaksha is the foundational pramana from which anumana (inference) derives its validity.

The Videha Parallel History Framework provides the most comprehensive context for Akshay Patra. Gajendra Thakur's parallel tradition framework argues that Maithili's Dalit, OBC, and female voices have always existed but have been systematically silenced by the literary establishment. Jhauli Paswan's publication in the Pallavi series represents the materialisation of the parallel tradition in print: the conversion of marginalized oral voice into archivable, citable, teachable literary text. Akshay Patra is both a poem-collection and a political act of linguistic-cultural survival.

Linguistic Analysis

Paswan's Maithili is, like the other Pallavi authors, a vernacular koine that incorporates Hindi loanwords and regional idioms without apology. The preface is written partly in Devnagari-rendered Maithili with some phonological features typical of the Dalit-Paswan community's speech — a linguistic self-presentation that differs subtly from the prestige Maithili of the Brahmin-Kayastha mainstream. This difference is itself a form of political statement, consonant with the Videha framework's insistence on the linguistic democracy of the parallel tradition.

Critical Assessment

Akshay Patra is an uneven but important collection. Paswan is not consistently a polished versifier — some poems are more manifesto than lyric, and the prosodic organisation is occasionally rough. But the best poems in the collection — those describing the unequal classroom, the daily experiences of caste discrimination, and the redemptive possibilities of educated labour — achieve a directness and moral force that compensates for aesthetic irregularity. Within the tradition of Dalit Maithili poetry, Akshay Patra is a landmark: it is one of the very few published Dalit poetry collections in Maithili, and its existence is itself a monument to the parallel tradition's work of literary democracy.

Comparative Analysis and Synthesis

The Pallavi Publication Series as a Literary Ecosystem

Considered together, the  works under analysis constitute a coherent literary ecosystem rather than a random assortment of publications. They mostly share: a publisher (Pallavi Publication, Nirmali); a typographer (Dr. Umesh Mandal, who was also co-editor of Videha); a cover designer (Smt. Punam Mandal); a common font infrastructure; and a shared social-political orientation toward the parallel Maithili tradition. This is not merely logistical consistency — it represents the institutional structure of a counter-canonical literary movement.

The Videha Parallel History Framework helps us understand this ecosystem: the Pallavi series is one of the material embodiments of Gajendra Thakur's parallel tradition project. By providing cheap, well-produced books (prices ranging from ₹100 to ₹350) to writers who would otherwise have no access to publication, Pallavi Publication performs the infrastructure function that the Sahitya Akademi and other government bodies have historically reserved for their preferred authors. This is, in Gramscian terms, the construction of a counter-hegemonic cultural institution.

The Question of Genre

The  works span poetry, novel, grammar, narrative verse (kavyadhara), short fiction, and historical reminiscence. This generic diversity is itself significant: it suggests that the parallel Maithili tradition is not a single-genre movement but a comprehensive literary culture with its own canon-in-formation. The inclusion of a grammar text (Arya's Varna Prakarana) alongside novels and poetry marks the parallel tradition's investment in language infrastructure, not just literary production — a recognition that cultural survival requires both aesthetic creation and institutional linguistic work.

Rasa and Social Consciousness

Across all  texts, the dominant rasa-complex is what we might call "social karuna" — compassion not as a private, personal emotion but as a politically activated recognition of systemic injustice. This is a distinctive inflection of the karuna rasa: in Bharata's classical formulation, karuna arises from the depiction of suffering (dukha) and its appropriate resolution is weeping (ashru). In the Pallavi authors, the social-karuna complex transforms weeping into action: the poems of Ramji Prasad Mandal call for revolutionary politics; the novel Baukee calls for social inclusion; the histories of Narayan Yadav call for memory and recognition; the poems of Jhauli Paswan call for liberation. This is a Maithili rasa-aesthetics of social transformation.

Navya Nyaya as Critical Metalanguage

The application of Navya Nyaya across these texts reveals a consistent epistemological pattern: all  authors are engaged in the project of restructuring the vyapti (pervasion) relations that underpin their communities' worldviews. The false vyapti — "If Dalit, then incapable of literary achievement"; "If mute, then incapable of social authority"; "If female, then incapable of institutional power"; "If non-Brahmin, then unentitled to Vidyapati's inheritance" — is the common target of each text's argumentative and aesthetic strategy. Each author constructs a dushana (defeater) of these false pervasions through narrative demonstration, lyric argument, and historical testimony. This is the Navya Nyaya spirit of critical inquiry applied to the lived experience of caste, gender, and class.

Gangesa's Tattva-Cintamani (c. 1320 CE, composed in Mithila) was itself an act of intellectual democratisation: Navya Nyaya's rigorous logical method challenged the authority of received tradition (agama) in favour of critical inquiry (tarka). The Pallavi authors, fourteen generations after Gangesa, perform an analogous democratisation in the literary sphere: they challenge the received tradition of Brahmin-centred Maithili canon-formation in favour of the critical, testimonial voices of the socially marginalised.

The Videha Framework and Literary Justice

The Videha Parallel History Framework provides the most comprehensive macro-analytical context for these  works. As Gajendra Thakur has documented in Videha's extensive critical archive, the mainstream Maithili literary institution has for decades functioned as a gatekeeper, directing awards, anthologies, translations, and cultural recognition toward a narrow range of upper-caste authors while systematically excluding the voices of OBC, Dalit, female, and economically marginalised writers. The Pallavi series, in collaboration with the Videha ecosystem (Dr. Umesh Mandal serves as typographer for the Pallavi series and as co-editor of Videha), represents the parallel tradition's institutional alternative: a publishing infrastructure that practises literary justice as its operating principle.

This is not merely sociological observation — it has direct critical implications. When we evaluate the aesthetic achievements of these  texts, we must do so against the backdrop of the conditions under which they were produced: without institutional support, without academic mentorship, without translation budgets, and in a language that has only recently (2003) achieved recognition as a scheduled language under the Indian Constitution. The aesthetic imperfections that a conventional literary criticism might note — prosodic irregularity, schematic characterisation, occasional didacticism — are also symptoms of the conditions of subaltern literary production. They do not invalidate the texts' achievement; they contextualise it.

Final Conclusion

The  works analysed in this volume — Lal Rang Chahait Achhi Roti, two further poetic works of Ramji Prasad Mandal; Varna Prakarana Bhashya-Bhumika of Pandit Bal Govind Arya; Baukee and Bagwar of Rameshwar Prasad Mandal; Sapna Sakar of Ram Chandra Roy; Salhaita-Gurmaita of Narayan Yadav; and Akshay Patra of Jhauli Paswan — constitute a significant moment in the contemporary history of Maithili literature. They are evidence that the parallel tradition, as theorised by the Videha framework, is not merely a critical concept but a living, productive, institutionally grounded literary culture.

Applied together, the four analytical frameworks deployed in this appreciation — Indian classical rasa and dhvani theory, Western critical theory, the Videha Parallel History Framework, and Navya Nyaya epistemology — reveal different dimensions of this achievement:

Indian classical criticism shows us the aesthetic ambition of these texts: their mobilisation of rasa, dhvani, and vakrokti for purposes that classical theorists could not have anticipated but would have recognised as genuine literary achievement.

Western critical theory shows us the political unconscious of these texts: their participation in global discourses of subaltern resistance, feminist self-fashioning, postcolonial recovery, and the epistemology of witness.

The Videha Parallel History Framework shows us the institutional context of these texts: their place within a counter-canonical literary movement that has spent two decades building the infrastructure — journal, publisher, typographer, critic, archive — of literary justice in Maithili.

Navya Nyaya epistemology shows us the logical structure of these texts: their systematic dismantling of false vyapti (pervasion) relations that encode caste, gender, and class hierarchy, and their construction of new inferential structures that validate the claims of the socially marginalised to full human dignity, literary voice, and historical memory.

The works of Ramji Prasad Mandal, Pandit Bal Govind Arya, Rameshwar Prasad Mandal, Ram Chandra Roy, Narayan Yadav, and Jhauli Paswan do not all achieve the same level of artistic finish. Some are more polished, some more urgent; some more lyrical, some more documentary. But all are valuable — as literature, as history, and as acts of cultural survival. Together, they make the case, in Maithili, that the parallel tradition is not peripheral to Maithili literature but constitutive of it: the voice of Mithila in its full social diversity.

The Many-Sided Mirror of Videha

This analysis demonstrates that the nine authors are not a monolith but a vibrant collective of distinct, often contradictory, voices. They are unified by their medium—Maithili—and their project: to represent, critique, and preserve the life of Mithila.

·       Ramji Prasad Mandal gives voice to the subaltern's pain and dignity.

·       Pt. Bal Govind 'Arya' constructs the very grammatical skeleton of the language, a political act of legitimization.

·       Rameshwar Prasad Mandal experiments with epic form to celebrate the ordinary and narrate the agency of the voiceless.

·       Ram Chandra Roy holds a clear, reformist mirror to the social realities of his time.

·       Dr. Bacheshwar Jha builds the scholarly archive, proving Maithili's historicity and depth.

·       Kameshwar Choudhary turns the lyric into a tool for philosophical inquiry and existential questioning.

·       Narayan Yadav becomes the chronicler of the unsung heroes, building a parallel history of the freedom movement.

·       Dr. Shubh Kumar Barnwal applies the precision of a geographer to the fluidity of poetry, mapping the changes in land and life.

·       Jhauli Paswan writes the epic of the oppressed, infusing folk forms with a militant, revolutionary consciousness.

Together, they embody the Videha Parallel History Framework. They have created an alternative, multi-genre, multi-voiced archive of Mithila's 20th and 21st centuries. Using the logical rigor of Navya Nyaya and the aesthetic sensibility of Indian poetics, we can appreciate these works not just as art but as complex intellectual and historical documents. The responsibility of the reader, and of the critic, is to listen to the sanes (message) they send and to understand the world they collectively build, word by word, poem by poem, story by story. The future of Maithili criticism lies in this kind of synthetic, rigorous, and pluralistic approach, moving beyond simple praise to a deep, structural, and philosophical engagement with the texts.

 

 

Select Bibliography and References

Primary Texts (Pallavi Publication Series)

Mandal, Ramji Prasad. Lal Rang Chahait Achhi Roti. Nirmali: Pallavi Publication, 2023.

Arya, Pandit Bal Govind. Varna Prakarana Bhashya-Bhumika. Nirmali: Pallavi Publication, 2020.

Mandal, Rameshwar Prasad. Baukee. Nirmali: Pallavi Publication, 2024.

Mandal, Rameshwar Prasad. Bagwar. Nirmali: Pallavi Publication, 2023.

Roy, Ram Chandra. Sapna Sakar. Nirmali: Pallavi Publication, 2023.

Yadav, Narayan. Salhaita-Gurmaita. Nirmali: Pallavi Publication, 2023.

Paswan, Jhauli. Akshay Patra. Nirmali: Pallavi Publication, 2023.

Indian Classical Criticism

Bharatamuni. Natyashastra. Ed. M.R. Kavi. Baroda: Oriental Institute, 1956.

Anandavardhana. Dhvanyaloka. Trans. K. Krishnamoorthy. Dharwad: Karnatak University, 1974.

Kuntaka. Vakroktijivita. Trans. K. Krishnamoorthy. Dharwad: Karnatak University, 1977.

Abhinavagupta. Abhinavabharati (Commentary on Natyashastra). Ed. M.R. Kavi. Baroda: Oriental Institute, 1956.

Western Critical Theory

Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994.

Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination. Trans. M. Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981.

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990.

Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Trans. Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press, 2004.

Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981.

Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000.

Guha, Ranajit. Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983.

Genette, Gerard. Narrative Discourse. Trans. Jane Lewin. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980.

Gilbert, Sandra, and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979.

Ngugi wa Thiong'o. Decolonising the Mind. London: James Currey, 1986.

Navya Nyaya

Gangesa Upadhyaya. Tattva-Cintamani. Ed. Kamakhyanath Tarkavagisha. Calcutta: Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1884–1901.

Matilal, Bimal Krishna. Epistemology, Logic and Grammar in Indian Philosophical Analysis. The Hague: Mouton, 1971.

Potter, Karl. Encyclopaedia of Indian Philosophies. Vol. 2: Indian Metaphysics and Epistemology. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977.

Phillips, Stephen. Epistemology in Classical India: The Knowledge Sources of the Nyaya School. New York: Routledge, 2012.

Videha and Maithili Parallel Tradition

Thakur, Gajendra. Videha e-Journal (ISSN 2229-547X). www.videha.co.in. Since 2008.

Thakur, Gajendra. "Parallel Literature in Maithili and the Videha Maithili Literature Movement." Blog, 2023.

Thakur, Gajendra. Genome Mapping: 450 AD to 2009 AD — Mithilak Panji Prabandh. New Delhi: privately published, 2010.

Choudhary, Radhakrishna. A Survey of Maithili Literature. Darbhanga: Maithili Akademi, 1976.

Oommen, T.K. "Linguistic Diversity." In Sociology. National Law School of India University/Bar Council of India Trust, 1988.

 

अपन मंतव्य editorial.staff.videha@zohomail.in पर पठाउ।