विदेह

Gajendra Thakur

A PARALLEL HISTORY OF MAITHILI LITERATURE- PART 9

 

XIX

Heritage Without Glamour: Decline and the Mongrel Middle Period

The period roughly between 1600 and 1830 is characterised by Chaudhary as one of 'decadent documentary prose' and literary decline. The political context is significant: the Khandwala dynasty (from c. 1556 A.D.) revived Maithili patronage briefly under Mahesha Thakur and his successors, but the growing influence of Brajabhasha (the Hindi lingua franca of north Indian Vaishnava devotion, associated with the birthplace of Krishna) created a competitive environment for Maithili literature. The hybrid 'mongrel language' of the period-blending Maithili with Brajabhasha-lacked the polish of either. As Chaudhary puts it, 'The growing popularity of Brajabhasha was due to the fact that it was associated with the birth-place of Krishna, whose legends grew popular in the middle ages in the wake of the growing Vaishnava faith.'

This decline is paralleled in Bengal, where the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw a similar tension between vernacular Bengali and Brajabhasha in devotional literature, and in Assam, where the post-Sankaradeva period saw a gradual petrification of the Ankianata tradition. Yet the parallel histories diverge in one crucial respect: Bengali literature, buttressed by its larger demographic base and the economic energies of Mughal Bengal, maintained a richer literary output through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, while Maithili experienced a more pronounced fallow period.

XX

The New Awakening: Colonial Modernity and the Maithili Revival

The Grierson Effect

The colonial period brought a paradoxical intervention in Maithili literary history. George Abraham Grierson-the Irish civil servant and linguist who served in Bihar-was the first to produce a systematic grammar of Maithili (1881), a comprehensive bibliography of Maithili manuscripts, and a catalogue of Mithila MSS. His insistence that Maithili was a distinct language (rather than a dialect of Bengali or Bihari, as some contemporary scholars claimed) provided the intellectual armature for a Maithili nationalist movement. This is closely parallel to the role played by English Orientalists in legitimising Bengali and Sanskrit literary traditions during the Bengal Renaissance: the colonial gaze, however condescending, inadvertently catalysed native literary self-consciousness.

Chanda Jha and the Modern Renaissance

The figure of Chanda Jha (1831-1907) in modern Maithili literature is analogous to Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay in Bengali-both men who, in the mid-to-late nineteenth century, redirected their literary tradition toward new social and aesthetic purposes while anchoring it in a recovered vernacular pride. Chanda Jha's Mithila Bhasha Ramayan demonstrated that Maithili was capable of sustaining a sustained epic narrative-not merely devotional songs and documentary prose-and thereby challenged the dominant view of Maithili as a language 'fit only for light literature.' He served the court of Maharaja Lakshmishwar Singh of Darbhanga, and his work represents the best example of what colonial patronage and personal conviction could achieve for a subordinated literary tradition.

The website dedicated to Chanda Jha's legacy describes his contribution in terms that consciously parallel Vidyapati: 'What Vidyapati did for Maithili in the 14th Century has been done by Chanda Jha in the 19th Century and perhaps his contribution is more profound than the former.' This is the kind of retrospective canonisation that marks the consolidation of a literary tradition-the construction of a lineage that gives the present moment its authority.

The First Maithili Journal and Linguistic Politics

The first Maithili journal, Maithil-Hit-Sadhana, was founded in 1905 by Madhusudan Jha and Chandra Dutta Jha from Jaipur-the same year as the Partition of Bengal and the height of the Swadeshi movement. The parallel with Bengali and other regional literatures is unmistakable: across India, the early twentieth century saw a proliferation of vernacular journals and literary societies that functioned as vehicles of cultural nationalism. In Mithila, this movement was complicated by caste politics: the Darbhanga Raj's lackadaisical approach to Maithili, the literacy rate of barely five percent (concentrated almost entirely in upper-caste households), and the subordination of the lower castes to forms of cultural production they could not easily access, all constrained the emergence of a broad-based Maithili literary nationalism.

As the scholarly paper published in JETIR (2019) observes, 'these developments, detrimental to the emergence of a homogenous elite group, constricted their sense' of Maithili as a unified political identity. Vidyapati became the icon of the Maithili revival-but the revival's social base remained narrow compared to the Bengali and Hindi renaissances.

 

XXI

The Golden Trio and Twentieth-Century Modernity

Chaudhary's chapter 'The Golden Trio' refers to the cluster of eminent early-twentieth-century Maithili writers who synthesised the lyric heritage of the medieval period with the social and aesthetic concerns of modernity. Maithili prose fiction-the novel and short story-emerged in this period, with Hari Mohan Jha's satirical fiction and B.K. Verma 'Manipadma's dramas representing the two major achievements of mid-century literary modernism. The short story, in particular, developed in Maithili in close dialogue with the Bengali short story tradition-itself shaped by Tagore, Prabhat Kumar Mukhopadhyay, and Manik Bandyopadhyay-with Maithili writers adapting the form to the distinctive social textures of north Bihar: the joint family, the Panji genealogical system, the rituals of Maithila Brahmin life, and the poverty of the Kosi flood plain.

The poetry of the modern period extended the lyric tradition of Vidyapati while absorbing the influence of English Romantic and modernist forms. Sitaram Jha pioneered blank verse (Muktakakavya) in Maithili. Later poets engaged with the free verse revolution that swept across Indian literatures in the 1930s-50s, producing a genuinely modern Maithili poetic idiom while continuing to compose in the traditional Nacharis, Maheshvanis, and folk song forms that remained living parts of Mithila's cultural life.

The inclusion of Maithili in the Eighth Schedule of the Indian Constitution in 2003-after decades of advocacy-represents the most significant institutional recognition the language has received. It enables Maithili to be used as a medium of instruction, examined in competitive examinations, and supported with state resources for publication and cultural preservation. However, as the Wikipedia article on Maithili language notes, Maithili missed out on Classical Language status in the October 2024 round of recognitions (which included Assamese, Bengali, Marathi, Pali, and Prakrit) due to the absence of a formal proposal from the Bihar state government-a telling example of how political indifference can retard the recognition of literary traditions of great antiquity.

 

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