Maithili
Maithili is the only one of the Bihari dialects which has a literary history. For centuries the pandits of Mithila have been famous for their learning, and more than one Sanskrit work of authority has been written by them. One of the few learned women of India whose name has come down to us was Lakhima Thakkurani, who, according to tradition, lived at the end of the 14th century A.D. Nor was the field of vernacular literature neglected by them. The earliest vernacular writer, of whom we have any record, was the celebrated Vidyapati Thakkura or Thakur, who raced the court of Maharaja Siva Simka of Sugaona and who flourished in the middle of the loth century.
As a writer of Sanskrit works he was an author of considerable repute, and one of his works, translated into Bengali, is familiar as a text-book, under the name of the Purusa-parlksa, to every student of that language. But it is upon his dainty songs in the vernacular that his feuTe chiefly rests. He was the first of the old master- singers whose short religious poems, dealing principally with Radha and Krisna, exercised such an important influence on the religious history of Eastern India. His songs were adopted and enthusiastically recited by the celebrated Hindu reformer Caitanya, who flourished at the beginning of the sixteenth century, and, through him, became the house-poetry of the Lower Provinces. Numbers of imitators sprung up, many of whom wrote in Vidyapati’s name, so that it is now difficult to separate the genuine from the imitations, especially as in the great collection of these Vaisnava songs, the Pada-kaipa-taru, which is the accepted authority in Bengal, the former have been altered in the course of generations to suit the Bengali idiom and metre. The Pada-kaipa-taru was ihe only record that we had of the poet’s vernacular works, till, in the first edition of the Maithili Chrestomathy, the present writer was enabled to publish a collection of songs attributed to Vidyapati, which he collected in Mithila itself, partly from the mouths of itinerant singers and partly from manuscript collections in the possession of local pandits. That all the songs in this collection are genuine is not a matter capable of proof, but there can be little doubt that most of them are so, although the language has been greatly modernised in the course of transition from mouth to mouth during the past five centuries. A larger collection of these songs has been made by Babu Nagendra Xath Gupta, and will, it is believed, shortly be published.
Vidyapati Thakkura or, as he is called in the vernacular, Bidyapati Thakur, had many imitators in Mithila itself, of whom we know nothing except the names of the most popular, and a few stray verses. Amongst them may be mentioned Umapati, Nandipati, Moda-narayana, Ramapati, Mahipati, Jayananda, Caturbhuja, Sarasarama, Jayadeva, Kesava, Bhanjana, Cakrapani, Bhanunatha, and Harsanatha or, in the vernacular, Harkh-nath. The last two were alive when the present writer was in Darbhanga thirty years ago.
Amongst other writers in Maithili may be mentioned Manbodh Jha, who died about the year 1788 A.D. He composed a Haribans, or poetical life of Krsna, of which ten cantos are still extant, and enjoy great popularity.