A Language without a State: Early Histories of Maithili Literature

Abstract

Although Grierson had attempted to establish its identity as a distinctive language, the claim of Maithili as an independent language was almost muffled in the colonial period by the Hindi juggernaut and the ongoing Hindi-Urdu conflict. Maithili’s misidentification either as a dialect of Bengali or Hindi played a major role in undermining its status as a separate language for long. In the colonial period Oriya was also claimed by the Bengali scholars as a 28 SHSS 2016 dialect of Bengali but unlike Maithili, itdid not lose its script with the advent of the printing press and could establish its claim as a distinct language. In post-Independence period this controversy resurfaced but the problem of the anachronistic reading of linguistic history, in calling a six hundred -year old language a dialect of a relatively new umbrella-language Hindi, was almost settled after the distinctiveness of Maithili was acknowledged by the Sahitya Akademi and the Indian Constitution.