The “Indescribable Country”: Locating Mithila between Bengal and the Hindi Heartland in Raghunandana Das’s Mithilānāṭaka

Abstract

This article examines the way multilingualism was employed by Raghunandana Das in his 1923 play, the “Drama of Mithila” (_mithilānāṭaka_), to shift Mithila (the region) and Maithili (the language) from its historically marginal position in the social geography of the newly emerging Indian nation. Since the late nineteenth century up to the present, Maithil authors and elites engaged in promoting their language and cultural region on a national stage found themselves disadvantaged and caught between the hegemony of the Hindi heartland and the political and cultural powerhouse of Bengal. In this context, Raghunandana Das’s moralistic drama written in Maithili, Hindi, Bengali, and Sanskrit renegotiates Maithili/Mithila’s marginal status by emphasizing its engagement with multiple elite cultural milieux—the national, the Sanskritic/traditional, and the modern. For Das, this renegotiation works to leverage the region’s credentials as an independent cultural sphere from which others might take influence. Show more