Session 2: Ankita Choudhary
Printing Mithila: Vernacular Media, Linguistic Belonging, and the Making of the Maithili Public
Chair: Christopher L. Diamond
Respondent: David Boyk
- Tuesday 2026-07-07 11:00-12:30
- Location: Seminar Room
- Type: session
Language movements do not emerge solely from shared speech; they are produced through media, institutions, and practices that render language visible, legible, and politically actionable. Scholarship on print and linguistic publics has demonstrated that vernacular print cultures play a decisive role in transforming spoken idioms into standardized languages and in enabling speakers to imagine themselves as part of a collective linguistic community (Anderson 1983; Orsini 2002; Pollock 1998; Robb 2020). In multilingual South Asia, journals, magazines, and newspapers were not merely channels of communication but key sites where linguistic boundaries were debated, cultural histories narrated, and vernacular publics constituted often in ways that both aligned with and contested dominant nationalist projects (Chatterjee 1993; Ghosh 2006).
This paper examines the Maithili language movement in north Bihar (India) and the Terai region of Nepal by foregrounding print as the primary site through which linguistic belonging was formed, circulated, and stabilized. Focusing on non-metropolitan urban centres such as Darbhanga and Janakpur, it argues that Maithili print culture did not simply reflect a pre-existing linguistic identity but actively produced it. Early twentieth-century Maithili journals and magazines such as Mithila Mihir, Mithila Moda, and Maithil Hit Sadhana played a crucial role in standardizing linguistic forms, articulating collective grievances, and consolidating a sense of belonging among dispersed Maithili speakers. Edited and contributed to by figures such as Babu Bhola Lal Das, Bhuwaneshwar Singh ‘Bhuwan’, Surendra Jha ‘Suman’, and Ramanath Jha, these publications helped transform Maithili from an everyday spoken vernacular into a politically legible language.
Although many of these journals featured Hindi and Sanskrit alongside Maithili, their ideological centre remained firmly vernacular. Through editorials, essays, literary pieces, and polemical interventions, they addressed questions of linguistic status, cultural reform, and regional marginalization, thereby constructing a “Maithili public” that cut across caste, regional, and national boundaries. By tracing how print media shaped linguistic belonging in Darbhanga and Janakpur, this paper highlights the centrality of vernacular print in the making of minority language movements in postcolonial South Asia.