Session 5: Christopher L. Diamond
From Courtyard to Canon: De-Domesticating Sita in Nineteenth-Century Maithili Rāmāyaṇas
Chair: Camille Buat
Respondent: Nupur Choudhary
- Wednesday 2026-07-08 09:00-10:30
- Location: Seminar Room
- Type: session
This paper examines two nineteenth-century Maithili re-tellings of the Rāmāyaṇa tradition in Maithili Rāmakathā, Candā Jhā’s Mithilā Bhāṣā Rāmāyaṇa (c. 1892) and Lāldās’s Rāmeśvaracarit Mithilā Rāmāyaṇa (1899), as twin projects of literary and regional self-inscription. I argue that their “Maithilīkaraṇa” (Maithilisation) of the Rama narrative proceeds through a gendered paradox: Brahmin male authors de-domesticate Sita from women’s oral song genres, such as gālī, samadāuni, and kohalabār—into a classical epic register, precisely in order to domesticate Rama. By transitioning the hero from a distant prince of the centre to a naturalised janai (son-in-law) bound by local household, ritual, and genealogical order, they relocate the narrative’s sacred and affective centres from Ayodhya, or India more generally, to the site-specific landscapes and domestic soundscapes of Mithila.
Engaging with the ‘Many Ramayanas’ paradigm, the paper attends to the specific mechanics of this relocation, reading both epics against the colonial philological horizon in which they arose. Both texts were composed when Mithila was being actively archived by colonial interlocutors and scholars while simultaneously facing the encroachment of Hindi as a foreign administrative idiom. Candā Jhā and Lāldās write for a doubled audience, namely, a local Maithil public and an emergent Western scholarly critique. A final section examines how these poets negotiate the doubled pressure of colonial philology and a Hindi-dominated vernacular sphere at every prosodic turn. By adopting the Old Hindi caupāī–dohā prosodic forms of the Rāmcaritmānas while integrating Maithili chandas and musical modes, they enact a formal mobility that mirrors the centre-periphery negotiations of the narrative itself.