Gajendra Thakur
A PARALLEL HISTORY OF MITHILA & MAITHILI LITERATURE- PART 61
A COMPLETE CRITICAL APPRECIATION OF RAMDEO PRASAD MANDAL 'JHARUDAR' Mithila's Bhikhari Thakur First Jan Kavi of Maithili Inventor of the Jhārū Literary Form With Reference to Indian and Western Critical Theories, Navya-Nyāya Epistemology of Gangeśa, , and the Videha Parallel History Framework
A COMPLETE CRITICAL APPRECIATION OF
RAMDEO PRASAD MANDAL 'JHARUDAR'
Mithila's Bhikhari Thakur First Jan Kavi of Maithili Inventor of the Jhārū Literary Form
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With Reference to Indian and Western Critical Theories,
Navya-Nyāya Epistemology of Gaṅgeśa,
, and the Videha Parallel History Framework
TABLE OF CONTENTS
I. Prefatory Note: Framing the Appreciation
II. Biographical Introduction: The Farmer-Bard of Mithila
III. The Invention of the Jhārū: A New Literary Form
IV. Survey of Works: Hamara Binu Jagat Sunnaa Chhai (2012) and Gatanjali Jharoo (2018)
V. Thematic and Ideological Analysis
VI. Critical Appreciation: Western Literary Theories
VII. Critical Appreciation: Indian Aesthetics, Nāṭyaśāstra, and Rasa Theory
VIII. Navya-Nyāya Epistemology of Gaṅgeśa Upādhyāya Applied to Jharudar's Poetry
IX. Comparative Study: Jharudar among Maithili Writers and Beyond
X. Jharudar and Bhikhari Thakur: The Jan Kavi Tradition
XI. Jharudar and Nagarjuna (Yatri): Two 'People's Poets' Compared
XII. Reception and Legacy
XIII. Conclusions: Literary Significance and the Jharū's Future
XIV. Bibliography and References
I. PREFATORY NOTE: FRAMING THE APPRECIATION
Ramdeo Prasad Mandal 'Jharudar' occupies a unique position in the landscape of Maithili literature: he is simultaneously inventor, practitioner, and populariser of an entirely new literary genrethe jhārūand the first writer to be widely recognised as the Jan Kavi ('People's Poet') of Maithili from a non-Brahmin, non-elite social background. Gajendra Thakur, editor of Videha: First Maithili Fortnightly eJournal (ISSN 2229-547X, est. 2000), has titled him 'Mithila's Bhikhari Thakur'invoking the legendary Bhojpuri playwright-poet Bhikhari Thakur (18871971), the low-caste barber who became the most celebrated voice of Bhojpuri folk theatre.
This critical appreciation draws on two primary sources from Jharudar's own pen: Hamara Binu Jagat Sunnaa Chhai (Shruti Publications, New Delhi, 2012; ISBN 978-93-80538-70-9), a collection of gīt (songs) and jhārū poems, and Gatanjali Jharoo (Pallavi Publications, Nirmali, 2018; ISBN 978-93-87675-61-2), his second major anthology. Both texts are examined in light of Indian aesthetics, Western critical theory, and the Navya-Nyāya epistemological methodology of Gaṅgeśa Upādhyāyathe great 13th14th century Maithili logician whose Tattvacintāmaṇi ('Wish-Fulfilling Gem of Truth') founded the Navya-Nyāya school of Indian logic.
II. BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION: THE FARMER-BARD OF MITHILA
Ramdeo Prasad Mandal 'Jharudar' was born into a non-elite, farming family of the Koshi-Kamla-Balan river-belt of Mithila (Bihar), the heartland of the Maithili-speaking world. The pen name 'Jharudar' is itself a literary manifesto: jhārodar means 'one who wields the broom' or 'bearer of the broom,' announced by the invented literary form of the jhārū poem. He lives in and works from the agricultural landscape of Mithila, carrying his poetic compositions on his back as he works the fields, rides a buffalo, and walks the village pathsa compositional practice that Gajendra Thakur describes in his preface (āmukh) to Hamara Binu Jagat Sunnaa Chhai (2012): 'Ramdeo Prasad Mandal Jharudar wanders the forest and the fields, and what he writes spontaneouslythat is distinctive; it will be.'
His educational background is limited by the standards of the dominant Maithili literary establishment: he has not received formal higher education in literature or Sanskrit. Yet this 'limitation' is, as Gajendra Thakur recognises, precisely the ground of his literary powerhis Maithili is the Maithili of the people, dense with rural idiom, proverbial wisdom, and lived experiential truth. Thakur notes in his 2012 āmukh that Jharudar 'has invented a new genre in Maithili literaturethe jhārūand no one before him in Maithili (or any other literature) has done this.'
His published work (known from the two volumes under study) spans gīt (lyric songs), jhārū poems (his invented form), and participates in the Videha movement's project of recovering and celebrating the literary voices of Mithila's non-elite communities. Jharudar describes his mother as his first guru: his āmukh poem in Hamara Binu Jagat Sunnaa Chhai opens: 'mā ke smṛti tine / prernā mā-bābūk saṃskārasaṃ prerṭ millai hame ī udes' ('Inspirationmy mother's and father's values directed me to this purpose'). He acknowledges collaboration from Nittu Kumari, Nagendra Thakur, Umesh Mandal, and Gajendra Thakur.
III. THE INVENTION OF THE JHĀRŪ: A NEW LITERARY FORM
3.1 Etymology and Definition
The jhārū (झाड़ू) is the brooman instrument of sweeping and cleaning. In Mithila, there are multiple kinds of brooms: the kharhā (made of stiff stalks for outdoor sweeping), the phulsokha (the feathery indoor broom), the lāṭhi-jhārū (stiff-stalk broom for clearing refuse). Jharudar's āmukh explains the genre name with characteristic precision: 'Phulsāru se khirihan nahi bahal haet, āu kharṛā se osārā nahi bahāri sakai chhi. Lāṭhime rāhṛik ḍoṭ ke jhāru se jhol-jhāl sāph kayal jāie.' ('You cannot sweep the threshing floor with a soft broom; you cannot sweep the veranda with a coarse one. With the stiff-stalk broom one clears slop and waste.') The jhārū poem, then, is the literary implement specifically designed to sweep away society's slop: its corruption, superstition, casteism, dowry practice, political hypocrisy, and environmental destruction.
3.2 Formal Structure of the Jhārū
Each jhārū poem in both collections follows a characteristic bipartite structure. The poem opens with a two-line couplet (the 'jhārū couplet' proper)a compressed moral or critical statement, often paradoxical or punning, that names the social evil to be swept away. This is followed by a gīt (song) section of multiple stanzas with a refrain, that develops the theme introduced by the couplet. The relationship between the couplet and the song is not merely sequential but epistemological: the couplet poses the problem (the sādhyathe 'to-be-proved' proposition in Navya-Nyāya logical terms) and the song constructs the argument, adduces the evidence (pramāṇas), and arrives at the conclusion.
Consider the opening jhārū from Hamara Binu Jagat Sunnaa Chhai:
[Jhārū couplet, poem 1, Hamara Binu Jagat Sunnaa Chhai]
ḌUbal hind' ajān ke sāgar, tapi rahval achi lobh bukhār.
Śāśako taṃ bacit nai dekhābai, ke karatai eṣṭar upacār.
(India drowns in the ocean of ignorance, burning with the fever of greed.
The rulers cannot see it; who will apply the remedy?)
This couplet deploys a medical metaphor (bukhār = fever; upacār = treatment) to frame political corruption as a disease, then the song 'Mānav mārai chhai mānavatāke / caṛhi gelair ajān yau' ('Man kills humanity / ignorance has prevailed') develops the argument through multiple social stanzas.
3.3 The Jhārū as Genre Innovation in World Literature
To assess the novelty of the jhārū as a literary form, it is worth situating it within the global taxonomy of poetic forms that combine moral critique with folk-lyric structures. The closest analogues are: (1) the Bhojpuri birahaa form of separation-lament that Bhikhari Thakur used to social-critical purpose; (2) the Kabir dohathe two-line couplet that distils moral and spiritual wisdom; (3) the Blues form in African-American traditiona three-line stanza where the first two lines state the problem and the third offers resolution or ironic resignation; (4) the Irish ballad tradition, particularly the political ballad. None of these, however, combines the formal bipartite structure (couplet + song) with the specific naming device (the instrument of social cleansing) that Jharudar has innovated. The jhārū is genuinely original.
IV. SURVEY OF WORKS
4.1 Hamara Binu Jagat Sunnaa Chhai (2012)
Published by Shruti Publications (New Delhi) in 2012, this is Jharudar's first major collection. The title'Without Me the World Is Empty'announces the poet's central metaphysical claim: it is the voice of the common Maithili person, the farmer-labourer-woman, that is the world's true content. Without that voice, the world (jagat) is mere vacancy (sunnā). The collection contains a Prārthanā (prayer), a Jhaṇḍā Gīt (flag song celebrating Indian national identity through Mithila's perspective), multiple gīt, and numerous jhārū poems. A preface (āmukh) by Gajendra Thakur (dated 18 May 2012) establishes the literary-historical significance of the collection and names Jharudar 'Mithila's Bhikhari Thakur.'
The collection is organised thematically: social issues (dowry, superstition, caste), political critique (corrupt politicians and officials), environmental consciousness (deforestation, pollution), women's empowerment, and the pride and pain of Mithila. Thakur's preface notes the philosophical range: 'Now seek in this jhārū the Buddhist philosophy of śūnyavāda and Śaṃkara's advaita philosophy!' an observation that positions even Jharudar's apparently 'simple' folk poetry within the deepest currents of Indian philosophical thought.
4.2 Gatanjali Jharoo (2018)
The second major collection, published by Pallavi Publications (Nirmali, Supaul, 2018), represents a formal deepening of the jhārū project. The title is a compound: gatajali (from the Sanskrit ajalian offering with cupped handscombined here with gat, 'gone/past') + jharoo, suggesting 'the broom offered in memory of what has been lost,' or alternatively 'the sweeping away of the past.' The book is organized into numbered gīt (122) followed by thematic jhārū sections: nārī jhārū (brooms on women's issues), bāl jhārū (brooms on children's issues), rājanīti jhārū (political brooms), śikṣā jhārū (educational brooms), paryāvaraṇa jhārū (environmental brooms), sāmpradāyikatā jhārū (communal-harmony brooms), krishi jhārū (agricultural brooms), and bhraṣṭācār jhārū (anti-corruption brooms). This systematic topical organization indicates a mature literary project that is simultaneously poetic and sociological.
V. THEMATIC AND IDEOLOGICAL ANALYSIS
5.1 The Central Assertion: 'Hamara Binu Jagat Sunnaa Chhai'
The title-poem's claimthat without the common person (hamara = us/me) the world is emptyis a political-ontological statement of considerable philosophical depth. It inverts the hierarchy of Mithila's classical literary culture, in which the world derives meaning from the king's patronage, the Brahmin's learning, or the deity's grace. For Jharudar, the world's meaning resides in the labouring, farming, suffering, and resisting masses of Mithila. This is closer to Marx's 'species-being' (Gattungswesen) than to any purely religious frame, though Jharudar expresses it through an idiom saturated with Maithili folk-devotional forms.
[from poem 1, Hamara Binu Jagat Sunnaa Chhai]
Hamara binā ke ī dukh haratai
Ahaṃsaṃ ī sabh dānav maratai
Kalamakai eka bera pher banābu
Rāmak tīr kamān yau.
(Without us who will remove this suffering / From us alone all these demons will die /
Make the pen once more into / The bow and arrow of Rama, friend.)
5.2 Social Critique: Anti-Superstition, Anti-Dowry, Anti-Casteism
Jharudar's most sustained thematic concern is the liberation of Mithila's peopleparticularly women and the rural poorfrom the triple burden of superstition (andhviśvās), dowry (dahej), and caste hierarchy (jāti-pāti). His anti-superstition poems attack the culture of temple offerings as a substitute for rational action ('Māṃgnese jab devtā daitai / nirghan-niput koi kie rahtai?''If prayer alone worked, why would anyone remain childless and poor?'). His dowry poems are among the most passionate and politically clear in the collection:
[Jhārū on dowry, Hamara Binu Jagat Sunnaa Chhai]
Āi har gharame Sītā roai chhai
Rāit-rāit bhari nai Janaka sutai chhai
Katae saṃ etai dahejak paisā
Hetai kenā kanyādān yau.
(Today in every home Sita weeps /
Night after night, Janaka cannot sleep /
From where will the dowry money come /
How will the daughter's gift-giving be accomplished?)
5.3 Women's Empowerment: 'Nāri Sītā Rādhā Aṃśa'
Jharudar's women's poetry occupies a distinctive space: it celebrates women's divinity ('Nāri Sītā Rādhā aṃśa / Puruṣa banalair Rāvaṇ kaṃśa''Woman is the part of Sita and Radha / Man has become Ravana and Kansa') while simultaneously calling for women's self-assertion, education, and refusal of subjugation. His poem 'Hama miṭhalānī Mithilā ke nāri / rahbai nai kamajor yau' ('We are Mithila's women / We shall not remain weak') is a declaration of feminist resolve rooted in Maithili folk tradition.
5.4 Environmental Consciousness: The Poet as Ecological Activist
One of Jharudar's most distinctive contributions is his sustained attention to environmental degradation. His pollution jhārū poemson air, water, and sound pollution; on deforestation and the destruction of rivers, lakes, and wetlandsare among the earliest sustained ecologically conscious poetry in Maithili. The jhārū on pollution reads: 'Vijānak ī den dūṣaṇ / bani ghar ghusal cuhār yau. / Bāgh bani ī muṃh baunel achi / duniyā banal sikār yau.' ('Science's gift, pollution / Has entered the home like a rat / It has opened its tiger-mouth / And the world has become prey.')
5.5 Political Critique: Accountability Without Ideology
Jharudar's political poetry is notable for its non-partisan quality: he attacks the systems of corruption (bhraṣṭācār), self-serving governance (lūt), and the exploitation of the poor regardless of which political formation is in power. His poem addressing Bihar's Chief Minister Nitish Kumar'Kemrāsaṃ tasvīr banebbai / Mithilā maithil parivār ker / Takrā dekhebbai Paṭnā jā kai / Vikās put Nītiśa Kumārake'is satirical rather than partisan: it offers the photographic evidence of Mithila's underdevelopment (unirrigated fields, broken homes, crumbling infrastructure) as a gift of truth to the 'development son' Nitish Kumar.
VI. CRITICAL APPRECIATION: WESTERN LITERARY THEORIES
6.1 Oral Poetry Theory: Albert Lord and Walter Ong
Albert Lord's foundational study of oral-formulaic poetry (The Singer of Tales, 1960), building on Milman Parry's work on Homeric composition, identified the key features of oral-traditional poetry: the formula (a fixed phrase or hemistich repeated across many poems), the theme (a repeated narrative or descriptive element), and the story-pattern (a recurring structural shape). Jharudar's jhārū poems exhibit all three. His formulas include repeated opening phrases such as 'Sabh banal chhai paisā rogī' ('All have become diseased with money') and 'Jāti dharm mānavatā bhedī' ('Caste-religion divides humanity'); his themes of dowry, superstition, and corruption recur with variation across both collections; his story-pattern of social-problem-stated → cause-analysed → solution-proposed → refrain is the structural backbone of the jhārū form itself.
Walter Ong's Orality and Literacy (1982) identifies the characteristics of oral-tradition thinking as 'additive rather than subordinative, aggregative rather than analytic, situational rather than abstract, empathetic and participatory rather than objectively distanced.' All of these characteristics describe Jharudar's compositional mode: his poems accumulate images additively, they create social solidarity through participatory refrains, they situate critique in specific named social locations (Mithila's farms, its political offices, its dowry-devastated homes), and they invite empathetic engagement through the folk-song form.
6.2 Gramsci: The Organic Intellectual and Folk Culture
Antonio Gramsci's concept of the 'organic intellectual' (Prison Notebooks, 192935)the intellectual who emerges from within a subaltern class and develops the class's own self-consciousnessis precisely applicable to Jharudar. Unlike the 'traditional intellectual' who is divorced from production and claims universal authority, the organic intellectual speaks from within the productive community. Jharudar's identity as a farmer who composes poetry on his buffalo's back, on field boundaries, and on village paths, is not incidental to his literary authority but constitutive of it. He is Mithila's rural working community thinking through the medium of art.
Gramsci also wrote extensively on folklore as a 'conception of the world' of the subaltern classesnot a merely decorative survival but a coherent (if fragmentary and unsystematic) world-view that exists in tension with the dominant 'official' culture. Jharudar's jhārū form is precisely such a folkloric world-view given systematic literary shape: it draws on the existing resources of Maithili folk song (the gīt form, the refrain structure, the communal mode of address) and inflects them with a consistent critical consciousness.
6.3 Bertolt Brecht and the Didactic Function of Folk Art
Bertolt Brecht's theory of Epic Theatrewith its insistence on the pedagogical function of drama, its Verfremdungseffekt (estrangement effect), and its direct address to the audience as rational agents rather than passive emotional subjectsfinds a striking parallel in Jharudar's jhārū mode. Brecht wanted theatre to make the audience think, not merely feel; to see the social world as changeable rather than natural. Jharudar's jhārū couplets operate precisely as estrangement devices: they defamiliarise the familiar social evil (dowry, superstition, corruption) by naming it with a sharp, often punning phrase that makes it appear strange and therefore criticisable. The question at the end of each jhārū refrain'ke karatai eṣṭar upacār?', 'hetai kenā navakā vihān?'functions exactly as Brecht's gestus: a physical or linguistic gesture that crystallises the social meaning of a situation.
6.4 Feminist Literary Theory: Adrienne Rich and the Politics of Location
Adrienne Rich's concept of 'the politics of location' (Blood, Bread, and Poetry, 1986) argues that all literary knowledge is situatedproduced from within a specific body, geography, and social positionand that this situatedness is not a limitation to be transcended but the ground of authentic literary authority. Jharudar's nārī jhārū poems speak from a politics of location that is simultaneously inside and outside women's experience: as a man from a marginalised community, he writes about women's oppression with deep empathetic understanding but also with a solidarity that recognises the structural parallels between caste-oppression and gender-oppression. His poem 'Nārī sītā rādhā aṃśa / Puruṣa banalair rāvaṇ kaṃśa' is a feminist analysis conducted through the idiom of the Maithili cultural imaginary.
6.5 Bakhtin: The Carnivalesque and Folk Humour
Mikhail Bakhtin's analysis of the carnivalesque in Rabelais and His World (1965) and the concept of dialogism in The Dialogic Imagination (1981) illuminate the social function of Jharudar's comic-satirical mode. Bakhtin describes the carnival as a temporary inversion of social hierarchy in which the body, laughter, and popular language overthrow official culture. Jharudar's jhārū poems perform exactly this carnivalesque function: they use the popular folk-song form, the earthy rural imagery (buffalo, broom, field, latrine), and vigorous satirical humour to expose and ridicule the pretensions of Mithila's social and political elite. The broom is itself a carnivalesque instrument: associated with the lowest social labour (sweeping, cleaning), it is wielded here to strip the powerful of their dignity.
6.6 Postcolonial Theory and the Vernacular
Ngugi wa Thiong'o's argument in Decolonising the Mind (1986) for writing in African vernacular languages as an act of cultural self-determination finds a precise Maithili parallel in Jharudar's insistence on composing entirely in Maithili. He does not aspire to Hindi, English, or Sanskrit legitimation; his literary authority is claimed through the vernacular itself. This is a specifically postcolonial linguistic politics: the refusal to use the colonial or elite language as the medium of one's literary ambition.
VII. CRITICAL APPRECIATION: INDIAN AESTHETICS, NĀṬYAŚĀSTRA, AND RASA THEORY
7.1 Bharata's Nāṭyaśāstra: Rasa in the Jhārū Poems
Bharata Muni's Nāṭyaśāstra (c. 200 BCE200 CE) defines the aesthetic experience of art through the concept of rasathe 'juice' or 'flavour' that a work produces in the cultivated reader/spectator through the alchemical combination of vibhāva (stimulant/cause), anubhāva (consequent/response), and vyabhicāribhāva (transitory emotions). Jharudar's jhārū poems are rich in rasa, though the rasas they evoke are not the dominant courtly rasas (śṛṅgāra, vīra) but the socially critical ones:
Karuṇa rasa (pathetic/compassionate): The dominant rasa of the women's and poverty poems. The vibhāva is the specific social condition described (the Sita who weeps every night for want of dowry money; the 'sick world' where children labour while passengers debate child labour). The anubhāva is the reader's compassionate sorrow. This rasa is sustained without sentimentality by Jharudar's refusal of melodrama.
Raudra rasa (furious/wrathful): The jhārū poems on corruption and political hypocrisy evoke controlled anger (raudra)not the uncontrolled fury that Bharata associates with villains, but the righteous anger of the social critic who refuses to be silenced.
Hāsya rasa (comic/ironic): Jharudar's satirical mode produces a particular kind of hāsyanot mere laughter but the bitter comedy of recognition, close to what Bergson (in Le Rire, 1900) identified as laughter at the mechanical encrusted on the living. His political satire is rich in this double-edged comedy.
Bībhatsa rasa (disgusting/grotesque): The pollution poems and the dowry poems use elements of the disgusting (bībhatsa) to estrange the reader from social evils that familiarity has normalised: 'Vijānak ī den dūṣaṇ / bani ghar ghusal cuhār yau' ('Science's gift pollution / has entered the home like a rat').
Vīra rasa (heroic): The women's empowerment poems and the calls for social solidarity evoke a 'subaltern vīra'not the warrior-king's heroism but the heroism of the ordinary person who claims dignity and refuses subjugation. 'Āba nai nārī rahab anārī / banabai saktī kaṭhor yau' ('Now women will not remain illiterate / We will become strong and firm').
7.2 Dhvani Theory: The Resonant Unsaid
Ānandavardhana's Dhvanyāloka (c. 850 CE) argues that the highest literary achievement consists not in what is directly stated (vācya) but in what is suggested (dhvani)the resonant unstated meaning. While Jharudar's poems are notably more direct than the dhvani-rich classical Sanskrit poetry (a directness appropriate to his folk-oral mode), his best jhārū couplets achieve remarkable suggestive power. The couplet 'Jāi gharame hoī nārī pūjā / O ghar hoi chhai svarg samān. / Oi gharake taṃ naraike mānu / Jetae hoī nārik apamān' ('The home where women are worshipped / Is like heaven. / Consider that home hell / Where women are dishonoured') achieves its force not through its explicit comparison but through its dhvani: the implication that most homes are hell, that Mithila's reality is the second stanza not the first.
7.3 Loka Dharma and the Nāṭyaśāstra's Social Register
Bharata's Nāṭyaśāstra stipulates that drama should serve the dharma of the loka (people)it should instruct, entertain, and reform. The Nāṭyaśāstra's fourteenth chapter identifies the four purposes of drama as dharma, artha, kāma, and mokṣa (right conduct, wealth, pleasure, and liberation). Jharudar's jhārū poems operate squarely within the dharma and artha registers: they teach right social conduct (dharma) by exposing wrong conduct, and they address the artha concerns of Mithila's people (poverty, dowry, governmental corruption, agricultural distress). The kāma and mokṣa registers are less prominentJharudar is not a mystical poet like Kabir or Vidyapatibut his prayer poem (Prārthanā) reaches toward mokṣa in its aspiration for a world freed from ignorance and greed.
7.4 The Kabir Tradition and the Doha Form
Jharudar's jhārū couplets are structurally related to the doha traditionthe two-line aphoristic verse form used by Kabir (13981518) to combine spiritual and social critique. Kabir's dohas achieved their devastating effect through paradox, surprise, and semantic compression; Jharudar's jhārū couplets achieve similar effects through a different formal strategythe naming of a specific social instrument (the broom), the precision of its deployment against a named social evil, and the promise of the song that follows. Like Kabir, Jharudar works in a vernacular idiom accessible to those without Sanskrit or formal literary education; like Kabir, he critiques both Hindu orthodoxy (mandir-centred superstition) and social hierarchy (caste and gender); and like Kabir, his poetry circulates orally among people who would never enter a library or literary seminar.
VIII. NAVYA-NYĀYA EPISTEMOLOGY OF GAṄGEŚA UPĀDHYĀYA APPLIED TO JHARUDAR'S POETRY
8.1 Gaṅgeśa Upādhyāya: The Logician from Jharudar's Own Land
Gaṅgeśa Upādhyāya (fl. 13th14th century CE) was a native of Mithilathe same geographical and cultural world that produced Jharudar. His Tattvacintāmaṇi ('Wish-Fulfilling Gem of Truth') founded the Navya-Nyāya school of Indian epistemology and logic, developing an extraordinarily precise technical vocabulary for analysing the conditions under which a cognition (jāna) constitutes valid knowledge (pramā). As documented in Gajendra Thakur's Parallel History of Maithili Literature and in Videha's coverage, Gaṅgeśa's own social biography was marginalised within the dominant Brahmin culture of medieval Mithilahe married a woman of the artisan (charmakāriṇī) community and was regarded as 'inferior in social status.' This structural parallel between Gaṅgeśa and Jharudarboth producing foundational intellectual work from outside the socially dominant communityis not merely biographical but literary-philosophical.
8.2 The Jhārū as Pramāṇa: Four Sources of Valid Knowledge
Navya-Nyāya recognises four pramāṇas (sources of valid cognition): pratyakṣa (perception), anumāna (inference), upamāna (analogy), and śabda (verbal testimony). Jharudar's jhārū poems can be analysed as operating through all four:
Pratyakṣa (Direct Perception): Jharudar's poems are grounded in observed social realitythe broken house, the weeping Sita, the polluted river, the corrupt official. His authority derives from having seen, having experienced directly, what he reports. The poem on Bihar's unirrigated fields and power-cut villages'Foṭo banebai khet asiṃcit / Siṃcāi pāni bijlīsaṃ vacit'is the report of a witness who has perceived directly.
Anumāna (Inference): The jhārū form's bipartite structurecouplet (problem) → song (analysis)enacts a movement of anumāna: from the observed sign (liṅga) of social evil to the inferred cause (vyāpaka) of structural injustice. The reader is invited to follow this inferential movement.
Upamāna (Analogy): Jharudar's metaphors are sophisticated upamānas. The medical metaphor (politics as disease, ajāna as fever, dowry as a 'shroud covering all'), the ecological metaphor (pollution as a rat entering the home, then a tiger devouring the world), and the cosmic metaphor (the empty world without the common person) are all upamānas that generate valid knowledge by comparing the unfamiliar (the structural nature of social evil) to the familiar (bodily illness, animal predation, cosmic vacancy).
Śabda (Verbal Testimony): Jharudar's poems also function as śabda pramāṇavalid testimony from a reliable source. His authority as a witness-from-within (a farmer, not an outside observer) gives his verbal testimony a different quality from that of the 'official' literary culture. Navya-Nyāya distinguishes between the testimony of a reliable speaker (āptavacana) and unreliable speech (anāptavacana). Jharudar's entire poetic project is an argument that the āpta (reliable witness) of Mithila's social reality is the person who lives it, not the person who theorises it from outside.
8.3 Vyāpti and the Universal Claim of the Folk Poem
Navya-Nyāya's concept of vyāptiuniversal concomitance, the relationship of invariable co-occurrence between a property and its signis central to the validity of inference. In logical terms: if wherever there is smoke there is fire (vyāpti), then the presence of smoke (liṅga) is a valid reason to infer fire (sādhya). Applied to Jharudar's poetry: the jhārū poem achieves literary power precisely when the specific instance it depicts achieves vyāptiwhen the particular dowry-weeping Sita becomes the sign of a universal condition affecting all Maithili households. The best jhārū couplets are those in which the specific collapses into the universal: 'Āi har gharame Sītā roai chhai' ('Today in every home Sita weeps') is already a universalisationhar ghara, every homethat enacts vyāpti.
8.4 Śūnyavāda and Advaita in 'Hamara Binu Jagat Sunnaa Chhai'
Gajendra Thakur's preface to the 2012 collection explicitly invites the reader to find 'Buddhist śūnyavāda and Śaṃkara's advaita philosophy' in the title poem's claim: 'hamara binu jagat sunnā chhai' ('without me the world is empty'). Thakur's reading is philosophically acute. In Mādhyamika Buddhist śūnyavāda, all phenomena are empty (śūnya) of inherent self-existencethey exist only in interdependence. Jharudar's claim that the world is sunnā (empty) without the common person inverts this: it asserts that the world's content, its non-emptiness, is constituted by the presence and work of the subaltern. In Advaita Vedānta, Ātman and Brahman are non-dualindividual consciousness and universal consciousness are the same reality. Jharudar's 'hamara' (us/me) claims to be the Brahman of the social world: the universal constitutive ground without which the particular phenomena of social life (governance, culture, religion) would collapse into sunnā.
IX. COMPARATIVE STUDY: JHARUDAR AMONG MAITHILI WRITERS
9.1 Jharudar and Vidyapati (c. 13521448): Continuity and Counter-Tradition
Vidyapati, the great medieval poet of Mithila, wrote his padāvalī in the śṛṅgāra (erotic-devotional) rasa, in a richly Sanskritised Maithili patronised by the Karnāṭa dynasty. Jharudar could not be further from this model in social location, audience, linguistic register, rasa, and purpose. Yet there is a deep continuity: both poets are rooted in the Maithili language's musical and lyrical traditions, both deploy a refrain-structure that invites communal participation, and both address their poetry to a named social world (Mithila). The difference is one of who the world belongs to: for Vidyapati, Mithila is the world of divine love and courtly culture; for Jharudar, Mithila is the world of the farmer's flood-damaged field and the woman's dowry-terror.
9.2 Jharudar and Harimohan Jha (19081984): The Social Satirist's Lineage
Harimohan Jha's Khattar Kakak Tarang is Maithili's foundational social-satirical prose work, attacking Brahmin orthodoxy from within. Jharudar attacks the same orthodoxysuperstition, caste hierarchy, dowryfrom outside: as a non-elite farmer. The difference in social location produces different literary modes: Jha used the sophisticated irony of the insider who knows the system's absurdities; Jharudar uses the direct indignation and the folk form of the person who suffers the system's consequences.
9.3 Jharudar and Jagdish Prasad Mandal (b. c. 1952): Two OBC/Farmer Writers
Jagdish Prasad Mandal, recipient of the Sahitya Akademi Award 2021 for his novel Pangu (2018), shares with Jharudar the social location of a non-Brahmin farming community and the commitment to representing Mithila's subaltern voices. But their literary modes are opposite: Mandal writes in social-realist prose fiction (novels, short stories), while Jharudar writes in the folk-lyric mode of the jhārū poem and the gīt. Together, they represent complementary dimensions of the democratisation of Maithili literature: Mandal providing depth of character and narrative, Jharudar providing breadth of communal address and formal innovation.
9.4 Jharudar and Umesh Mandal (Videha's Artist-Lexicographer): Folk Traditions
Umesh Mandal, associated with the Videha movement, has contributed picture-dictionaries of Mithila's flora, fauna, and traditional crafts to the archive. His work is lexicographical; Jharudar's is lyrical. But both operate from the same conviction: that the knowledge most worth preserving and celebrating is the knowledge embedded in the daily practices and languages of Mithila's non-elite communities.
X. JHARUDAR AND BHIKHARI THAKUR: THE JAN KAVI TRADITION
The comparison with Bhikhari Thakur (18871971) is not merely an epithet coined by Gajendra Thakur for promotional effect; it is a structurally precise characterisation that illuminates both figures.
10.1 Parallel Biographies: Caste, Labour, and Literary Invention
Bhikhari Thakur was born into the Nāī (barber) castea service caste regarded as socially inferior in the Brahmin-dominated cultural hierarchy of Bihar. He was largely self-taught and composed his first plays while working as a barber and later as a performer. Jharudar is from a farming community that similarly occupies a non-elite social position in Mithila's hierarchy. Both men used their social marginality as literary resource: their intimate knowledge of the lives of the rural poor, the women left behind by migrating husbands, the victims of dowry and caste violence, gave their work an authority that no amount of formal education could have produced.
Bhikhari Thakur was called 'Shakespeare of Bhojpuri' by Rahul Sankrityayana comparison that (as Theatre Times' analysis notes) captures his theatrical range and his ability to blend religious, secular, tragic, and comic elements into a distinctive folk theatre. Jharudar is called 'Mithila's Bhikhari Thakur' by Gajendra Thakura comparison that captures his invention of a new form, his social-critical purpose, and his rootedness in his community's daily life.
10.2 The Jan Kavi: A Structural Role
The 'Jan Kavi' (People's Poet) is not merely a popular poet; it is a structural role in the literary ecology of a community. The Jan Kavi is the one who voices what the community knows but has not articulated in literary form; who holds up a mirror (to use Hamlet's phrase) that is not the polished silver of the educated class but the clean water of the common stream. In Bhojpuri, Bhikhari Thakur performed this role through drama and song (his Bidesiya giving voice to the wives of migrant labourers, his Beti Biyog to the grief of daughters given away in marriage). In Maithili, Jharudar performs the same structural role through the jhārū and gīt, giving voice to Mithila's women, farmers, and socially marginalised communities.
Both Jan Kavis also addressed the systematic social problems of their regions: child marriage, dowry, gender inequality, casteism, and the exploitation of the poor by the powerful. Both did so through forms accessible to illiterate and semi-literate audiencesnot through the difficult formal verse of the Sanskrit-trained literary tradition but through the melodic, participatory structures of folk song.
10.3 Differences: Theatre vs. Lyric, Migration vs. Soil
The most significant difference between Bhikhari Thakur and Jharudar is the literary medium. Bhikhari Thakur was primarily a dramatist-performer: his Bidesiya, Beti Biyog, Vidhva Vilap, and other plays were performed on open stages with music, dance, and improvisation. As Theatre Times notes, 'In folk theatre, with its flexible structure that provides space for improvisation and experimentation, the text is constantly rewritten in the hands of actors and musicians.' Bhikhari Thakur's texts were living, performance-dependent entities. Jharudar, by contrast, is a lyric poet: his jhārū poems and gīt exist in fixed written form (published by Shruti Publications and Pallavi Publications) even as they draw on oral-folk conventions. The second difference is thematic: Bhikhari Thakur's central theme is migration (Bidesiya = the one who has gone abroad), the pain of separation, and the destruction of the village community by the city's pull. Jharudar's central theme is the soil itselfthe farm, the river, the flood, the village's political lifenot the migrant's journey but the stayer's resistance.
XI. JHARUDAR AND NAGARJUNA (YATRI): TWO 'PEOPLE'S POETS' COMPARED
The comparison of Jharudar with Nagarjuna (Vaidyanath Mishra, 19111998)Maithili's most celebrated Jan Kavi, known as 'Yatri' in his Maithili work and 'Nagarjun' in his far more extensive Hindi writingilluminates both the continuity and the radical difference between the two generations of Maithili populist poetry.
11.1 The Janakavi Title: Nagarjuna's Legacy and Jharudar's Claim
Nagarjuna was universally acknowledged as Janakavi ('People's Poet') in both Hindi and Maithili. Born into a Maithil Brahmin family, he educated himself in Sanskrit, Pali, Prakrit, Hindi, and Bengali; converted to Buddhism (taking the name Nagarjuna, after the great Mādhyamika philosopher); immersed himself in Marxist ideology; and became the wandering bard of progressive Indiathe 'Yatri' (Traveller) of Maithili and the revolutionary voice of Hindi progressive literature. He received the Sahitya Akademi Award (1968/1969) for his Maithili work Patrahin Nagna Gachh ('The Leafless Naked Tree').
Jharudar's claim to the Janakavi title operates on entirely different grounds: not the intellectual breadth and political-historical range of Nagarjuna, but the rootedness in a specific local community and the invention of a specific local form. If Nagarjuna's poetry is the bird's-eye viewsurveying all of India's political and social landscape from the altitude of a widely travelled, widely read revolutionary intellectualJharudar's poetry is the worm's-eye view: the perspective from within the Mithila soil, seeing only what the farmer in the field can see, but seeing it with unsurpassable intimacy and precision.
11.2 Language and Social Location
The most fundamental difference is social location and its linguistic consequence. Nagarjuna was a Maithil Brahmin whose dominant literary medium was Hindi; his Maithili work, while genuine and celebrated, was never the primary vehicle of his literary ambition. As Wikipedia's entry notes, 'Hindi remained the language of the bulk of his literature.' This means that Nagarjuna's relationship to Maithili was that of the highly educated native speaker who chooses to write partly in his mother tongue while conducting his major literary career in the dominant national language. Jharudar writes exclusively in Maithili, from a community that has no access to Hindi literary prestige, and with a formal invention (the jhārū) that could not have been achieved in any other language. His Maithili is not a choice but a necessityand that necessity is his literary strength.
11.3 Ideology and Form
Nagarjuna's poetry is explicitly ideological in the Marxist-progressive tradition: his poems engage with the Emergency, the JP Movement, the Bihar peasant struggle, and the international left. His satire is politically sophisticated and often intellectually demandingrequiring knowledge of history, politics, and literary allusion. Jharudar's ideology, by contrast, is not imported from Marxism or any formal political philosophy; it is an indigenous social ethics rooted in the values of rural Mithilathe dignity of labour, the equality of all persons before the divine (his prayer poem invokes a God who heals all), and the specific grievances of Mithila's women, farmers, and poor.
In formal terms, Nagarjuna's best poetry is characterised by a mastery of both classical Sanskrit metres and free verse, intellectual density, and satirical wit of a literary rather than folk character. Jharudar's jhārū form is structurally simpler but sociologically more specificit is designed for oral performance, communal participation, and immediate social application. Each represents a different relationship between literary form and social function.
XII. RECEPTION AND LEGACY
Ramdeo Prasad Mandal Jharudar's reception history is small in the institutional senseno major literary prize has been awarded to him, no entry in mainstream literary histories of Maithilibut significant in the 'parallel literature' framework established by Videha. Gajendra Thakur's preface to Hamara Binu Jagat Sunnaa Chhai (2012) is the most substantial critical assessment of his work to date and constitutes the entry of his work into Maithili's critical discourse.
Thakur's assessment emphasises three dimensions of Jharudar's significance: (1) formal innovationthe invention of the jhārū as a new genre in Maithili and in Indian literature generally; (2) social functionthe sweeping of social evils through the broom-poem, making literature directly applicable to community life; and (3) philosophical depththe Buddhist and Advaita resonances of his central metaphysical claim. These three dimensions together constitute Jharudar's literary legacy within the Videha movement's project of parallel Maithili literature.
His work has been distributed through Videha's networks, through Pallavi Distributors (Nirmali, Supaul), and through the oral circulation of folk performance. His songs (gīt) have circulated beyond the literary sphere into community events, as the folk-song form naturally does. The Gatanjali Jharoo (2018) represents a further deepening and systematisation of the jhārū project, suggesting a continuing creative development.
XIII. CONCLUSIONS: LITERARY SIGNIFICANCE AND THE JHĀRŪ'S FUTURE
Ramdeo Prasad Mandal 'Jharudar' occupies a singular position in the history of Maithili literature for reasons that this appreciation has sought to demonstrate: the invention of the jhārū as a genuinely new literary form; the occupation of the Jan Kavi role from a social location (non-elite farming community) that had never previously held that position in Maithili; the systematic application of literary art to social critique across the full range of Mithila's contemporary problems; and the sustained maintenance of folk-lyric beauty in the service of radical social content.
From the perspective of Western literary theory, Jharudar is an organic intellectual in the Gramscian sense, a practitioner of folk humour in the Bakhtinian sense, and a postcolonial vernacular poet in the tradition of Ngugi wa Thiong'o. From the perspective of Indian aesthetics, his primary rasas are karuṇa, raudra, and hāsya; his best poems achieve the dhvani of structural critique beneath the surface of folk-lyric simplicity; and his prārthanā poem aspires toward the śānta rasa of universal human dignity. From the perspective of Navya-Nyāya epistemology, his jhārū form operates through all four pramāṇaspratyakṣa, anumāna, upamāna, and śabdaand achieves vyāpti when its specific social observations generate universally recognisable truths.
The jhārū as a literary form has genuine potential beyond Jharudar's own work. Its bipartite structure (critical couplet + elaborative song), its instrument-metaphor (the broom as social critique), and its topical organisation (one broom for each social evil) constitute a flexible template that other Maithili poets could adopt and adapt. The systematic thematic organisation of Gatanjali Jharoowith its nārī jhārū, rājanīti jhārū, paryāvaraṇa jhārū, etc.suggests the possibility of a jhārū literature that addresses the full range of Maithili society's concerns in a form accessible to its widest possible readership. Whether this potential is realised depends on whether the Maithili literary establishmentmainstream and parallel alikerecognises and engages with the significance of Jharudar's innovation.
Hamara binā ke ī dukh haratai / Ahaṃsaṃ ī sabh dānav maratai. Ramdeo Prasad Mandal 'Jharudar', Hamara Binu Jagat Sunnaa Chhai (2012)
XIV. BIBLIOGRAPHY AND REFERENCES
Primary Sources (Works by Ramdeo Prasad Mandal 'Jharudar')
Mandal, Ramdeo Prasad 'Jharudar.' Hamara Binu Jagat Sunnaa Chhai: Anthology of Maithili Poems and Jharus. New Delhi: Shruti Publications, 2012. ISBN 978-93-80538-70-9.
Mandal, Ramdeo Prasad 'Jharudar.' Gatanjali Jharoo: Collection of Geet and Jharoo. Nirmali: Pallavi Publications, 2018. ISBN 978-93-87675-61-2.
Secondary Sources: Maithili and Indian Scholarship
Thakur, Gajendra. Āmukh [Preface]. In Mandal, Ramdeo Prasad 'Jharudar.' Hamara Binu Jagat Sunnaa Chhai. New Delhi: Shruti Publications, 2012.
Thakur, Gajendra. A Parallel History of Mithila and Maithili Literature. Parts 156. Videha: First Maithili Fortnightly eJournal. ISSN 2229-547X. www.videha.co.in/gajenthakur.htm.
Thakur, Gajendra. 'Supplement Two: Literary Scene in Maithili after the Arrival of Jagdish Prasad Mandal.' In Rajdeo Mandal: Maithili Writer. Videha Archive, 2022.
Choudhary, Radhakrishna. A Survey of Maithili Literature. Patna: Maithili-Hindi publication, 1976.
Jha, Jayakanta. A History of Maithili Literature. New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1980.
Jha, Dinesh Chandra Bhattacharya. History of Navya-Nyāya in Mithila. Darbhanga: Mithila Institute, 1958.
Thakur, Gajendra (ed.). Videha: First Maithili Fortnightly eJournal. ISSN 2229-547X. Available: www.videha.co.in.
Thakur, Gajendra. 'Kumar Pawan: A Comprehensive Research Report and Critical Appreciation Integrating Western Literary Theory, Indian Rasa-Dhvani Aesthetics and the Epistemological Methodology of Gaṅgeśa Upādhyāya.' Videha Parallel History, Part 48. www.videha.co.in/new_page_48.htm.
Thakur, Gajendra (ed.). Videha Pothi Archive. www.videha.co.in/pothi.htm.
Western Literary Theory
Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981.
Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. Trans. Hlne Iswolsky. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1968.
Brecht, Bertolt. Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic. Ed. and trans. John Willett. London: Methuen, 1964.
Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971.
Lord, Albert B. The Singer of Tales. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960.
Ngugi wa Thiong'o. Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. London: James Currey, 1986.
Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London: Methuen, 1982.
Rich, Adrienne. Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose 19791985. New York: Norton, 1986.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 'Can the Subaltern Speak?' Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988. 271313.
Indian Aesthetics, Navya-Nyāya, and Comparative Sources
Ānandavardhana. Dhvanyāloka [Light on Suggestion]. Trans. and ed. Daniel H. H. Ingalls, Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, and M. V. Patwardhan. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990.
Abhinavagupta. Abhinavabhāratī (commentary on Nāṭyaśāstra). In The Nāṭyaśāstra of Bharata. Trans. M. M. Ghosh. Calcutta: Asiatic Society, 195061.
Bharata Muni. Nāṭyaśāstra [The Science of Drama]. Trans. M. M. Ghosh. Calcutta: Asiatic Society, 195061.
Gaṅgeśa Upādhyāya. Tattvacintāmaṇi [The Wish-Fulfilling Gem of Truth]. Ed. Kamakhyanath Tarkavagisha. Calcutta, 18841901.
Nagarjuna (Vaidyanath Mishra). Patrahin Nagna Gachh [The Leafless Naked Tree]. Maithili poems. Sahitya Akademi Award, 1968/69.
Oommen, T. K. 'Linguistic Diversity.' Sociology. National Law School of India University / Bar Council of India Trust, 1988.
Ranjan, R. 'Ideology of the Dramatic Themes of Bhikhari Thakur.' RESEARCH REVIEW International Journal of Multidisciplinary 11.2 (2026): 107112.
Wikipedia. 'Bhikhari Thakur.' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhikhari_Thakur.
Wikipedia. 'Nagarjun.' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nagarjun.
Theatre Times. 'Bidesia The Folk Theatre of Eastern India.' https://thetheatretimes.com/bidesia-folk-theatre-eastern-india/.
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