Gajendra Thakur

A PARALLEL HISTORY OF MAITHILI LITERATURE- PART 8

 

XVII

The Mongrel Language: Brajabuli as Pan-Eastern Literary Medium

The emergence of Brajabuli is the most striking instance of Maithili literature's trans-regional influence and deserves extended treatment in any parallel history. Brajabuli is described by Chaudhary, following S.K. Chatterji, as 'a kind of Maithili, mixed with Bengali in Bengal and Assamese in Assam, with some earlier Apabhramsa and contemporary western Brajabhasha forms.' It developed from the fourteenth century onward as Vaishnava singers from Bengal and Assam-having absorbed Vidyapati's Maithili lyric tradition through the Bengali students who studied Nyaya in Mithila and carried songs back with them-began composing their own padas in an artificial literary language modelled on Maithili but inflected with their own mother tongues.

Grierson, who first analysed Brajabuli systematically, called its emergence 'an unparalleled circumstance in the history of literature.' Sukumar Sen argued that Brajabuli was created in the hands of Bengali poets imitating Vidyapati's Padavali; at a later stage he revised this view and related it more closely to Avahatta ancestry. More recent scholarship-including a 2019 essay in the Journal of South Asian Languages and Linguistics analysing manuscripts at the Asiatic Society of Bengal-has confirmed that while thousands of padas in Bengali padavalis are attributed to Vidyapati, only a small fraction can be directly traced to authenticated Maithili sources; the majority represent Bengali poets writing in Brajabuli under Vidyapati's prestige.

Bengali Brajabuli

The great Bengali Brajabuli poets-Govindadasa Kabiraja, Jnanadasa, Narottamadasa, Balaramadasa-composed padas in this hybrid tongue that became liturgically central to Gaudiya Vaishnavism. Govindadasa, described by Chaudhary as 'almost the greatest after Vidyapati,' excels in 'verbal harmony' and 'matchless alliterations.' Balaramadasa surpasses all Bengali Brajabuli poets in metrical skill. The tradition persisted until the late nineteenth century when Bengali reformers adopted contemporary Bengali as their literary medium. Significantly, Rabindranath Tagore-at the height of the Bengal Renaissance-composed his early Bhanusingha Thakurer Padavali (1884) in Brajabuli, initially promoting these lyrics as the work of a newly discovered medieval poet named Bhanusingha. The hoax, though eventually revealed, testifies to Brajabuli's living literary vitality even in the era of print and colonial modernity.

Assamese Brajavali

In Assam, the parallel development is known as Brajavali. Sankaradeva (c. 1449-1586), the founder of Ekasarana Vaishnavism and the Ankianata dramatic tradition, composed his Baragitis (celestial songs) and much of his drama in Brajavali-a medium that drew on Maithili morphology, Assamese vocabulary, and some Avadhi and Brajabhasha elements. Chaudhary notes that in Assamese Brajavali, Maithili words predominate, reflecting the depth of Sankaradeva's debt to the Mithila tradition. A 2015 contrastive linguistic study (published in Language in India) confirms that while Assamese Brajavali and early Maithili share significant morphological features, they are distinct language forms-the Assamese tradition developing independently under its own formal constraints.

Oriya Brajabuli

In Orissa, the Brajabuli tradition is inaugurated by Ramananda Raya, governor of the Godavari province under the Gajapati king Prataprudra Deva and disciple of Chaitanya. His language is described as Maithili mixed with Brajabhasha, Bengali, and Oriya. Vidyapati's influence reached Orissa through Bengal, and other notable Oriya Brajabuli poets include Champati Ray and King Pratap Malla Dev (1504-32). Chaudhary characterises this as a 'case of direct participation in a common literary life in eastern India'-a phrase that captures the essentially collaborative nature of the Brajabuli phenomenon.

XVIII

Maithili Drama: Nepal and the Kirtaniya Tradition

The history of Maithili drama constitutes another major strand of the parallel history of eastern Indian literature. Maithili's dramatic tradition, which predates the vernacular drama of Bengal and Assam, spread to Nepal under the Malla kings and became for a period the court language of Kathmandu, Patan, and Bhatgaon.

The earliest extant Maithili drama-Jyotirishwar's Dhurtasamagamanataka-was discovered in Nepal, where the manuscript tradition of Maithili literature was better preserved than in Mithila itself (much as early Bengali manuscripts were preserved in Nepal). Umapati's Parijataharananataka established the model of Sanskrit-Prakrit drama with interspersed Maithili songs. Vidyapati followed and extended this model in his Gorakshavijaya, and the tradition crossed the border into Nepal, where from the seventeenth century onward Maithili drama flourished at its height under the Malla kings. Chaudhary notes that in Nepal, 'For about one hundred and fifty years, Maithili drama flourished at its height, replacing the Sanskrit drama for all practical purposes.'

Among the Malla poet-kings, Jagajyotirmalla (1613-1633), Jagatprakashamalla, Siddhinarayana Malla, and Bhupatindra Malla (1695-1722) composed extensively in Maithili. Bhupatindra Malla alone wrote twenty-six Maithili plays-an output comparable to any professional dramatist of the period. The Kirtaniya drama tradition-combining devotional song, gesture, and narrative in a form peculiar to Mithila-parallels the Ankianata of Assam as an instance of how Vaishnavism generated new dramatic forms across eastern India simultaneously.

 

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