Caste, Script and Language: The Curious Case of Maithili Print

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as a result of the Hindi–Nagari movement, many Indian languages such as Maithili, Bhojpuri and Magahi were reduced to dialects of Hindi. The recent surge in critical literature dealing with the Hindi public sphere barely pays attention to the historical processes that led to the marginalisation of Maithili despite having its own distinctive script, rich literary heritage, regional consciousness and millions of speakers spread over parts of Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and Nepal. This article argues that the coming of print in Mithila turned out to be detrimental to the distinctive identity of Maithili. While doing so, it examines the twentieth-century Maithili public sphere and demonstrates that the substitution of Mithilakshar, supposedly the original script of Maithili, for Devanagari in print was a curious tale of the disappearance of a fully developed script. The article engages with this complexity and, in the process, corrects the assumption that Maithili is the language of the upper caste of the region. Instead, it proposes that it was only after the advent of print and transition from oral and manuscript culture to print culture that Maithili began to be associated with the upper-caste elites.