Language, History, Nation, and the Imaginary of Maithili Identity

Using the category of language and history, the present chapter attempts to explore the incongruities, persistent ambivalences and challenges to the formation of nationalist consciousness in the context of India’s ‘Hindi heartland’ in the second half of the nineteenth century and early twentieth century. Within the ‘Hindi heartland’, we do not find any serious challenges to the pan Indian identity formation, at least not in the beginning. But a weak, even suppressed, but obvious and often visible discomforts against such formation was not totally absent. The Maithili speakers accepted Hindi as the national language of India but when attempts were made by the supporter of Hindi to appropriate it as a ‘dialect’ of Hindi, they began to contest not only such claims by asserting the independence and rich literary history of Maithili, but also in the process they began to articulate a ‘new’ imaginary of Maithili identity. I have explored in this chapter how far such articulations were successful and how did Maithili language and history was used as powerful tools for the articulations of modern Maithili identity.