Bihar Quiz: Languages (Maithili, Bhojpuri, Magahi) and Literature

This amendment added four languages to the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution, namely Bodo, Dogri, Maithili and Santhali, and raised the total number of scheduled languages from eighteen to twenty-two.

Vidyapati was the poet of the Mithila court in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and his Maithili padavali of songs about Radha and Krishna is still sung in north Bihar.

His Varna Ratnakara, a fourteenth century work, is counted as the earliest prose composition in Maithili and indeed one of the earliest in any modern Indian language.

Bhojpuri is spoken by crores of people in western Bihar, eastern Uttar Pradesh and the Indian diaspora of Mauritius, Fiji, Suriname and Trinidad, and it has a rich folk theatre, yet it has not been added to the Eighth Schedule.

This is the traditional script of the Mithila region, used for Maithili manuscripts, panjis of genealogy and ritual texts, and it is related to the eastern group of scripts that also produced Bengali and Assamese letters.

Bhikhari Thakur of Kutubpur in Saran district wrote, composed and staged plays with his own travelling troupe, and Bidesiya, on the suffering of a wife whose husband has migrated for work, became the name of a whole style of Bhojpuri theatre.

The name itself preserves the link: Magadha gives Magadhi, and Magadhi gives Magahi. Ardhamagadhi, a close relative, is the language in which the Jain canon preserves the sermons of Mahavira, and Pali, the language of the Buddhist scriptures, grew out of the same eastern speech.

The dialect takes its name from that region, and a demand for its recognition is made alongside the demand for Bhojpuri.

Dinkar, born at Simaria in Begusarai district and honoured as Rashtrakavi for his nationalist verse, received the Jnanpith Award for Urvashi, a long poem that treats the love of Pururava and the apsara Urvashi as a meeting of the earthly and the divine.

Renu, born at Aurahi Hingna in the Purnia country of north east Bihar, set the novel in a village called Meriganj just after independence, and made the village itself the hero, with its castes, quarrels, politics, superstitions and hopes.