9 788126 053193

9 788126 053193
 VIDYĀPATI 1

VIDYĀPATI
2 VIDYĀPATI

The sculpture reproduced on the end paper depicts a scene where three
soothsayers are interpreting to King Śuddhodana the dream of Queen
Māyā, mother of Lord Buddha. Below them is seated a scribe recording
the interpretation. This is perhaps the earliest available pictorial record
of the art of writing in India.
From: Nagarjunakonda, 2nd century A.D.
Courtesy: National Museum, New Delhi
 VIDYĀPATI 3

MAKERS OF INDIAN LITERATURE

VIDYĀPATI

Ramanath Jha

Sahitya Akademi
4 VIDYĀPATI
Vidyāpati: A monograph in English on Vidyāpati, an eminent poet and
philosopher by Ramanath Jha, Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi: 2017, `  50.

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© Sahitya Akademi

First Published: 1972

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ISBN: 978-81-260-5319-3
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Printed by Sita Fine Arts Pvt. Ltd., A-16, Naraina Industrial Area, Phase-II, New Delhi 110028
 VIDYĀPATI 5

V IDYĀPATI was par excellence a maker of Indian literature. At

a time when Sanskrit was the language of culture throughout
Āryavarta, he made the spoken language of his region the medium
of his poetical compositions, sweet and charming, and invested it
with an expressiveness worthy of a literary language. He set the
fashion of a new type of poetry for others to follow, and there is
no literature of this part of Āryavarta which does not owe deeply
to the influence of his talents and craftsmanship. He has rightly
been called Maithila Kokila or the Cuckoo of Mithilā̄ whose sweet
warblings ushered in a veritable spring in the poetry of the modern
North-Eastern Indian languages.
2
Vidyāpati was born in the village of Bisapi (in the Madhubani sub-
division of the district of Darbhanga) in the heart of Mithilā about
A.D. 1350 in a family of scholar-statesmen who had been leaders
of Maithil society for more than five generations.
The land of Mithilā has been since times immemorial famous
for intellectual pursuits and speculation, but politically she had
been under the suzerainty of Magadh since the Buddha’s time.
After the Guptas, when the highest ideal of kingship consisted
in the performance of an Aśvamedha through the conquest of all
the four quarters, every adventurous prince all over India overran
Mithilā across the Ganges to reach the Himalayas, which formed
the northern boundary of their world. Thus Mithilā which had no
king of her own never enjoyed peace. It is strange how she could
maintain her cultural entity inviolate in spite of the political turmoil
but it was the Maithil way of life which set no value on political
changes so long as the people were free to live their life without let
6 VIDYĀPATI

or hindrance. Nevertheless, Mithilā could offer no patronage to the

arts, on account of which her sons had to go abroad. Therefore, when
in 1097, Nanyadeva, the Karṇāṭa, came to Mithilā from the extreme
south, he was received with open arms, specially as he was himself a
scholar, fond of the arts and letters. He established a kingdom of his
own and for six generations the Karṇāṭas ruled over Mithilā. They
identified themselves completely with the people of the land and
under their benevolent rule Mithilā prospered in peace. The rest of
Āryavarta passed under the rule of the Mohammedans but Mithilā
managed her affairs with such consummate statesmanship that her
native Kṣatriya rule continued undisturbed. This ushered in an age
of renaissance in the life of the land. Lakshmidhara compiled his
digest of law, the Kalpataru, and Gangesha produced in the realm
of philosophy his famous Tattvacintāmaṇi, both of which set the
pattern of scholarship all over Āryavarta, and even beyond, for
centuries following.
But the leaders of Maithil society saw that they could not keep
off the Mohammedans for long from overrunning Mithilā and they
set about to re-organise their social life, consolidate their social
position, and create a bond of unity that would hold together the
different sections, living in the land, into a single nation. When,
therefore, Mithilā under the intrepid young prince, Harisinghadeva,
fell before the onslaught of Ghiyasuddin Tughlaq in the Śaka year
1245 (A.D. 1323), the last Kṣatriya rule in Northern India came to
an end; but it was soon found that it was not profitable nor possible
to keep Mithilā under the direct rule of the Mohammedan Subedar.
Consequently, Ferozeshah Tughlaq made over the Raj of Tirhut to
Raja Pandit Kameshwar Thakur, and to him and his descendants,
members of Vidyāpati’s family lent their wholehearted support. He
belonged to a most respectable family of Brahmanas of Kaśyapa
Gotra of Śukla Yajurveda with its origin at Oini, a prosperous village
still flourishing near Pusa in the district of Muzaffarpur. Vidyāpati
was born only 27 years after the fall of the Karṇāṭas and almost
within a decade or so after the establishment of the Oinabara rule
in Mithilā.
 VIDYĀPATI 7

The Karṇāṭas established their rule in Mithilā at a time when

the conflict between Vedic and Buddhist systems had been set at
rest by the assimilation of Buddhism in neo-Hinduism and the
territorial division of castes had crystallised. New social values
were being recognised and the old order was yielding place to the
new. Old laws were being adapted to suit the conditions of the
time by giving them new interpretations. On the other hand, the
Mohammedans were advancing gradually from the west and south-
west, and the whole of Āryavarta was threatened with the onslaught
of Moslem religious adventurism before which one state after the
other succumbed with the result that, soon after the Karṇāṭas
settled themselves, the whole of Āryavarta passed into the hands
of the fanatic and ruthless Mohammedans. The leaders of Maithil
society under the enlightened and benevolent Karṇāṭas used
every stratagem to keep the Mohammedans away and set about
consolidating their own social structure. A new norm or pattern
was planned and promulgated to regulate the entire social behaviour
and personal discipline for each caste or group; and though drastic
changes were introduced in every sphere of life, these changes
were brought about by giving new interpretations to the old rules,
so that the whole process seemed outwardly evolutionary rather
than revolutionary. Continuity with the past was thus maintained
unimpaired, though sometimes only in name.
Vidyāpati with the hereditary surname Thakur, which signi-
fied possession of landed property, was born in a family of Maithil
Brahmanas belonging to Kaśyapa Gotra of the Mādhyandina
Śākhā of Śukla Yajurveda. The family had its origin at Bisapi, still
a prosperous village some 16 miles north-west of Darbhanga and
resided at the same village when Vidyāpati was born, on account
of which the family is known as Bisaibar Bisapi. This was a family
of scholar-statesmen, noted in Mithilā for culture in sacred
literature and occupying posts of great trust and responsibility
at the court of the Karṇāṭa kings. Sixth in ascent from Vidyāpati
was Karmaditya who seems to have joined the court as minister,
and his son Devaditya, grandson Vireshwara and great-grandson
8 VIDYĀPATI

Chandeshwara held the post of minister of peace and war. Another

son of Devaditya, Ganeshwara, was the minister and presided
over the council of the feudatory rulers, Mahāsamantādhipati,
and was the chief of feudatories with the high-sounding title of
Mahārājādhirāja. Vidyāpati records tales of both Vireshwara and
Ganeshwara in his Puruṣaparīkṣā, and of the latter he tells how
he was renowned all over India for his wisdom. The brother of
Devaditya, called Bhavaditya, was a courtier and the brothers and
half-brothers of Vireshwara held high offices, such as the Keeper
of Treasury, in charge of the Transfer Department, Keeper of the
Seal, etc. Vireshwara composed a Paddhati or manual of rituals
for Chhandogas or the followers of Sāmaveda, and Ramadatta, the
son of his third brother Ganeshwara, for the Vājasaneyins or the
followers of Śukla Yajurveda and these Paddhatis govern all the
rites in Mithilā up to the present time. Ganeshwara is the author
of many Smṛti works including Sugati-Sopāna which regulates
the Śraddhā rites of a large section of the Brahmanas in Mithilā
up to our own time. The greatest, however, in scholarship was
Chandeshwara, the son of Vireshwara. He is the author of the
Dharma or Smṛti digest called Ratnākara divided in seven sections.
It deals with law and rituals and has been the ruling authority
among the people of Mithilā for the last six centuries. Over and
above these seven Ratnākaras, Chandeshwara compiled his Rāja-
Nīti-Ratnākara to lend support to the Oinabaras who failed at first
to receive recognition from the people of Mithilā because they
owed allegiance to their Delhi overlords and also because, being
Brahmanas, they could not take the sacrament of Coronation. On
these points as on others Chandeshwara expressed his views with
a wonderful realisation of new and hard facts under the changed
conditions and thereby laid the foundation of a new society which
has survived to our own times through all the stresses and strains of
the ages. And Chandeshwara was only one of the band of scholar-
statesmen, though, perhaps, the most respected, who moulded the
life of the land during this period of renaissance. Vidyāpati was the
rarest genius of this age of awakening who is immortal as the singer
 VIDYĀPATI 9

of eternal love but who is no less memorable for the fullness of his
personality as man and as statesman.
3
Such were the times of great social and intellectual re-awakening in
Mithilā when Vidyāpati was born and such the family of leaders of
that cultural resurgence of which he was, indeed, a worthy scion.
Connected most intimately with the newly established ruling
family of the Oinabaras, he was all along his long life conspicuously
attached to the court of the Oinabara kings and served with great
distinction as many as seven Rajas covering four generations of
the Oinabaras. He was the most representative writer of his time
and the life that he lived and the works that he did were shaped
by the course of events in the Oinabara Courts. The history of the
Oinabaras, however, is not well known even in Mithilā. It will,
therefore, be convenient to relate here briefly the history of the
Oinabara rulers of Mithilā in the light of which Vidyāpati’s life and
works can be better understood.
After the Karṇāṭa rule of Mithilā had come to an end with the
defeat of Harisinghadeva in A.D. 1323, although the Raj was handed
over to Kameshwara Thakur, for some time the Oinabaras were not
recognised as the rightful kings. Kameshwara was succeeded by
his eldest son Bhogishwara, but his youngest brother Bhava Singha
challenged his authority and got the Raj partitioned. Consequently
there was antagonism between these two branches. Bhogishwara
was short-lived and was succeeded by his son, Ganeshwara, but
in the L. Sam. year 252 he was assassinated treacherously through
the machinations of the children of Bhava Singha. The sons of
Ganeshwara, Vira Singha and Kirti Singha, fled away, and having
wandered far and wide, managed at length to move Ibrahim Shah
of Jaunpur to avenge their father’s murder and restore them to their
rightful possession. Bhava Singha, in the meantime, took possession
of the entire Raj, got himself acknowledged the Raja Tirhut with the
active support of the grand-old-man, Chandeshwara, and assumed
the title ‘Singha’ as the insignia of royalty. In the traditional history
10 VIDYĀPATI

of Mithilā, Bhava Singha is regarded as the first Raja of the Oinabara

dynasty.
Bhava Singha was succeeded by his son Deva Singha but he
was so very much disgusted with the state of things arising out
of the family feud that he handed over the Raj to his son, Shiva
Singha, who was then only 16 years of age and went away forever
to far off Naimiśāraṇya, modern Nimsar near Kanpur, to live
a retired life. Shiva Singha proved himself a very noble prince,
powerful and popular, assumed independence, and fought many
battles with the Mohammedan Nawabs, both of Bengal and Patna.
Deva Singha died in the L. Sam. year 293 and then Shiva Singha
became a full-fledged Raja but he could reign for only three years
and a half. In the winter of L. Sam. year 296-297 he had to fight,
most probably, with Ibrahim Shah of Jaunpur who had reached
Tirhut with Kirti Singha to avenge Ganeshwara’s assassination. In
this battle Shiva Singha was defeated, but he was not found either
alive or dead. The victorious Nawab was, however, pleased to leave
Tirhut undisturbed with the renewed oath of allegiance of the Raja
to the House of Jaunpur instead of to the Emperor of Delhi but
the wives of Shiva Singha went into voluntary exile to live under
the protection of Puraditya, the Chief of Saptari, now in Nepal, to
wait for 12 years for any news of the lost Raja, after which only his
funeral rites could be performed under the Śāstras. Tirhut was ruled
in the meantime by Padma Singha, the younger brother of Shiva
Singha, and after his death, by his wife, Viswasa Devi. When in L.
Sam. year 309, the last rites of Shiva Singha were performed and his
wife became Sati, the Raj devolved upon the next male heir of the
Raja and the reversioner happened to be the old Hara Singha, the
youngest son of Bhava Singha by another wife. He was succeeded
by his son, Narasingha, but there was once again a conflict for the
Raj. Narasingha was succeeded by his eldest son Dhira Singha, but
after him the Raj went to his younger brother, Bhairava Singha, and
not to his son. Vidyāpati died sometime about L. Sam. year 330, a
little more than 32 years after the disappearance of Shiva Singha
when Dhira Singha was the Raja of Tirhut.
 VIDYĀPATI 11

We do not know exactly when Vidyāpati was born but it is said

that he was two years older than Shiva Singha who was fifty years
of age when his father died and he became the Raja in his own right
on the sixth day of the dark half of Caitra which was a Thursday
in the L. Sam. year 293, corresponding to Śaka year 1324, i.e., A.D.
1402. It follows, therefrom, that Vidyāpati was born in A.D. 1350
or thereabout, some 27 years after the fall of the Karṇāṭa dynasty
and within 25 years from the composition of Varṇaratnākara by
Jyotirīṡvara Ṭhakur. Vidyāpati was, therefore, a boy of ten years or
so when Ganeshwara was treacherously assassinated and Bhava
Singha came in possession of the entire Raj of Tirhut. It would,
therefore, appear that Vidyāpati was born while Chandeshwara,
who was the first cousin of his grandfather, was still alive.
Vidyāpati was the great-grandson of Dhireshwara who has been
known as a Mahā-Vārttika-Naibandhika, though none of his works
is now available. Dhireshwara was the brother of Vireshwara (father
of Chandeshwara) and of Ganeshwara, who was the proverbially
wise minister of the last Karṇāṭa king. There are anecdotes
about both Vireshwara and Ganeshwara in the Puruṣaparīkṣā.
Direshwara’s son was Jayadatta and Jayadatta’s son Ganapati was
the father of our poet.
On the sameness of names it has been held by many that
Kaviśekhara Jyotirīśvara, the author of Varṇaratnākara, who was the
son of Dhireshwara, was the brother of Jayadatta whose grandson
Vidyāpati was. This is, however, a mistake because Jyotirīśvara’s
father Dhireshwara was the son of Rameshwara while Vidyāpati’s
great-grandfather Dhireshwara was the son of Devaditya and also
because Jyotirīśvara belonged to Vatsya Gotra while Vidyāpati
belonged to Kaśyapa. Similarly Vidyāpati’s father, Gaṇapati, has been
identified with Gaṇapati, the author of Gaṅgā̄-Bhakti-Taraṅgiṇī,
but this too is a mistake. Vidyāpati’s father Ganapati was the son of
Jayadatta while the author of Gaṅgā̄-Bhakti-Taraṅgiṇī calls himself
the son of Dhireshwara. Even Vidyāpati has been a common name
in Mithilā and there have been many Vidyāpatis, some with even
the same surname Thakur, who have composed works that have
12 VIDYĀPATI

come down to us. In any study of Vidyāpati, therefore, we must not

be led away by the mere name Vidyāpati to hold him the great poet
of that name unless the evidence is unassailable. This is always full
of hazard and, if not heeded, will result in identifications a absurd
as the identification of his father with the author of Gaṅgā̄-Bhakti-
Taraṅgiṇī or of the author of Varṇaratnākara with the brother of
his grandfather.
Vidyāpati wa born in the village of Bisapi, the ancestral home
of the family as far back as they could remember, with the result
that in the new set-up of social re-organisation Bisapi had been
accepted as the place of th family’s origin on account of which they
were called Bisaibaras. Vidyāpati lived at Bisapi all his life, and when
Shiva Singha ascended the throne, it was this village Bisapi with
the grant of which the Raja rewarded the poet for his conspicuous
services to the throne. The descendants of Vidyāpati continued to
live at Bisapi enjoying its free gift till they migrated some 300 years
ago to Sauratha, a village near Madhubani, where they still flourish.
The village continued to be in the possession of the family till the
advent of the British.
This village Bisapi has been called Garha or a fort which is a
sure indication of the fact that, having been the seat of one of the
most influential families of statesmen for many generations, this
village was politically very important, and as these state- men were
all scholars of the first rank, the village was conspicuous in the
cultural life of the land. The title of the family, which is Thakur, also
points to the same fact because Thakur implies possession of landed
property and this becomes all the more clear when we remember
that at least one of the members of the family, Ganeshwara, has
been known all the time as Mahasamantādhipati.
Born in a family that was closely connected with the court
of the Tirhut Rajas, Vidyāpati must have found an easy entrance
into the circle of the newly established royal household and played
even as a child with the many princes of the same age such as Kirti
Singha, Shiva Singha, Padma Singha and Hara Singha who all played
important roles in the history of Tirhut during the first century
 VIDYĀPATI 13

of the Oinabara rule of the land. But of all the princes Vidyāpati
was drawn specially towards Shiva Singha of whom he became a
faithful friend, sincere adviser, constant companion and reliable
officer. Their association has been a unique feature of the history
of the period, specially the literary history of the land, because it
was under the liberal patronage and inspiring admiration of Shiva
Singha that the genius of Vidyāpati found its finest flowering.
We do not know anything about the course and extent of
Vidyāpati’s learning as a student. Traditionally he is known to have
read for some time with the renowned teacher Hari Mishra who
was the uncle and also the teacher of the renowned Naiyayika of
the time, Jayadeva Mishra, popularly known as Pakṣadhara who
has immortalised his uncle Guru in his Āloka, the famous gloss
on the Tattvacintāmaṇi of Gangesha. But Vidyāpati does not seem
to have spent much time over his studies under a Guru because
we find him at Naimiṣāraṇya in the entourage of Deva Singha who
had retired there to in about A.D. 1368, leaving his young son,
Shiva Singha, to rule as his Regent. It was here at Naimiṣāraṇya
that Vidyāpati wrote his first authentic work, Bhūparikramā, a work
in Sanskrit prose and verse cast in a Paurāṇika mould, describing
the route from Naimiṣāraṇya to Tirhut and interspersed with
eight tales with an introduction which we find reproduced exactly
in Puruṣaparīkṣā. Bhūparikramā promises to describe sixty-five
countries and tell sixty-five tales but it does not go beyond the first
chapter which describes only eight countries and tells only eight
tales. Since these tales are told exactly in the same words in the
later work Puruṣaparīkṣā, of course without the Paurāṇika frame-
work and the topography of the countries between Naimiṣāraṇya
and Tirhut, it is clear that the plan of Bhūparikramā was given
up because he di d not have the opportunity for travel further to
describe the countries or to live longer at Naimiṣāraṇya to complete
the plan. He was soon recalled to Tirhut to join the court of Shiva
Singha and plunge head-long into the politics of the time as the
confidential courtier of the young prince.
14 VIDYĀPATI

But what Vidyāpati learnt under a Guru was only a small

part of his education. It was an age of profound learning all over
Mithilā and people from all parts of Āryavarta used to come over
here to receive specialised training in the different disciplines of
Sanskrit lore. The mind of a creative artist like Vidyāpati could not
be kept confined within the narrow grooves of a particular system.
With a sharp intellect and receptive mind he learnt more from the
world around him than from the world of letters. His very home
was a centre of light and learning and scholars from all over the
country flocked there to discuss Śāstras or Dharma, statecraft or
social values, and it appears Vidyāpati inhaled learning in the very
air that he breathed at home. In fact, he could learn many things
without an effort in that enlightened atmosphere that others could
hope to do with diligence under competent Gurus. Moreover, his
mind was too quick and inquisitive, searching and receptive to
stick to one point and concentrate there. His interests were wide
and all embracing; his outlook on life was liberal. As soon as he
had acquired the necessary training in the rudiments of the Śāstras
to give him the power of comprehension of the Śāstric lore, he
gave up the rigours of a regular student’s life and went to adopt
the hereditary profession of his illustrious family and dedicated his
services to the cause of his land and its people.
But his learning did not cease with his student’s life. All through
his life he continued a voracious reader and from the quotations in
the works of his old age, one is struck with admiration and wonder
how very minutely he had read the Mahābhārata, the Rāmāyaṇa,
the Purāṇas, the Āgamas and Tantras, the Dharmaśāstras and
Nibandhas, besides poetry and drama from which echoes can be
heard in his lyrical songs every now and then. He held, moreover,
the office of Raja Pandit in the court of Shiva Singha which brought
him in close contact with all the scholars who came to the court.
With a quick mind and retentive memory, he remembered whatever
he read and retained whatever he heard and he used them with
advantage whenever he required them. Vidyāpati was, therefore,
a scholar of wide erudition rather than of deep learning. In an
 VIDYĀPATI 15

age when specialisation was the mark of scholarship, Vidyāpati

was characterised by liberal versatility rather than by specialised
mastery of any particular lore.
And much more than reading, Vidyāpati had a passion for
writing. In his Kīrtilatā, Vidyāpati says: ‘How can the creeper of
renown spread out to the region of the three worlds if a platform
is not constructed with poles of letters.” He saw that his illustrious
forefathers, though busy as statesmen, were nonetheless famous
authors and he was, therefore, fired with an ambition for authorship
from his early adolescence. In perfect keeping with the tradition
of the house of Chandeshvara, he commenced writing in Sanskrit
over which he had a wonderful command even at an early age,
and before he was twenty he planned an ambitious work in the
orthodox Paurāṇika style, his Bhūparikramā, which is a strange
admixture of topography and moral tales exemplifying his ideal of
Man. But even before Bhūparikramā, Vidyāpati seems to have tried
his hand on a drama, Maṇimañjarī by name, which is very crude
in its worksmanship but contains echoes of Abhijn̄āna Śākuntalam,
Uttara-Rāma-Caritam and Ratnāvalī and shows at the same time a
wonderful insight into the working of a woman’s heart which is a
sure index of Vidyāpati’s love poetry. Thus, from his early youth, he
continued writing till the last days of his life. His last work Durgā-
Bhakti-Taraṅgiṇī mentions Dhira Singha reigning when he must
have been well over eighty years of age. Even if we leave aside the
songs, of which he composed more than a thousand at the least,
there are a dozen works which will do credit even to a life dedicated
to writing alone. But Vidyāpati was not a mere author; he was a
man of very wide interests, busy for the best part of his life with
the politics of his time. It is clear, therefore, that what he wrote in
the Kīrtilatā of constructing poles of letters for the platform for the
creeper of renown to spread out was but a statement of his personal
ambition, and that he wrote for the very love of renown, which he
did achieve in more than an ample measure even while he was alive
and ever since his death.
16 VIDYĀPATI

Vidyāpati joined the court of the Oinabaras during the time

of Deva Singha or even before, and was at Naimiṣāraṇya with
Deva Singha but he was recalled to Tirhut when Shiva Singha
was consolidating his power in about A.D. 1370. Since then to the
last days of Shiva Singha, he remained constantly with the Prince
and served him conspicuously with utmost devotion and loyalty
as a faithful friend and wise counsellor. Officially he held the post
of the Raj-Pandit charged with the responsibility to deal with
Pandits, to receive them, to look after them, to arrange for their
rewards and gifts, etc. but he was actually the intimate friend and
faithful counsellor of the Raja, his constant companion and trusted
officer. He enjoyed the fullest confidence of the Raja and rendered
implicit obedience to him. It is said that once when Shiva Singha
was arrested for non-payment of revenue, it was Vidyāpati who
with Amritakara, the young son of the Diwan, pleased the Nawab
with their poetry so very immensely that the Raja was not only
released but honoured profusely for his patronage of such eminent
poets and decorated Vidyāpati with the title Kaviśekhara. When
Shiva Singha ascended the throne, he rewarded Vidyāpati with the
grant of his native village and the distinguished title of Abhinava
Jayadeva. When going to fight the battle from which he never
returned, Shiva Singha entrusted Vidyāpati with the care of all his
six wives and charged him with their safety and protection. Such
was the confidence of the Raja that the poet enjoyed and which he
so richly deserved.
Vidyāpati was thus in the court of Shiva Singha for about 36
years. In the annals of Mithilā, there has not been a more glorious
king, puissant but benevolent, strong but popular, and there is a
saying common in Mithilā1:
There is only one tank, Rajokhar; all else are ditches; there was
only one king, Shiva Singha; all else were mere lads.
1. Poshari rajosliari aar sab posltara
Raja Shivai Simlia aar sab chhokara,
 VIDYĀPATI 17

In the last verse of Kīrtipatākā, Vidyāpati says that ladies in

every household in every city in every direction sing the glory of
Shiva Singha arising out of his victory on the fields of battle. In
the last verse of Puruṣaparīkṣa, Vidyāpati says that Shiva Singha was
victorious in his battles with the lords of Gajjan and Gaura, meaning
thereby the forces both of Delhi and Bengal. It appears, therefore,
that though in the early years, Shiva Singha was obliged to pay
tribute to the Emperor of Delhi direct or through the Governor
of Bihar, he came gradually to defy the authority of the overlord,
stopped paying tribute, assumed independence and struck his own
coins. As a result of all this he had to fight many battles where he
was generally victorious. It is perhaps one of these victories which
has been eulogised by Vidyāpati in his Kīrtipatākā. It was, however,
in one of these encounters that Shiva Singha met his end, just as
Hari Singha of the Karṇāṭas met his end on account of his intrepid
qualities. Fighting, specially with the Mohammedan invaders, had
never been the policy of Mithilā’s statesmen. They had succeeded
so long to stem the tide of their advance only with the policy of
appeasement. But Hari Singha of the Karṇāṭas and Shiva Singha of
the Oinabaras chose to fight them on account of their prowess and
impetuosity, and both had to fall down before the overwhelming
forces of the invaders.
Vidyāpati has described the character of Shiva Singha variously
in glowing terms, bordering almost on adulation. At the end of the
third chapter of the Puruṣaparīkṣā, there are two verses in which
Shiva Singha has been compared with Lord Viṣṇu and Lord Śiva, not
only in personal appearance, but also in their special characteristics,
and Vidyāpati says that “rare indeed is the union of all three, of
perspicacity, heroism and expert knowledge. In the whole universe,
but three persons possess them all”, the two gods Viṣṇu and Śiva,
and one human being Raja Shiva Singha, Rupanarayana. In the
tale.1of the Discerning Amoroso (Vidagdha Katha), Vidyāpati
says that Shiva Singha was a discerning lover both of poetry and
women like the proverbial Raja Bhoja. This idea occurs again and
1. Puruṣaparīkṣā, Tale No. 39.
18 VIDYĀPATI

again in his songs. He is called a cupid on earth1, a discerning lover

of beauty2, an artist among kings3 and a liberal patron of arts and
letters.4 Vidyāpati goes so far as to call him the eleventh incarnation
of Lord Viṣṇu5 and a dispenser of love like Kṛṣṇa.6 It is, indeed, a
fact that Shiva Singha gave the poet everything that made his life
full and happy but the poet had, on his part, done all to make him
immortal in his many works, specially in his songs, all over the
land through these cen- turies. In tale No. 26 of the third chapter
of Puruṣaparīkṣā; Vidyāpati describes very feelingly the relation
between a poet and a patron and says that it is only in the words
of a poet that the name of a king is remembered through the ages.
From 1370 to 1406 (from the age of 20 till he was fifty-six), in
other words throughout the period of his manhood, Vidyāpati lived
with Shiva Singha and enjoyed life to the full. Like a true genius of
the renaissance he was most progressive in his views, saw far ahead
of his time and had the courage of his convictions to pursue the
ideals in a form that would appeal to the men and women, not only
of his own time, but of all time. He enjoyed the confidence of a king
like Shiva Singha and under his liberal patronage, he pursued his
ideals in all spheres of life in a manner which seems amazing and
evokes our admiration.
4
During this period Vidyāpati composed most of the songs which
have made him immortal and wrote four works, Kīrtipatākā and
Kīrtilatā in Abahaṭṭa, Puruṣaparīkṣā in Sanskrit prose and verse,
and a drama in Sanskrit and Prakrita, Gorakṣavijaya by name, in
1. Songs Nos. 50, 245, 343, 500, 608.
2. Nos. 240, 504.
3. Nos. 122, 243, 294, 343, 364.
4. Nos. 20, 245, 330.
5. Nos. 250, 737.
6. Nos. 75, 240, 600, 767. All these numbers here and hereafter are from the
Devanagari edition of Vidyāpati’s Padavali by N. Gupta (1910) unless
otherwise indicated.
 VIDYĀPATI 19

which he introduced an innovation by providing songs in Maithili,

as Kālidāsa had provided dance-songs in the fourth Act of his
Vikramorvaśīya in Apabhraṃśa. If we analyse all these works of
his manhood, including tke bulk of his love songs, we shall find
that there is a point of view running through all of them and that
is the “idealisation of ‘Real Man’, with all the marks of a man, as
distinguished from a ‘Man shape’, a mere brute without only the
tail”.1 “Easy enough it is to find a being in the shape of a man,”
says Vidyāpati, “but a real man is rare.”2 “A man is a man if he
possesses manliness but not simply because he is born in the shape
of a man. We call cloud the Falad or giver of rain only if it gives
rain; otherwise it is only a heap of smoke.”3 Even in his love songs
the damsels love and pine for ‘real men’, Supuruṣa as he calls them.
Of a real man, Vidyāpati recounts three marks, heroism which
consists in val our with discretion and energy, intelligence or good
wit and specialised skill; and a real man is one who has attained
the four objects of life, namely, righteousness, worldly prosperity,
sexual satisfaction and salvation. It would, thus, appear that
Vidyāpati believed in the balanced growth of the full personality of
man. Like a true child of the renaissance, he advocated enjoyment
of life in full, and his outlook on life was broad enough to include
every aspect of it, balanced properly without undue emphasis on
one at the expense of the other. This was, indeed, the life that
he himself lived. This emphasis on a balanced life seems to have
gripped his mind from the very beginning. The very first work
that he composed, Bhūparikramā, has ‘the test of man’ as the main
thesis and the last work of this period, Kīrtilatā, is an exposition of
a ‘real man’ only.
But in all this Vidyāpati followed in the footsteps of his own
forefathers. Though eminent scholars and writers, they were pre-
eminently statesmen and all their efforts were directed towards
forging a bond of unity among the different sectors of society, so
1. Purusopariksa, 1.9.
2. ibid., 1.8.
3. Kirtilota, 1.12.
20 VIDYĀPATI

that Mithilā might emerge as a nation to withstand the Moha-

mmedan Subjugation. They built up a new society on foundations
so strong that it assumed the leadership of north-eastern India in
matters cultural, and at home it continues, though in a tottering
state, up to our own times. And their statemanship lay in their
loyalty, not so much to the throne of the Raj of Tirhut, as to the
land of Mithilā and its people. Through successive generations, they
built up the social re-organisation in a planned way and Vidyāpati
was, indeed, the last of them and the most talent- ed, the rarest
genius that Mithilā produced during that age of renaissance.
Vidyāpati lays so strong a stress on personal character and
extols the fullness of personality because, if society is made up
of real men, they will raise society along with themselves. It is
something which is within easy reach of every individual, whatever
his station in society may be. In the introduction to the fourth
chapter of Puruṣaparīkṣā, Vidyāpati says, “Follow thou only the
path that hath come down in the tradition of the tribe in which
by the decree of the almighty thou hast been born.” If, therefore,
society is made up of ‘real men’ and there is a strong bond to hold
together all the individuals of the society irrespective of caste and
creed, sex and age, etc. the social organisation will stand out as
one nation which can face any aggression from outside without
deviating from the path laid down for the fullest enjoyment of life.
And what can be more cementing a factor to bind together all the
people living in the land irrespective of all the distinctions of birth
and acquirements than the language spoken in the land? Vidyāpati
took up the language actually spoken in Mithilā as the medium
of his popular songs, and gave it a literary expressiveness as sweet
and entrancing as could be found only in Sanskrit. Sanskrit which
had till then been the language of the cultured was confined to a
very small minority, the Pandit-class, and the unique pleasure that
true poetry in Sanskrit gives was thus available only to that class.
Vidyāpati made that pleasure easy for everyone to enjoy and as we
shall see later on he chose such topics for treatment in his songs
which could appeal to the common men and women, including the
 VIDYĀPATI 21

lowest in society but not excluding the highest and the noblest. A
common language has since those far-off days been recognised as
the surest mark of nationhood and the adoption of the language of
Mithilā as the language of his popular songs was, indeed, the first
and surest step to turn Mithilā into a nation in the truest sense of
the term. It is remarkable to note that even today, we of Mithilā
are recognised as a unit of society distinct from all the rest only
on account of our language and that language owes its distinctness
and graceful expressiveness to the lyrical outpourings of Vidyāpati’s
poetic heart which had a ravishing effect on all who heard them
and became at once the most popular form of literature, not only
in Mithilā, but even abroad.
Vidyāpati was, indeed, very progressive in his views and
considering the age in which he lived we would call these views
almost modern. He was a staunch protagonist of women’s education.
In cultured families girls’ education received proper attention
during that age and the ladies of the Oinabara Kings’ household
were learned. Shiva Singha’s wife, Lakhima, Chandeshwara’s wife
of the same name, and Vidyāpati’s daughter-in-law, Chandrakala,
were poetesses of repute. Vidyāpati advocated this on a large scale
and he composed Puruṣaparīkṣā with the avowed purpose of
providing a text-book “for the delectation of those ladies of the
city who display a taste for the mirthful arts of the god of love”.
Imparting sex-education to ladies was one of the purposes of his
love-lyrics. In one of his songs Vidyāpati says that he wants to
teach the qualities of a Nāgarī1, and a ‘Nāgarī’, though meaning
etymologically a lady of the city, as Grierson translates it, has been
used in Sanskrit literature, as also by Vidyāpati, to connote a lady
who is cultured in the art of love- making.
About education in general Vidyāpati held very decided views.
In the opening verse of the 16th tale, which is the tale of an adept
in arms, Vidyāpati says that “by its very nature book-lore is inferior
to lore of arms; for it is only when a kingdom has been made safe
by arms that the thought of book-lore prevails”. Herein Vidyāpati
1. Nagaripan Kichhu Kahaba Chahaun, No. 541.
22 VIDYĀPATI

clearly advocates compulsory military training and we can admit

at once how very urgent and essential this must have been during
those days when the security of the land was under a constant
threat of Mohammedan invasion, and Mithilā had experienced for
more than a thousand years the evils of weak defence of the land.
In matters religious Vidyāpati has been dubbed a sectarian,
some calling him a devotee of Viṣṇu, others of Śiva, but Vidyāpati
held the most common sense view that “there is but one Almighty
and naught is there in the worlds that has not been created by
him1.” and that “only in their names is their sublimity distinct.”2 In
his songs also Vidyāpati dismisses the idea of distinctness between
Hara and Hari.3 In the introduction to his Śaivasarvasvasāra, a work
devoted to the worship of Lord Śiva, Vidyāpati quotes holy texts
to uphold the view that there is no difference between Hara and
Hari and that the devotion to one is as good as the devotion to
the other. One is free to adore anyone form of the Almighty and
Vidyāpati did adore the Śiva-form, but it does not mean that he was
disrespectful towards Hari or that he was hostile to His devotion.
Much has been made of the large number of songs that
Vidyāpati composed in devotion to Śiva, but we must remember
in this connection that Vidyāpati composed songs in devotion not
only to Śiva but to Viṣṇu, Devī, Gaṅgā̄ and many other gods of
the Hindu pantheon. It is true that Vidyāpati was emotionally a
devotee of the Almighty in the form of Śiva but traditionally he
was a Pañcadevopāsaka, an adorer of the five deities, like every
other Smārta Maithil. The reason why he composed so many songs
devoted to Śiva is simply the fact that of all the gods in Hindu
pantheon Śiva is the only one whose devotion and worship have
been permitted by Śāstras for every man and woman of whatever
cast he or she may be, from a Brahmin down to the Cāṇḍāla. Songs
in devotion to Śiva were therefore the only devotional songs that
could appeal to the common men and women irrespective of caste
or sex for whom Vidyāpati composed these songs.
1. Puruṣaparīkṣā, Chap. IV, v . 5.
2. ibid., Chap. IV, v. 10.
3. No. 6 of Haragauri Padavali in N. Gupta’s edition.
 VIDYĀPATI 23

Vidyāpati composed most of his songs during this period and

as his fame now rests mainly on these songs, it will be dealt with
separately later on. Of the four books composed during this period,
all of which are original and creative, the earliest is Kīrtipatākā, a
eulogistic poem in old Maithili or Abahaṭṭa, as it was then called,
recounting the victory of Shiva Singha over some Mohammedan
whose name is not given in the manuscript avilable to us. Only
one manuscript of this work on palm-leaves is known to exist
in the Vira Library at Kathmandu in Nepal and was discovered
by M.M. Haraprasad Sastri. It is too dilapidated, broken and
incomplete and full of all sorts of obscurities and errors and the late
Mahamahopadhyaya Sastri gave it up as worthless for the purposes
of reconstruction. Recently an edition of this worthless manuscript
has been published by Dr. Jayakant Mishra of Allahabad, but it is
of little use. The pagination of the leaves is lost, but the last page
is intact and from this it is clear that this is a work of Vidyāpati
on Shiva Singha’s victory but in the body of the MS., there are
two introductions, including the benedictory verses. From one
it appears to have been the work of Bhīṣma who was a poet of
renown of the later Oinabara days, and from the other it seems to
have been a love-poem composed for the delectation of Arjuna by
Abhinava Jayadeva which is a well-known title of Vidyāpati. This
cannot be Kīrtipatākā, which is a poem of valour and not of love.
It appears therefore that in this bundle the leaves of three different
MSS., all in old Maithili, have been mixed up, which in the absence
of pagination cannot be separated. One of them is a poem of
Bhīṣma; another a love-poem by Vidyāpati for Arjuna Rāya; and
the third is the Kīrtipatākā, of which the first leaf is not there but
only the last leaf is clear at the end of the bundle, which has led
everyone to suppose that the entire bundle is one manuscript, that
of Kīrtipatākā. No work of Bhishma has ever been known nor a
love-poem of Vidyāpati for the sake of Arjuna Raya,
The second work is Puruṣaparīkṣā which together with
Gorakṣavijaya was composed when Shiva Singha was the reigning
king. To understand Vidyāpati the man, this work is of inestimable
24 VIDYĀPATI

value and reflects the spirit of the age also. It was planned quite
early, taken up when he commenced writing, and completed when
he was mature in his judgement, firm in his convictions and reputed
as a writer of extraordinary eminence. In the introduction to this
work, which indeed was not there in Bhūparikramā, Vidyāpati says
that he undertakes the preparation of these tales “with a view to
the moral instruction of boys of immature understanding and for
the delectation of those ladies of the city who display a taste for the
mirthful arts of the god of love” (verse 3) and goes on to ask if “the
wise man whose intellect has been made clear by skill in learning
will not hearken to my work on account of the moral instruction
contained therein and of the elegant language in which these tales
are couched.” These tales are thus of the same category as the tales
in the Pañcatantra or the Hitopadeśa with only this difference that
in the latter works, the tales are fables or legendary stories while in
the work of Vidyāpati the tales are all anecdotes which had actually
happened or at least believed to have happened. There are altogether
forty-four tales in the Puruṣaparīkṣā divided into four chapters and
the eight tales of the first chapter have been reproduced verbatim
from the earlier work, Bhūparikramā. Some of them are, indeed,
historical and even the tales involving miracles are such as were
matters of common belief. The book was translated into Bengali
by one H.P. Raya at Serampore in 1815 and another edition by Sir
G. Haughton issued in London in 1826. It was prescribed as a text-
book for entrants into the service of the East India Company at the
College of Fort William.
And Puruṣaparīkṣā is remarkable for the simplicity and elegance
of its language. There was a gap of at least twenty years, if not more,
between Bhūparikramā and Puruṣaparīkṣā, but there is very little
in the style of the entire work to show that the first part of the
Puruṣaparīkṣā was the first authentic work of his youth issued in
the form of Bhūparikramā while the rest of the work was composed
during the years of his maturity. This shows his command over
Sanskrit expression which was, indeed, inborn. There are many
forms in this work which do not conform to Pāṇini’s grammar and
 VIDYĀPATI 25

the work is full of Maithilisms. They, however, help to simplify the

language without any loss to its expressiveness. All this leads one
to believe that Vidyāpati made an attempt in this work to create
a common Sanskrit, easy and simple but vigorous and elegant, by
the popularisation of which a new style of Sanskrit might come
into vogue which could be easily grasped by the common men and
women desirous to learn the language without much effort. Had
Vidyāpati’s example been followed, we would have had a common
Sanskrit language peculiar to Mithilā but in this as in his other
views, Vidyāpati was much ahead of his time and during the stage
of degeneration which followed soon after the death of Vidyāpati,
the cultural life of the land fell into the hands of the orthodox Pandit
class and Vidyāpati was ridiculed, his attempts at modernisation
decried, his original contributions ignored except in one matter,
namely the tradition of lyrical songs in Maithili which came to stay
for ever in the tongues of lakhs of Maithil women throughout these
six centuries.
Gorakṣavijaya Nāṭaka was also composed while Shiva Singha
was ruling. It is a small drama which could be easily staged. There
were many small dramas in Sanskrit written during this age for
staging and the comic Prahasana, Gaurī̄-Digambara, by Śaṅkara
Miśra is perhaps the most famous of them. But Vidyāpati introduced
an innovation there also, and if followed in the spirit in which it
was introduced by Vidyāpati, Maithili would have been the modern
Indian language to have established a genuine tradition in drama
as it is the first to have lyrical songs. Vidyāpati introduced songs
in Maithili in a drama in Sanskrit and Prakrit prose and verse. The
next step would have been the writing of the complete drama in
Maithili, as was done by Śaṅkaradeva and his disciple Mādhavadeva
in Assam or the long line of poets in the different courts of the Malla
Kings of Nepal. Vidyāpati, however, could not go further, probably
because, with the disappearance of Shiva Singha and the sudden
change in his fortune, the very source of his inspiration dried up
and his creative genius was rendered infructuous. His successors in
Mithilā kept up the tradition and went on imitating him but just in
26 VIDYĀPATI

the form in which the master had done it. Quite a large number of
such dramas were produced during the succeeding centuries but in
all these dramas only the songs are in Maithili. A genuine Maithili
drama was written in Mithilā only in the early years of this century.
The last work of this period and the most controversial of all
Vidyāpati’s works is Kīrtilatā. It is a work in old Maithili or Abahaṭṭa
prose and verse and purports to be an historical account of the
early days of Oinabara rule in Mithilā, how Kirti Singha avenged
his father’s assassination with the belp of Ibrahim Shah, the Sharki
Nawab of Jaunpur. The account given in Kīrtilatā, however, runs
counter to the course of events otherwise known. The assassination
of Ganeshwara took place in the L. Sam. year 252 which according
to Kielhorn’s calculation was A.D. 1371 but according to Vidyāpati
(who says that Shiva Singha’s accession to the throne took place
in L. Sam. 293 corresponding to the Śaka year 1324) this seems to
have happened in A.D. 1361. But even supposing that Gaṇeśvara
was treacherously murdered in A.D. 1371 there was a gap of
more than thirty years before Ibrahim Shah became the Nawab of
Jaunpur. These years are described in Kīrtilatā as a period of chaos
and anarchy in Mithilā but we know that these were the days when
Shiva Singh a was ruling over Mitbila and there was peace and
prosperity all around under his strong rule.
The theme of Kīrtilatā is the glorification of Kirti Singha who
proved himself ‘a real man’ by his patience and perseverance, valour
and determination, but in reality the poem is an eulogy of Ibrahim
Shah who has been exalted beyond measure and raised almost to
the sky as the most powerful Nawab and greatest conqueror of his
time. As a poem Kīrtilatā lacks those excellences which characterise
Vidyāpati’s poetry and has, therefore, been taken to be a work of his
early years but as it could not have been composed before Ibrahim
Shah was the Nawab of Jaunpur in A.D. 1400 when Vidyāpati must
have been fifty years old, this explanation is contradicted by history.
Linguistically, Kīrtilatā is obscure in places, partly because the only
manuscript from which the different editions of this work have
been published is full of errors and obscurities, but partly because it
 VIDYĀPATI 27

is a mixture of Prakrit and Apabhraṃśa with purely Maithili words

and phrases, sometimes sentences, and interspersed with Persian
and Arabic terms specially where the Mohammedan court and
army are described. Five different editions of the work have been
published and eminent scholars have studied it and given their own
views about it. It is not possible to enter into the controversy in any
detail here. I have explained my own views at great length in the
introduction to my edition of the work and give here below what
I feel about it.
It is a fact that Ibrahim Shah invaded Tirhut soon after he
ascended the throne when Shiva Singha was the Raja here. It is
also a fact that Shiva Singha suffered defeat within four years of
ascending the Gaddi, exactly three years nine months after, in the
winter of 1405-06. It is, however, not known either from history or
tradition by whom Shiva Singha was defeated or why and against
whom Ibrahim Shah invaded Mithilā. But Ibrahim’s invasion and
Shiva Singha’s fall seem to have happened at about the same time
and as Shiva Singha was in possession of the Raj which was claimed
by Kirti Singha as his patrimony, it is just possible that Ibrahim
attacked Shiva Singha to help Kirti Singha and Shiva Singha was
worsted in the battle. If that be the fact, Mithilā must have been
exposed to the danger of being annexed to the kingdom of Jaunpur
and devastated by the victorious army. But Mithilā was not annexed
and we have evidence to believe that Shiva Singha was succeeded by
his brother Padma Singha. Ibrahim Shah was a great patron of arts
and letters and the fame of Vidyāpati as the creator of Śiva- songs
called Nachari had reached Jaunpur of Ibrahim Shah.’1 I therefore
feel that Kīrtilatā was composed by Vidyāpati on the disappearance
of Shiva Singha, and with this he approached the Nawab, pleased
him and saved Mithilā from devastation and annexation consequent
upon Shiva Singha’s defeat.
It must have been very galling to the poet to have to praise a
Sultan who had caused the downfall of his patron-friend and put an
1. Search Report for 1944-46 of Kashi Nagari Pracharini Sabha. vide,
Haricharitra, Virata Parva of Lakhan Seni.
28 VIDYĀPATI

end to all the dreams of his life, but the astute statesman that he was,
his first loyalty was to the land and its people for whose sake he had
to suppress his personal feelings and use his talents to save Mithilā
as he had used his talents to save Shiva Singha once before when
he had been arrested for non-payment of revenue. In this light, all
the problems of Kīrtilatā are solved. This explains why the poems
is full of flattery and imaginary descriptions, avoids scrupulously
any reference to Shiva Singha and makes the hired assassin of Kirti
Singha’s father the target of the Sultan’s attack. This accounts also
for the large number of Persian and Arabic terms and the absence
of those qualities which characterise Vidyāpati’s poetry, because in
the state of anguish at the fall of his patron-friend no poet can be
expected to produce a better work. According to this hypothesis
Kīrtilatā was composed sometime In early summer of 1406. It is at
best an historical romance in which only the basic fact is historical,
and was composed to flatter a Mohammedan conqueror.
5
The defeat of Shiva Singha and his disappearance in early 1406
changed entirely the course of Vidyāpati’s life. He lost the light of
his life and the source of all his inspiration. All his dreams vanished
with the Raja at once. The anguish of his heart was all the more
gnawing because nothing was heard of the Raja either dead or alive.
So completely the Raja relied upon him, so much confidence he
had in his character, so implicit was his trust in his integrity and
prudence, that when he started for the last battle, he entrusted all
his six wives to Vidyāpati to look after them, and since not even
the dead body of the Raja was found, they had to wait for 12 years
before his last rites could be performed according to the Śāstras.
For fear of molestation by the victorious army, Vidyāpati sent them
to a friend and ally of Shiva Singha, the Dronabara Raja of Saptari,
Puraditya, at Rajabanauli now in epal Terai, and followed himself,
soon after the affairs of the State in Mithilā were settled, to live a
life of voluntary exile, looking after the six Ranis, all waiting for the
news of the lost Raja for twelve long years.
 VIDYĀPATI 29

These years of voluntary exile at Rajabanauli were the darkest

period of Vidyāpati’s life. There was nothing before him except
frustration and disillusionment. The creative genius was dead and
poetry given up. He wrote a small treatise, of course in Sanskrit,
on the forms of letters, documents, etc. for the Raja of Saptari and
this Likhanāvali is the only work of the poet written during this
period. The dates given in the forms are all of them L. Sam. 299
which shows that the work was compiled during that year. The
book has been published, and the letters and other documents
throw much light on the life of the time, social, political, economic
and commercial.
At Rajabanauli Vidyāpati had nothing to do, and he read
extensively the Rāmāyaṇa, the Mahābhārata, the Purāṇas, etc.
Brooding all the time that it was probably as a punishment for
the sacrilege he had committed in praising Shiva Singha and his
amours as those of Lord Kṛṣṇa that he had to lose him, Vidyāpati
began copying Śrīmad Bhāgavata, the sacred text of the Vaiṣṇavas
of the Kṛṣṇa cult, which he completed on the 15th day of the bright
half of the month of Śrāvaṇa in L. Sam. 309, which was a Tuesday,
at Rajabanauli, just when the period of waiting was expiring. It is
written on 576 leaves of the palm-tree, each leaf 27 inches long and
five inches broad, with five lines on each page and 112 letters in a
line in excellent letters, very legible, with only a few scratches or
errors corrected, which shows the care and co acentration Vidyāpati
bestowed upon it. The whole manuscript is safely preserved in the
library of the Sanskrit University at Darbhanga and is worth seeing.
This is the only autograph of the poet available so far.
On the expiry of this painful waiting for 12 years, the last rites
of Shiva Singha were performed and though nothing was known as
to what became of the other Ranis, Lakhima is said to have burnt
herself on the funeral pyre where the body of the Raja made of
Kuśā grass was burnt. Relieved of the trust reposed in him by the
departed Raja, Vidyāpati returned home a changed man, sad and
old, approaching the Biblical limit of three score years and ten.
30 VIDYĀPATI

Viswasa Devi, the first wife of Padma Singha, Shiva Singha’s younger
brother, was the ruler of Mithilā at the time. Scholars have said1
that after Shiva Singha, Lakhima, his widow, ruled for 12 years, and
then Padma Singha and Viswasa Devi for thirteen. It is, however, a
mistake of duplication. As Shiva Singha was not declared dead for
12 years, the question of succession did not arise. Shiva Singha had
no issue nor had Padma Singha any. Legally Lakhima, his widow,
was his regent to rule in his absence but she lived at Rajabanauli
and did not come back to Mithilā. She appointed her husband’s
younger brother to rule in her stead. Padma Singha died soon
afterwards and in his place his wife, Viswasa Devi, held the reins of
government. But a woman could not hold the throne as the ruler,
and therefore, after the last rites of the deceased Raja were over,
the question of succession arose and the next reversioner happened
to be Hara Singha, the youngest son of Bhava Singha. But it is
doubtful if he was alive at the time, in which case his son, Nara
Singha succeeded Shiva Singha as the next male heir. Any way, the
period of waiting for 12 years has been assigned separately both to
Lakhima and to Padma Singha and Viswasa. It may be interesting
to note here that beginning from Deva Singha every ruling Raja
of the Oinabara dynasty assumed a Viruda or title on ascending
the throne. Deva Singha was Garudanarayana. Shiva Singha was
Rupanarayana, Narasingha was Darpanarayana and so on. No such
Viruda is available for Padma Singha which shows that he was only a
regent and not a full-fledged Raja, nor is it available for Hara Singha
and therefore, it is doubtful if he was alive when the question of
succession opened after Shiva Singha was declared dead.
Vidyāpati was, however, a man of action and did not shirk the
duties of life. He joined the court of the Raja of Tirhut and for a
little over 20 years that he lived after his return, he attended the
court of three kings, Hara Singha, his son Narasingha and his son
Dhira Singha. He compiled as many as seven works for four royal
persons, two for Viswasa Devi, one for Narasingha, one for his
wife Dhiramati, and the last one for Dhira Singha. They are all of
1. Grierson, G.A., The Test of a Man, Introduction, p. xii.
 VIDYĀPATI 31

them Smṛti works, all in Sanskrit, all compilations and not even one
original creative work. It appears, therefore, that he joined the court
indeed, but not as an active courtier but only as an elder statesman,
ready for consultation on matters of law, custom or polity but
without holding any independent post of responsibility. Scholars
say that he composed some devotional songs, specially those in
which the frustration and disillusionment of old age are depicted so
very feelingly and so very faithfully, but the sentiments expressed
in the songs need not be attributed to his personal experience.
Vidyāpati has written hundreds of songs on the non-marital love
of a Parakīya but on that account we must not hold the view, as the
Sahajīyas of Bengal have held, that Vidyāpati himself was involved
in unlawful sexual relations. In Maithili, as in Sanskrit, poetry is
only impersonal and what appears the faithful effusion of the heart
is due to the intensity of feeling which the poet creates in himself
by the force of his imagination.
The two works associated with the name of Viswasa Devi
are Śaivasarvasvasāra, devoted to the worship of Śiva and Gaṅgā̄
Vākyāvalī, devoted to the pilgrimage to the holy Gaṅgā̄ in general
and places of special sanctity in particular and the rites to be
performed there.
Śaivasarvasvasāra is a famous work dealing exhaustively with
all aspects of Śiva-worship which is a matter of common interest
to the people of Mithilā. It is, however, not yet published and
MSS. of this work are very scarce. The book on the Gaṅgā is no
less important, speciaIJy as it includes a detailed discussion of
the everyday necessary duties of a Brahmana, the Āhnika. This
book has been published in the series, “Contributions of Women
to Sanskrit Literature,” edited by the late Dr. J.B. Chaudhary. The
special feature of both these works, as of all the books of this
period, is the wealth of quotations from sacred texts with which
each statement is supported. This shows how extensively Vidyāpati
was well-versed in the sacred literature of the Brahmanas and how
prodigious his memory was to have quoted from them so relevantly
32 VIDYĀPATI

because books were then in MSS. only and it was not easy to consult
a relevant text in a MS. when it was needed in a particular context.
Another work equally exhaustive is Dūnavākyāvalī published
at Varanasi in A.D. 1883 and has been long out of print. It was
compiled for Rani Dhiramati, the second wife of Narasingha, and
is dedicated to her. In this work the various kinds of gift have been
described and the Saṅkalpa Vākyas of making them have been set
down with sacred texts to support each one of them.
The last work of Vidyāpati was Durgā-Bhakti-Taraṅgiṇī, which
is exactly like the works on Śiva, Gaṅgā and Dana and deals
exhaustively with the Durgāpūjā, the popular festival of Mithilā. It
is stated to have been compiled by orders of Bhairava Singha while
his brother Dhira Singha was still ruling. Vidyāpati must have been
above eighty years of age at the time. No work of Vidyāpati has
come to light which can be dated later than this.
All these works are on rites and rituals, socio-religious in nature,
but there is one work of this period which is on the Hindu Law
of inheritance, Vibhāgasāra by name, compiled under the orders
of Narasingha Darpanarayana. Chronologically it falls, therefore,
between the work on Gaṅgā̄ and that on Dana. What could have
impelled Vidyāpati to compile this serious work on law when he
was almost eighty years of age, specially when there were so many
authoritative treatises on the subject? The work is not yet published
and has not received the attention it deserves. If we look into the
contents of this work, we shall find herein only one point that has
been discussed with great stress, and all the rest are the common
topics dealt with in any work on the subject and that point is the
impartibility of a Raj which should be inherited by the law of
primogeniture. Narasingha’s succession to his father seems to have
been disputed by his other half-brothers claiming partition of the
Raj, and one of whom Ranasingha actually assumed the Viruda,
Durlabhanarayana. From his sons also Narasingha apprehended
danger, and actually all his three sons assumed royalty. It is most
likely, therefore, that as Narasingha’s grand-father, Bhava Singha,
had commissioned Vidyāpati’s grandfather, the grand old man
 VIDYĀPATI 33

Chandeshwara, to lend him his support by upholding his royalty

of limited status even without undergoing the regular coronation
rites, so Narasingha also commissioned the grand old man of
his own time, a worthy scion of Chandeshwara’s family, to lend
him his support and establish with authoritative texts the fact
that the succession to a Raj is not governed by the general law of
inheritance but by the special rule of primogeniture. And Vidyāpati
has done it very conelusively by quoting, besides other texts, from
the Nītisāra of Vireshwara, the father of Chandeshwara, and the
eldest brother of his own great grandfather. That there was family
feud among the Oinabaras of this generation is borne out by a line
in the Bhagirathpur inscription of Anumati Devi, dated L. Sam.
394 or A.D. 1503.1 This Rani was the daughter-in-law of Bhairava
Singha, wife of Rambhadra, and mother of the last Oinabara
king Kamsanarayana. In this inscription she has been praised for
baving brought about amity among her kinsmen by means of her
great humility and high diplomacy.2 It seems that in view of the
impending attack from the Mohammedan Nawab of Bengal, Rani
Anumati patched up the differences among the later Oinabaras,
which were coming down for three generations from the days of
Narasingha. This work of Vidyāpati was thus motivated by political
reasons and shows how highly he was esteemed among the learned
men of his own time.
There are two more works of Vidyāpati, commonly known but
not available and they are Gayāpattālaka or a work on rites to be
performed at Gaya and Varṣakṛtya on the festivals falling during
the year. No complete manuscript of either of these has yet been
found, and the fragments that are available do not contain any
introduction, not even the benedictory verse with which every
work begins. It appears therefore that the fragments available were
not compiled in book-form but were mere notes made by Vidyāpati
from time to time. For the same reason it is not possible to say
anything about the time of their composition.
1. Journal of the Bihar Research Society, Vol. XLI, part 3, 1955.
2. Kincoccairvinayannayacca vasalam nila yaya vandhavali.
34 VIDYĀPATI

It is remarkable to note in this connection that manuscripts

of Vidyāpati’s works are very scarce in Mithilā. No manuscripts of
works other than the Purusaporik sa are easily available. Kīrtilatā,
Kīrtipatākā and Gorakṣavijaya are available only in Nepal, and
there too only one manuscript, a very bad one, is available. Of
Bhūparikramā, the sole copy known to be there is in the Sanskrit
College collection at Calcutta. Of Likhanāvalī no manuscript is
available and though the book was printed in Darbhanga some
70 years ago, not even a printed copy is easily available, Of
Śaivasarvasvasāra there is an incomplete copy at Darbhanga and
a fuller one in Nepal. It appears that, except Puruṣaparīkṣā, none
of his works was popular in Mithilā. It is evident that the songs of
Vidyāpati so completely eclipsed his other works that his popularity
remained confined only to his songs. The Pandits as a class very
reluctantly refer to his views and do not recognise him as an
authority. The great Naiyāyika Keśava Miśra (the grandson of the
jurist Vachaspati) refers in his Daivatapariśiṣṭa very reverentially
to Vidyāpati’s Gaṅgāvakyāvalī. but he too does not miss the
opportunity of flinging a gibe at him for his accepting the gift of
his native village, Bisapi, from Shiva Singha by calling him, “the
greatly covetous beggar of a village”, Atilubdha-nagara-yācaka. It is
interesting to note that even today the Durgāpūjā in Mithilā is not
performed according to the treatise compiled by Vidyāpati. Clearly
enough, Vidyāpati was far too advanced in his views for the age
in which he lived and was not, therefore, looked upon with due
reverence by the orthodox Pandit class.
There are thus four clearly defined periods of Vidyāpati’s life,
each distinct from the other, and the works that he produced.
reflect clearly the course of life he lived during the period. The first
period extending over the first twenty years was one of preparation,
and we find him at the end of this period at Naimiṣāraṇya in the
entourage of Deva Singha. The next thirty-six years, the period of
his manhood, were spent at court with Shiva Singha. It was the
 VIDYĀPATI 35

happiest period of his life when his creative talents were at their
best and he produced all those works for which he is immortal. The
next twelve years of voluntary exile were the darkest period of his
life when he had to suffer silently the deepest anguish of frustration
and disillusionment. The last twenty years were spent comparatively
quietly at home, as an elder statesman at court, engaged in reading
and compilation of sacred texts. All through the changes of fortune
and vicissitudes of life, through bright sunshine and darkest clouds,
there was, however, one work which he never forgot, which he
never ceased to do and that was writing. In his own words, he went
on patiently and perseveringly constructing poles of letters to build
up the high platform for the creeper of his renown to spread out.
Vidyāpati married two wives though we do not know if he
married the second at the death of the first. From his first wife he
had two sons and two daughters and from the second only one
son and two daughters. His descendants through his eldest son,
Harapati, who was a Mudrārakṣaka or keeper of the Royal seal
of some later Oinabara king and composed a work on Astrology,
Daivajñavāndhava, are still flourishing, but not at Bisapi but at
Sauratha, a village near Madhubani famous for its annual marriage
Sabha where lakhs of Maithil Brahmanas congregate to negotiate
and settle the marriage of their boys and girls. The seventh in
descent from Vidyāpati was Narayana Thakur who transcribed a
copy of the Puruṣaparīkṣā which is preserved in the collection of the
Asiatic Society of Bengal in Calcutta on which my edition of that
work has been based. It was transcribed in the L. Sam. year 504,
i.e., 1613 or 1623 according to Kielhorn in the village of Bisapi from
where Narayana’s grandson migrated to Saurath. Those flourishing
at present at Saurath are 16th in descent from the poet. Many more
respectable persons all over Mithilā claim descent from Vidyāpati
through his three daughters, specially from the ones from his first
wife.
36 VIDYĀPATI

Many miracles are told about Vidyāpati all over Mithilā. It is

said that, having been pleased with his devotion, the Lord Śiva
attended upon him as his servant under the guise of Ugaṇa, but
this name with a cerebral n is there in the famous Rudrādhyāya in
the Saṁhitā of Śukla Yajurveda1 with which the Lord is invoked. It
is also said that, during his last journey to the bank of the Ganges,
Vidyāpati found himself unable to proceed further, but during
the night the course of the river so changed that it passed by the
spot where Vidyāpati was sojourning during his last night and
consequently Vidyāpati found himself in the morning on the bank
of the Ganges where he breathed his last. It should, however, be
remembered that this incident has been told by Vidyāpati himself
regarding the Kāyastha Bodhi in his tale of “A Man genuinely
righteous” (Tale No. 30 of the Puruṣaparīkṣā). Whatever may be the
fact, it is clear that in the eyes of the people of Mithilā the image of
Vidyāpati was holy among the holiest and indeed people believed
him to be holiness. incarnate with supernatural powers and capable,
therefore, of all miracles.
In one of the songs attributed to him it is said that Vidyāpati
saw Shiva Singha in dream thirty-two years after his disappearance
and that he expired on the 13th day of the bright half of, perhaps,
the following Kārtika. It is a miracle for a man to tell the date of his
death while still alive, but even if this song be one of a later poet,
it is very old and believed as a fact by people at large, so that this
thirteenth day of the bright half of Kārtika is regarded as the date
of his death as a result of which this date has been celebrated as the
Vidyāpati Day by all his admirers all over the country. Vidyāpati
is said to have breathed his last on the bank of the Gaṅgā near the
spot where now stands the Vidyāpati Nagar railway station on the
Barauni Junction in Hajipur branch of the North-Eastern railway.
Vidyāpati thus attained the fourth object of life, namely salvation,
1 Mādhyandina Śākhā, 16.25.
 VIDYĀPATI 37

by breathing his last on the bank of the Ganges. He had lived a full
life, lived literally the meaningful life, which he had been advocating
all through his life, successful with attainments of the purposes of
life-the unfailing mark of a ‘real man’.
6
Such was the man Vidyāpati; but Vidyāpati is immortal as the
maker of songs, the first great poet to use the spoken language of
the land in the composition of the songs of ravishing melody and
exquisite beauty, which opened up, at once, new vistas of Indian
poetry. I have, however, always held the view that howsoever great
as a poet, it was but a mere put of Vidyāpati’s personality, and
since the whole is always greater than a part, however significant
it may be, it is essential to know Vidyāpati, the man, in order to
understand and appreciate him as a poet. It was, indeed, the unique
genius of Vidyāpati that felt the pulse of the age so correctly, foresaw
the possibilities of his talents so clearly, and laid the foundations
of a new type of poetry on such strong grounds that it became a
tradition for the poets of the succeeding centuries to follow and
imitate; but Vidyāpati was himself a creature of his own heredity
and environment of his own land, his own age, his own society
and his own family, because it was from them that his talents took
their shape and direction. We are apt to be misled in our appraisal
of the poet if we study him in isolation divorced from all the
limitations under which he had to work, and may be led away in
our enthusiasm to credit him with things which Vidyāpati could
never have even dreamt of.
To take a very simple example, Vidyāpati used the language
actually spoken at the time as the vehicle of his poetical expres-
sion, but except in his songs he never used that language as such.
In the historical romances, Kīrtilatā and Kīrtipatākā, as also in his
songs on Shiva Singha’s accession and his victory, which might
have been written originally for the Kīrtipatākā, he used a language
the that was supposed to have been spoken at some distant past
and was, therefore, approved by usage. When Vidyāpati says in
38 VIDYĀPATI

the Kīrtilatā1 “Vidyāpati’s language is like the young moon; this

adorns the forehead of the Lord Śiva; that ravishes the hearts of the
connoisseurs of poetry”, we seem to hear the defence of Vidyāpati
against the attack of his orthodox critics for the spoken language
that he used in his songs. But Vidyāpati used Maithili only in the
songs in his drama also and in Likhanāvalī, he gives all the forms
of letters, deeds and other documents in Sanskrit only and not in
Maithili which could have been most useful and desirable. But we
must remember that literacy at that time was strictly limited to the
orthodox class that favoured Sanskrit and among women it was
negligible. Vidyāpati used Maithili in his songs because these songs
were not written and read but were meant to be sung and listened
to, and learnt by heart. Even in the songs of Vidyāpati we find the
spoken Maithili language of two varieties. There are some in the
sophisticated language of the court and the elite where Tatsama
words predominate and pictures are laden with strings of figures
of speech. There are, however, other songs which are couched in a
language simple, direct and homely with Tadbhava or Deśī words
predominating. Evidently Vidyāpati chose the language according
to the cultural status of the audience for whom he meant the songs;
and to reach the men and women of his time all his songs had
to pass through anyone of these channels, through the court and
courtly circle, through his own household or through the homes of
his friends and admirers. Vidyāpati does not seem to have written
his songs for himself independently of the particular audience for
whom they were meant. Later on, when his fame as a song-writer
spread out, Raja Shiva Singha appointed a young professional
musician of his court, Jayata by name, to take songs from the
poet, set them to music and give demonstration when prepared on
suitable occasions at court or elsewhere. This is the most basic fact
about the songs of Vidyāpati and we can understand and appreciate
the songs of Vidyāpati only when we look at them in this light.
And exactly for this reason, the greatest problem in any
study of Vidyāpati’s songs is the question of authenticity of a song
1. Kīrtilatā, 1.5.
 VIDYĀPATI 39

ascribed to Vidyāpati. This is done generally by the presence of

the name of the poet in the last couplet of the song, technically
called the Bhaṇita, which is a special feature of these songs, but in
course of oral transmission over the centuries, specially through the
uncritical singers mostly women, the Bhaṇitas have been confused,
misplaced and added. Moreover, not all the songs have the Bhaṇita
either. In many collections specially in Nepal, the Bhaṇita has been
left out for economy of space. Even in anthologies made by scholars
as far back as the 18th century, we find such confusions which are
baflling. In Mithilā, the practice of adding the name of Vidyāpati
at the end is still common. Many lesser poets have purposely given
the name of Vidyāpati in their songs to give them the prestige of
the master’s composition. In Bengal, at least one poet wrote all his
songs under the borrowed name of Vidyāpati.
Therefore no complete collection of Vidyāpati’s songs has yet
been made and it is very doubtful if it can still be made. Vidyāpati
never collected his songs; they have been floating orally in Mithilā,
in Bengal, in Nepal, etc. The pioneer work in this direction was
done in Bengal where the Padas of Vidyāpati were very carefully
preserved in the Vaiṣṇava anthologies as depicting the amours
of Lord Kṛṣṇa and the Gopī̄s. The most critical edition of these
Padas, and the most exhaustive too, was made by the late Dr. B.B.
Majumdar of Patna. The Bihar Rashtrabhasha Parishad has also
been bringing out collections of Vidyāpati’s Padas. My friend Dr.
Subhadra Jha brought out a very valuable collection of these songs
as preserved in an old palm-leaf manuscript in Nepal, and before
him Pandit Shivanandan Thakur had published a collection which
he found in a manuscript in Mithilā. A book on Maithil music,
Rāgataraṅgiṇī by name, compiled by Locana in the middle of the
18th century contains 53 songs of Vidyāpati and I have published
a manuscript of Nepal, Bhasha Geeta Sangraha, which contains
77 songs of Vidyāpati, 37 of them being altogether new. But all
this does not exhaust the songs. I have found two manuscripts in
Mithilā containing 300 songs, of which some eighty are not yet
published and I am just now busy making a critical edition of this
40 VIDYĀPATI

Mithilā Padavali for the Maithili Development Fund of the Patna

University. But most of these collections are vitiated by corrupt
readings, except the Bhasha Geeta Saṁgraha which is a collection
made very meticulously by a Pandit more than 200 years ago. The
reason is obvious. All the collections were made either by persons
not speaking Maithili or persons who were not learned enough to
understand what they were writing. I, therefore; feel that a scientific
study of Vidyāpati’s songs is possible only when the authenticity of
the songs and the genuineness of their readings are determined.
We do not know when Vidyāpati began composing these
songs. The earliest, pointed out so far by many on the basis of its
Bhaṇita, which contains the name of Raja Bhogishwara, is one
on the Kandarpa Pūjā (song No. 850) but it is palpably absurd.
Vidyāpati was not more than 12 years old when Ganeshwara, son of
Bhogishwara, was assassinated in L. Sam. 252. How can it be believed
that Vidyāpati when he was only ten years old or so composed
a highly erotic song depicting the grief of a Virahiṇī, associating
therewith Raja Bhogishwara who was of the age of his grandfather?
In his first Sanskrit work, Bhūparikramā, Vidyāpati does not talk of
love but in the subsequent sections of the Puruṣaparīkṣā love is the
dominant theme even when the tales are meant to exemplify other
marks of man. Befitting a disciplined child of a cultured family
Vidyāpati began writing on love only after his adolescence was over
and he had entered manhood.
Vidyāpati’s songs are of three different categories, each with
its own characteristics, the only thing common to all three being
the language, which is the language actually spoken by the men
and women in Mithilā during that age. The most popular of them,
which have kept Vidyāpati alive in the throats of lakhs of Maithil
women over these centuries, are the songs suitable for social
functions including the prayer songs of the family deity with which
any auspicious function begins in Mithilā. Next to them are the
songs devoted to Lord Śiva, including the songs depicting Śiva’s
marriage and family life. Vidyāpati created a new variety of such
songs called ‘Nachari’ which became so popular and were so widely
 VIDYĀPATI 41

renowned that a poet of Jaunpur praised Vidyāpati as their creator

and Abul Fazl in his Ain-i-Akbari1 calls all the songs of Vidyāpati,
even those that depict the violence of the passion of Jove, under
the general name of Lachari. Those songs are still very popular
with the devotees of Śiva all over the country and can be heard in
any temple of Śiva every day. The last but the most important on
which his fame chiefly rests are songs in which the various forms
and phases, moods and situations of sexual love are depicted, some
with reference to Lord Kṛṣṇa and the Gopī̄s, and others to men and
women in general.
Before, however, we enter into these different categories of
Vidyāpati’s lyrical outpourings, it is pertinent to give an account
of the background in which these overflowings took place and the
success achieved by the experiment. Of all the titles with which
Vidyāpati has been decorated over these centuries there are two
that are authenticated by his drama Gorakṣavijaya, the copperplate
grant of Bisapi and by tradition, over and above by the Bhaṇitas of
those many songs which are genuinely his. Vidyāpati was called
Abhinava-Jayadeva or ‘a modern Jayadeva’ during his own lifetime
and also Kavi Kanṭhahāra or ‘a poet who was the garland for the
throat’. Dr. B.B. Mazumdar who has discussed in detail the many
titles associated with Vidyāpati has come to the conclusion that
these two only were genuinely his and his only. Both these epithets
are meaningful, and if we analyse and assess their connotation
we shall visualise clearly the ideals that inspired the poet in the
experimentation and the immediate ravishment with which this
experiment enraptured the heart of all those who listened to them.
It is an established fact, which does not require a reiteration,
that for centuries before Vidyāpati appeared on the scene there were
two streams of poetry running side by side all over North-Eastern
India in general, and Mithilā in particular. Both these streams were
entertaining and not edifying. The one was the stream of classical
Sanskrit poetry coming down from the remotest past of which the
most outstanding representative is the Amarū Śataka (the Century
1. Gladwin’s translation, edited by Jagadish Mukhopadhyaya, p. 730.
42 VIDYĀPATI

of Amarū) of which it has been said that a single verse is equivalent

to a hundred treatises. This was in Sanskrit, modelled on Sanskrit
rhetoric and composed in Sanskrit metres by Sanskrit poets, and
patronised by the cultured society and the various courts all over
the country. Sanskrit being the lingua franca of the entire Bhārata,
this kind of poetry had an all-India appeal, though confined to that
class only that knew Sanskrit. This poetry was lyrical and mostly
erotic though eulogistic and devotional lyrics too were in vogue.
The other stream was the folk poetry in the spoken language refined
by usage, the earliest representative of which we have in the Gāthā
Saptaśatī but which developed in the eastern region of Āryavarta
through the Charchari dance-songs of Kālidāsa’s Vikramorvaśīya
to the songs of the Vajrayana Siddhas, of the Pal days, of which a
collection has been published as Bauddha Gāna and Dohā which
are characterised by the fact that they are all set in various Rāgas
peculiar to this part of Āryavarta, and mention the poet’s name at
the end which came to be known as Bhaṇita later on.
Jayadeva was the first poet to attempt a fusion of the two
and give a new variety of Sanskrit poetry. The language was still
Sanskrit there; the theme was the amours of Lord Kṛṣṇa as depicted
in Śrīmad Bhāgavata though enshrined in the Prakrit poetry since
the days of the Gāthās; the style, manner and the attitude were the
same as in the classical Sanskrit poetry. Only the technique was the
one used in folk-poetry; they were songs to be sung, and were set in
the local Rāgas with the Bhaṇita used for the first time in Sanskrit
poetry. There was such a happy fusion of true poetry and ravishing
melody in the new poetry that it was at once popular, and even
today people are enraptured with the songs of Gītagovinda, even if
they do not understand the meaning, simply by their sweet diction
and melodious rhythm.
With the advent of the Karṇāṭas, music and dance received a
great impetus in Mithilā and from Varṇaratnākara of Jyotirīśvara
we gather what an important place they had in the social life of
the time. Songs became an integral part of the social life of Mithilā
which they still are, and there is no function in a Maithil home,
 VIDYĀPATI 43

religious, social or seasonal, for which there are not songs with
tunes peculiar to them.
Vidyāpati took the cue from Jayadeva. He adopted the
technique of songs of the folk-poetry coming down from the Pal
days which Jayadeva had adopted almost two hundred years earlier;
he adopted the language of the land as actually spoken and not its
refined form, approved by usage, which he himself sometimes used
specially in his historical romances. But the theme was taken from
classical Sanskrit poetry with its style, manner, tone, etc. There
was a true fusion between the two streams of poetry. He went one
step still further than Jayadeva towards modernisation and made
available the pleasure of Sanskrit poetry even to those who did not
know Sanskrit. In Vidyāpati’s compositions, both the sound and
sense appealed to the common men and women and not the sound
only. It was in this sense that Vidyāpati was an Abhinava Jayadeva
because Jayadeva’s innovation popularised only the sound element
but Vidyāpati really modernised it by popularising both the sound
and sense.
Vidyāpati was like the bright sun in the firmament of Maithili
poetry with whose rise in effulgence all the lesser planets and stars
disappear from view. All the compositions of his predecessors,
most of those of his contemporaries and some of those of even
his successors, all of them floating orally among the connoisseur
of the art, have perished or they may still be floating with the
name of Vidyāpati replacing that of the author in the Bhaṇita.
We can imagine that Vidyāpati had a sweet voice and talent for
singing. Hearing songs being sung by the ladies of his family, he
would compose songs even as a lad and give them to the ladies to
sing. He must have, therefore, begun with the songs for the social
functions and as he grew into manhood he would have composed
erotic songs for his friends, for his friends’ wives or for his own
wife, which moved about in private circles. Vidyāpati wrote most of
his songs, at least in the early stage, for the women-folk who had to
sing them, and therefore, required them. Vidyāpati was not a poet
44 VIDYĀPATI

by profession; he was a man of the court, and when his reputation

spread, he began to compose songs for the king; but there also it
was the queens who learnt them with avidity and required them
enthusiastically because the men-folk could get the delight of
these songs in Sanskrit lyrics also but the women-folk, once they
had experienced the exhilaration of poetic delight which his songs
afforded, could not be content with what he had given them but
wanted more and more of them. Vidyāpati had the wonderful
insight into a woman’s heart and he depicted the secret emotions of
a woman so very faithfully, realistically and feelingly that women
found in them their own portrayal. It was, therefore, the women
who learnt these songs and transmitted them from mouth to mouth
till some one put them down in a note-book. Till very recently
every cultured family in Mithilā had its own book of songs, and
modern editions of these songs have mostly been made from these
family song-books. Vidyāpati hardly, if ever, wrote down a song; no
song written in the poet’s own hand has yet been found or heard
of. And since these songs were then, as now, adornments for the
throats of the lovers of these songs, he was very affectionately and
correctly called Kavi-Kanṭhahāra.

The Vyavahāra songs, as the songs meant exclusively for social

functions are called, are of as many varieties as there are functions,
and each variety has a tune peculiar to it. These songs have been the
most popular, and therefore, the most floating, and are found very
rarely in writing. The authenticity of these songs, therefore, is most
doubtful. Except a few devotional songs in praise of or prayer to
the goddess with which all festive functions in a Maithil household
begin, some songs describing Śiva’s marriage, which are sung on
the occasion of marriage, and some Uchiti songs which are sung
to the bridegroom by the ladies of the bride’s party on behalf of
the bride in the form of an appeal to look upon her kindly and
excuse her faults—except these varieties of Vyavahāra songs, none
 VIDYĀPATI 45

others, genuinely Vidyāpati’s, for any festive occasion, are available

in any old and reliable collection. People have come even to doubt
if Vidyāpati actually composed any such songs as are popularly
attributed to him. One such song has, however, been available to me
on a palm-leaf1 not less than 400 years old; it is a typical Vyavahāra
song, the prototype of a host of such other songs sung still all over
Mithilā to the bridegroom at the time of feeding for full one year
after the date of marriage or even afterwards. These songs called
‘Joga’ describe the various methods of spell or charm calculated
to make the husband subservient to the newly married wife. The
central idea underlying this type of songs is given by Vidyāpati in
the refrain here: “Listen carefully, Oh my daughter, to the devices
of charm by virtue of which your (newly-married) husband will
not fall into the influence of another (girl)” and goes on to give
recipes for a herbal concoction for drink, an incense to be burnt,
and a special collyrium to apply to the eyes, processes described in
any work on erotics to bring a man under the control of a woman.
For sheer weirdness it can be compared with the Witches’ song in
Shakespeare’s Macbeth.
It is sad that these songs have not received the attention which
they deserve. Partly it is due to their non-availability, and partly
to the fact that belonging as they do to the social life of the land,
they can be relished only in that social background. These social
functions have certain rites peculiar to each, and although they
are nowhere recorded, they are known to the ladies who officiate
over these functions. Those rites are described in these songs and
they serve, therefore, as guides. When composed, these songs
incorporated within themselves the various rites, processes, etc.
concerning the function, and in course of transmission these
songs served the purpose of lessons for the new generation. Thus
these songs kept the function alive in the throats of the women-
folk and saved them from being forgotten or confused. Thus
they gave an unbroken continuity to the social functions, set a
standard for them, and brought about uniformity in them. They
1 Some Unpublished Maithili Songs. Gaṅgānatha Jha Research Institute Journal,
Vol. II, Part 4, p. 408. Aug. 1945.
46 VIDYĀPATI

have, therefore, a cultural importance of their own. Poetically they

are simple, sensuous and straightforward without any effort for
embellishment. They evoke homely emotions and sentiments, and
appeal to the commonest people as well as the most sophisticated
alike because the occasion is equally important for them all. Such
are songs suitable for investing a boy with the sacred thread, for
the joy of the forefathers is described on the occasion when a new
child is being initiated into Duija-hood; songs (called Samadaona)
to be sung when a married girl goes to her husband’s house, in
which the feelings at the parting are portrayed; birth-songs (called
Sohara) which are sung on the occasion of the birth of a son, rarely
on the birth of a daughter, expressing the joy of the members of the
family, specially the sisters of the father of the child who press the
parents of the child, specially the mother, to give them presents;
rains-songs (called Malāra or Pāvasa) which express the grief of
the young girls whose husbands are away and they spend time in
recreation by swinging and so on, These are all sentiments which
are common to every member of society, feelings shared by all, and
couched as they all are in simple, sensuous and sweet words with
a lilting music each peculiar to itself, they electrified the women-
folk, then as they do now, and thousands of such songs have been
composed by hundreds of poets since Vidyāpati’s days, but all on
the pattern set by the master.
Vidyāpati’s Śiva-songs are no less popular, specially as one kind
of these songs, those describing Śiva’s marriage with the daughter
of the Mountain-King, have been treated by the women-folk of
Mithilā as marriage-songs. He composed, how- ever, a number of
songs of devotion to Śiva in a specific tune which devotees sing
in dance in accompaniment of Ḍamaru1, sacred to Śiva, and they
are called Nacharis. It is not the subject-matter that characterises a
Nachari, it is the tune which is peculiar to it. One can see a devotee
in any Sive temple dancing in ecstasy while singing a Nachari.
Mithilā is mostly Śaiva and even those who profess devotion to
Śakti adore Śiva alike. Vidyāpati’s Śiva songs have led people to call
1 Ḍarnaru—A pan-like drum.
 VIDYĀPATI 47

him a Śaiva and believed in stories of miracles like the one that Śiva
attended upon him in the guise of a servant called Ugana.
Thematically Vidyāpati’s Śiva-songs are of three kinds. There
are the prayers and praises of the Lord, so sincere in feeling, so
penitent in tone, so completely surrendering in attitude, so simple in
expression and so sweet in diction and lilting in tune, that they are
universally popular, specially as the adoration of Śiva is permitted
to all Hindus irrespective of caste and sex. “Oh Bholānāth, when
wilt thou allay my agonies?”1 or “How shall I cross over the end of
this life? There appears no end to the sea of life, Oh Bhairava, take
hold of the oars.”2—are some of the popular songs which evoke
the pathos in everyone when he thinks of his own helplessness. In
many of his songs Vidyāpati has depicted the incongruity in the
life, looks and deeds of Lord Śiva which are humorous in extreme.
Śiva is said to have burnt Cupid but taken over his wife Gaurī̄ as
one-half of his own body (in the form of Ardhanārīśvara). Alluding
to this, a friend of Pārvatī asks Śiva3—“Oh Śaṃbhu the benevolent,
Oh Śaṃbhu the beneficent, thou who destroyedst the five-arrowed
(Cupid), how is it that on one side thou hast (man-like) beards and
on the other side (woman-like) breast—what a nice combination.
Indeed, on account of thy intense desire to possess the great qualities
of Gaurī̄, thou tookst her into your own body, ignoring the infamy
that this will give rise to.”
Secondly, there are the songs describing the various stages of
Śiva’s marriage with Pārvatī-Śiva with five heads and three eyes,
the third with fire burning therein; the Ganges flowing from his
matted hair; with the digit of the moon on the forehead; the whole
body besmeared with the ashes of the cremation ground; with the
hide of an elephant for the cover of the body, and a bullock to ride
on; with serpents coiled round his neck and arms and hanging all
over his body; with his throat black on account of taking poison
to which he was addicted inveterately; with the ghosts, Piśācas
1. Padavali, edited by Benipuri, No. 243.
2. ibid., No. 239.
3. Haragauri, N. Gupta’s Edition, No. 19.
48 VIDYĀPATI

and other such strange Gaṇas as his followers-such was Śiva as

old as eternity and could not therefore be a suitable match for the
sweet, pretty daughter of the king of mountains. Kālidāsa in his
Kumārasaṃbhava describes how Lord Śiva went in the guise of a
young Brahmin student boy to Pārvatī while she was engaged in
austere penance to gain Śiva as her husband and to test the sincerity
of her love dissuaded Pārvatī from wishing such a disparate union.
Disparaging Śiva as an old ugly mad mendicant, the Brahmin boy
shows how Śiva lacks all those qualities which are generally sought
in a match for any young girl, more so for a princess. Vidyāpati has
taken his cue from Kālidāsa and what Kālidāsa has said in seven
verses1, Vidyāpati has described in dozens of his songs in different
forms of invective, full of sarcasm, from the mouth of different
persons, sometimes from the mouth of the mother of Pārvatī,
sometimes of her friends, sometimes from the ladies of friends’
families, but always disparaging the personality of the Lord, his
age, his looks, his attributes and his associations. Says the mother
of Pārvatī2—“He who has only to beg from house to house every
day since he was born, how can he think of marrying, and he will
be the bridegroom for Gaurī—this is intolerable” or “Who gave
the name Śaṅkara (which means one who brings about good) to
him who has five heads, who destroyed the demon Pura, who is so
dreadful with three eyes with fire burning in the third, and nobody
knows in which family he has been born, etc.”3 Says the lady of the
neighbourhood—“Oh my friend! What a mad bridegroom has
Himavat brought home—it is stupefying to think of it. The mad old
fellow does not ride a horse, howsoever well the horse is caprisoned,
etc.”4 All this is highly suggestive when we remember that in Mithilā
the bridegroom is even today sought after and brought home for
marriage by the guardian of the bride with the help of the match-
maker, and in these songs the famous sage Nārada in the form of
1. Kumārasambhava, canto V, vv . 66-72.
2. Haragauri, No. 14.
3. Bhasha Geeta Sangralia, Appendix No.3.
4. Haragauri, No. 13 in N. Gupta’s edition.
 VIDYĀPATI 49

the match-maker is the butt of the ladies’ attacks for negotiating

such a disparate match. It is in this social background that these
songs have an everlasting univeral appeal for the ladies of Mithilā.
And when Śiva arrives for marriage, his person, his
accoutrements and his associates create a good deal of confusion
and amusement. There are various rites in a marriage which ladies
perform, over and above the Vedic rites prescribed in the Śāstras
and many of the local rites have become standardised in the songs
of Vidyāpati which have been sung over these centuries all over
Mithilā. Ladies go forward to receive the groom, but they all blush
and move away when they find him stark naked and only wrapped
in an elephant’s skin. They have to catch hold of the bridegroom by
the neck with a wrapper but they are scared away by the hissing of
the black serpent hanging by his neck. They have to put collyrium
to his eyes but their hand is burnt in the fire burning in the third
eye. Says one of the ladies assembled to perform the rites1—“What
a bridegroom has been brought by the ascetic (meaning the
match-maker, Nārada) on seeing whom Gaurī has been so deeply
enamoured! Fire is burning in the eye; where shalI we put the
collyrium; there is the pool of the Gaṅgā on his head; how shall we
perform Chumaou2? Ghosts have come in the marriage party; how
shall we feed them? He has five mouths; to which shall we apply the
Mahuaka3, etc.” These are all local rites but even in the performance
of the Vedic rites there was confusion. Says a spectator.4—“It was
a sight to see when Śiva went over to the Vedī.5As the ankuśī 6 was
1. Bhasha Geeta Sangraha, No. 67.
2. Chumaon is a practice common in a Maithil household which con- sists in
moving round over the head of a person of a round flat basket made of split
bamboo pieces and full of paddy, bananas, coconut, betel leaves, curd, etc.
3. Mahuaka which is a Maithili form of Madhuparka is a sweet por-ridge prepared
with rice boiled in milk which a bridegroom is made to lick by the mother-in-
law.
4. Bliasha Geeta Sangraha, Appendix No.2.
5. Vedi is a specially built up spot in the courtyard where the Vedic rites of Homa,
etc. are performed after the girl is given over to the bridegroom.
6 A hook made of lac and coloured, which is hung by the pig-tail (Śikhā) of the
bridegroom while he is performing Homa.
50 VIDYĀPATI

thrust into the matted-hair, the Gaṅgā began to flow down and all
the materials collected for the rites began to float away. The bullock
of Śiva saw the Kuśā grass and began to nibble at it. The fried
rice grains attracted the attention of serpents which began to hiss
dreadfully on account of which the bullock was frightened, etc.”
The suggestiveness of all these popular songs can, however, be
properly understood and appreciated only when the background of
the peculiar social life is generally known. This is the reason why
they have not yet received the attention they deserve outside the
Maithil Society. They depict, however, an abundance of fanciful
situations, highly amusing and entertaining.
And lastly, there are the Śiva-songs depicting the domestic life
of Śiva, more properly of Pārvatī in the household of Śiva. Looked
at from the wordly point of view, the predicament of the housewife,
Pārvatī, is, indeed, unenviable. The head of the family is an old man
without any possession and addicted to poison. He himself has five
mouths and of his two sons, one has six mouths and the other has
the elephant’s trunk. Pārvatī herself has taken the lion, Lord Śiva the
bullock and serpents, the eldest son a peacock and the youngest son
a mouse and all these animals are sworn enemies of one another.
It is a problem to keep peace in the household and provide food
for all. Says Pārvatī—“Oh my mother, how shall I live on; there is
nothing in the house except a bag full of ashes. With no possession,
not even a piece of cloth to put on; no one to lend any thing; sons
oppressed with hunger; what shall I give them to eat? The serpent
lives on air and the lord on poison. The master and the servant have
no anxiety but how shall I live on, etc.?”1 To Śiva himself Pārvatī
says2—“I have repeatedly advised you, my lord, to take to farming.
Unless you have food grains, you cannot do without begging which
in a degradation in itself, etc.” In dozens of such songs Vidyāpati
has depicted a realistic picture of abject poverty and helplessness
and couched as they all are in the simple language spoken actually
by common men and women, they have a special appeal to all the
1. Bhasha Geeta Saugralia, Appendix No. 4.
2. Haragauri, No. 31.
 VIDYĀPATI 51

women-folk for whom the trials and patience of Pārvatī evoke

sincerest sympathy. No wonder, therefore, that the image of Pārvatī
has been the ideal of all housewives in Mithilā and they all adore
her for managing a successful domestic life.
It is, however, important to note that in all these Śiva-songs,
whether they are satirical in tone or incongruous in content, the
image of the Lord in all its peculiarity is brought forth and to that
extent they serve the purpose of bringing before us those special
features of the Lord, to meditate on which is an important part of
devotion. Whatever they may appear outwardly, they are essentially
devotional songs. Some of them are dreadful; many of them are
humorous; sometimes they are even erotic; but a strain of wonder
runs through them all which helps to evoke the feeling of devotion,
and it is a common sight in any temple of Śiva to see a devotee
singing one of these songs while dancing in ecstasy.
And these Śiva-songs are a special feature of Maithili literature,
the like of which we do not find in the literature of any other
language even of this region. They are original contributions of
Vidyāpati to the Indian literature so much so that for quite a long
time the name of Vidyāpati was associated in the public mind with
his Nacharis, which is clear from what Lakhanseni said in the 15th
and Abul Fazl in the 16th century. In Mithilā this became the most
popular form of devotional poetry and in the course of these five
centuries or more, thousands of such songs have been composed
by hundreds of poets all over Mithilā. In Nepal it became a fashion
to compose all devotional songs in the form of a Nachari and we
have in the collections preserved in Nepal the Nachari of Viṣṇu,
the Nachari of Gaṇeśa, the Nachari of Sūrya and the Nachari of
Durgā, etc.
It is sad to observe that in modern times very little attention has
been paid to this aspect of Vidyāpati literature, as if these songs were
inferior in poetry and not worthy of the great master that Vidyāpati
was. Almost a hundred years ago Vidyāpati caught the attention
of scholars of the new light, and English scholars like Beames and
Grierson followed by Bengali scholars like Sharadacharan Mitra
52 VIDYĀPATI

and Nagendranath Gupta began to study Vidyāpati as a poet in the

most critical manner. They, however, studied of Vidyāpati only that
which was available in Bengal in the books of Bengal Vaishnavism,
and there only the erotic songs of Vidyāpati were available in which
the amours of Kṛṣṇa are described. That set the pattern of Vidyāpati
studies and most unfortunately the scholars of Mithilā also followed
in the footsteps of the Bengali admirers of Vidyāpati. Only recently
I have read with great delight the works of Dr. Sankari Prasad Basu
of Calcutta in which as much attention has been given to Vidyāpati’s
devotional Śiva-songs as to his erotic Kṛṣṇa-songs and one can hope
that efforts will be made to collect as many Śiva-songs of Vidyāpati
as are stilI not all lost and a serious attempt will be made to study
these songs critically in the true Maithila perspective when alone
they can be properly understood and correctly adjudged.

It is, however, a fact that the fame of Vidyāpati as a world poet

today rests solely on his love lyrics. He was indeed a sweet singer
of eternal love-physical or sexual love which consists in the urge for
mating of persons of both the sexes. This is the most elemental of
all human feelings, the one on which the process of creation rests
and has been the most popular form of poetry at all times all over
the world—Sanskrit literature has been very rich in erotic poetry
and the beginnings of this poetry can be traced back to the Prakrit
lyrics of pre-Christian days. Vidyāpati, however, took it direct
from Jayadeva whose Gītagovinda is a poem depicting the various
aspects of sexual love of Lord Kṛṣṇa and the Gopīs̄ of Vraja land.
But the love songs of Vidyāpati have been so popular, not only
because of their universal theme, but also because of the superb
craftsmanship of the master poet. There are three different elements
in these songs, each important in itself, and all three combined
together have given these songs the unique popularity which has
transcended all the limits of time and space.
 VIDYĀPATI 53

The first in importance is, indeed, the theme. All his songs are
lyrical or what is technically called in Sanskrit rhetorics as ‘Muktaka’
poetry, in which each poem is complete in itself. These songs,
therefore, depict the various moods in the sexual life of a man and
a woman. By the force of his imagination Vidyāpati visualises the
particular mood which caught his fancy and depicts it so very truly,
realistically, feelingly and sympathetically that everyone feels his
own self portrayed there in the circumstances described therein.
Secondly these songs are couched in a language which is sweet,
rhythmical and melodious. The words are chosen with the utmost
skill, the right word in the right place, appropriate in the context,
simple, direct and perspicuous but mellifluous all the same. With
a preponderance of short vowels and liquid consonants, Maithili,
like Bengali, is a very sweet language and the credit for this goes
primarily to Vidyāpati who so moulded the forms of words that all
crudities of the Apabhraṃśa period were shorn off and the flow of
words was soft and rhythmical. The nature of words in a song of
Vidyāpati is determined by the kind of audience for whom the song
was meant, but whether the word is Tatsam, Tadbhava or Deśī, it
is soft, sweet, simple and touching at once the heart while pleasing
the ear. Also, Vidyāpati had the talent to make the sound follow the
sense so that even if we fail to understand the meaning we can at
once perceive the kind of feeling that pervades the song.
Thirdly, the songs are all set in different Rāgas peculiar to the
eastern region of India. The Rāgas used by the Bauddha Siddhas
in their Gāna, those used by Jayadeva in his Gitagovinda, those
mentioned by Jyotirīśvara in the Varṇaratnākara are all of the same
variety as used by Vidyāpati. In Mithilā under the Karṇāṭas, music
received patronage under which it was cultivated extensively and
from what Locana says in his Rāgataraṅgiṇī it is clear that there
was an independent school of Maithil music which had certain
characteristics, e.g., it was always sung in chorus and in vilanibita
laya, etc. etc. Vidyāpati contributed largely to the development of
this music. He took the Rāgas as they were used and provided them
with tunes at once sweet and melodious so that there were different
54 VIDYĀPATI

tunes even under one Rāga. The versification of songs was based
on the time taken in reciting a word and consequently the long and
short vowel sounds depended upon the mode of recitation and was
never fixed. Locana in his Rāgataraṅgiṇī says that the metre of any
song of Vidyāpati is the same as the name of the Rāga, and this has
been the view accepted all along, but if the metre is based on the
arrangement of words in a line this view of Locana does not seem to
be quite accurate because the same song is quoted under different
Rāgas by different masters according to the mode of singing, and
therefore it is not quite relevant to call the same arrangement of
words by different metres, though the different arrangements of
sounds of a song can place it under different Rāgas. Vidyāpati has,
however, in his songs given us divers varieties of the same Rāga,
and since most of them were new innovations they became popular
not only for the theme or contents but also for the new music that
they provided.
Vidyāpati classified his songs on the basis of the Rāgas. When
anyone of them became popular, later poets imitated it and in
this way many varieties of Vidyāpati’s popular songs became the
types and came to be known under various names. One example
will make the point clear: Khaṇḍita is a type of Nāyikā in Sanskrit
literature who is cross with her lover whom she has found involved
in the love of another lady and the lover appeases her by all means
at his command. Vidyāpati in some of his songs describes how the
lover baving tried all through the night to appease her tells at the
end that the night is coming to the end yet she has not relented.
This type of song became very popular and was sung in a tune
suitable for early morning (called Prabhātī). Later poets followed
this pattern till this kind of song came to be known as ‘Māna’,
which is an important kind of Maithili song which every poet has
composed in exactly the same tune. Thus has developed various
kinds of songs under different names, all suggestive of the theme
and with their peculiar tunes, but to Vidyāpati these names were
unknown. What was important for him was only the tune, and this
was one of the most potent reasons why his songs leapt into instant
 VIDYĀPATI 55

popularity. These tunes electrified the people; the sweet rhythmical

flow of the soft words gripped their mind; and when they· easily
followed the sense through the incantation of the words, their soul
was filled with true poetic delight. To enjoy the songs of Vidyāpati
to the fullest extent, one must listen to them when they are properly
sung. In reading his songs we can get only two thirds of the delight.
But by reading them in translation, we will miss the magic of the
music and the incantation of the words and receive only one third
of the delight that these songs are capable of yielding.
It has to be emphasised that the theme of Vidyāpati’s erotic
songs is love, physical love, the sexual love of man and woman,
without any ulterior meaning either spiritual or mystic. It is the
greatness of his genius that his words have different import for
different sets of people. To Caitanya and his followers these songs
described the amours of Lord Kṛṣṇa, and since the recitation of
the Līlā (diversion or pastime) of the Lord is a part of adoration,
these songs have been known in the Vaiṣṇava circles of Bengal as
purely devotional. To Grierson and persons like him these songs
are mystic like those of Kabīra where the craving of the soul for
union with the Lord has been described in terms of sexual love. But
only in less than half the songs of Vidyāpati is there a mention of
Kṛṣṇa and Rādhā, and even there only the names are mentioned.
Followers of Caitanyadeva, however, treat all these songs as referring
to the amours of Kṛṣṇa and Rādhā whereas we find that in many
songs1, Vidyāpati has meant by such terms as Kanha, Madhai, etc.
his patron Shiva Singha whom he calls the eleventh incarnation of
Viṣṇu. In any case, Kṛṣṇa is only the type of the hero and Rādhā or
Gopī̄ of the heroine of the Sanskrit poetics.
In fact, Vidyāpati composed these love lyrics on the pattern
of Sanskrit literature. In the fragment of the work, published as
Kīrtipatākā, there is a passage2 wherein it is said that because the
Lord had to suffer separation from Sītā in his Tretā incarnation,
He appeared again as Kṛṣṇa in Dvāpara and in the form of the
1. Songs Nos. 35, 164, 175 & 177 in Mitra and Mazumdar edition.
2. Kīrtipatākā, pp. 8-9.
56 VIDYĀPATI

Gopa-boy enjoyed the sexual pleasures of life as the four kinds of

the hero with the young Gopī̄ damsels who were one of the eight
kinds of the heroine. This explains Vidyāpati’s craftsmanship. He
took the forms of Sanskrit poetics—the four types of the hero and
eight types of the heroine and composed his songs with reference
to them. It does not matter whether the hero is Kṛṣṇa or any man
and the heroine a Gopī̄, Rādhā or any woman. The hero and the
heroine, the lover and the beloved, are essential for the evocation
of the sentiment of love because then only Sādhāraṇīkaraṇa or the
universalisation of the principal sentiment is possible; in Aristotle’s
words1, “it is universality at which poetry aims in giving expressive
names to the characters”. Poetry is an expression of the universal
element in human life. In other words, it is an idealised image of
human life, of character, emotion or action, under forms manifest
to senses. “The capacity of poetry is so far limited that it expresses
the universal not as it is itself, but as seen through the medium
of sensuous imagery.”2 Judged in this light, Vidyāpati gave us true
poetry and when we consider him as a poet, we may leave aside the
consideration of who his hero is or who the heroine.
It is absurd likewise to read any mystical import in Vidyāpati’s
songs. Here there is not only the craving of the beloved for the
Lord, but even the Lord has craving for the beloved. It is true that
the self-surrendering love of Vidyāpati’s heroines was interpreted
by Caitanyadeva as the complete idealisation of the craving of the
devotee for union with the Lord in the form which came to be
known in Vaiṣṇava circles as Madhura Rasa, or it was symbolised
by Kabīra as the craving of the soul for union with the infinite. But
these concepts were not before Vidyāpati when he composed these
songs, and they do not find a place in the tradition that Vidyāpati
accepted from Sanskrit erotic poetry and established in the poetry
of Mithilā. Vidyāpati sang of love because to him sexual satisfaction
was as important a purpose of human life as piety, riches and final
liberation.
1. Poetics, IX. 3.
2. Butcher, S.H., Aristotle’s Theory 0f Poetry and Fine Art. London. 1895, p. 178.
 VIDYĀPATI 57

It has been held1 that nearly all interpretations of poetry

may be classified roughly as Aristotelian or Baconian, and from
whatever point of view we look at the poetry of Vidyāpati, we find
that he was a master of the craft. Aristotle considered poetry as
an imitative art but he admits2 that the poet’s business is to relate
not what actually happens but what may happen. Speaking of the
poetic truth he says3 that a probable impossibility is to be preferred
to a thing improbable yet possible, for, he says, that the impossible
is the higher thing; for the pattern before the mind must surpass
the reality. Whether it is the description of the person of a damsel
or of her feeling, of the lovers in union or in separation, or it is
the description of the season, time or weather in relation to sexual
passion, Vidyāpati always produces a new thing, not the actuality
of experience, not a copy of reality, but a higher reality. He brings
together many elements of beauty which are dispersed in nature.
It is not enough to select, combine, embellish, to add here and to
retrench there. He always harmonises them all into an ideal unity
of type.
Bacon, on the other hand, holds4 poetry as ‘feigned history’,
and “the use of feigned history hath been to give some shadow of
satisfaction to the mind of man in those points wherein the nature
of things doth deny it, the world being in proportion inferior to
the soul; by reason whereof there is agreeable to the spirit of man a
more ample greatness, a more exact goodness, and a more absolute
variety than can be found in the nature of things”. Bacon thus
ignores altogether the principle of poetic truth and regards poetry
as an untrammelled exercise of imaginative power. He therefore
considered poetry merely ‘theatre’ of the mind to which one may
repair for relaxation and pleasure but in which it is “not good to
stay too long” because it onlv ‘feigneth’.
1. Hudson, Introduction to the Study 0/ English Literature, p. 66.
2. Aristotle, Poetics, IX. 1.
3. ibid., XXV. 17.
4. Bacon, Advancement 0/ Learning (Everyman’s Library), pp. 82-83.
58 VIDYĀPATI

Vidyāpati’s lyrics are “an idealised representation of human

life-of character, emotion, action,” and what Matthew Arnold has
said of Wordsworth, we can say of Vidyāpati that he has given us
all ‘the wonder and bloom” of the world of love. Vidyāpati was,
however, not a poet by profession. It was merely his avocation, in
the sense that when he was in the mood to sing, he wrote songs
for the delectation of his admirers, specially ladies. It can therefore
be said that he was ‘feigning’ all the time he wrote these lyrics. He
composed them only in the full flush of his youth when he was
happy in the benevolent patronage of Shiva Singha. He was by
profession a Pandit, a Raja Pandit, busy all the time with serious
things of the State and life. When, therefore, Vidyāpati sings of
extra-marital love, of Abhisāra, of meeting secretly by assignment,
etc. we cannot say that he was giving poetical expression to his own
experiences; we can explain them only by saying that Vidyāpati is
‘feigning’. And actually these songs are sung on particular occasions
only for enjoyment, or as Bacon says, they have been actually like
a theatre of the mind to which people repair for relaxation and
pleasure.
One chief element of Vidyāpati’s poetry is its revealing power.
It opens our eyes to sensuous beauties of the female form or
of nature. The range of Vidyāpati’s poetry is thus limited. He has
written only of the sexual life of the female world, but within that
range his power of observing and feeling the sensuous beauties and
even the beatings of the women’s heart shines pre-eminent. And
he possesses, at the same time, the power of so expressing and
interpreting what he sees or feels as to quicken our imagination and
sympathy to make us see or feel with him. He awakens our mind’s
attention and “directs it to the loveliness and wonders” of the sexual
love. Browning tells us through the mouth of Fra Lippo Lippi:
For, don’t you mark? We’re made so that we love,
First when we see them painted, things we have pass’d
Perhaps a hundred times, nor cared to see,
And so they are better, painted-better to us,
Which is the same thing. Art was given for that.
 VIDYĀPATI 59

This is a painter’s apologia but Vidyāpati too was a word-painter.

Who has not seen girls in the first phase of adolescence, but
Vidyāpati in his many songs depicting the changes daily becorning
apparent reveals to us the beauties which seem altogether new and
wonderful. He perceives beauties in the minutest details and can
recall with the help of his most sensitive imagination those details
which he expresses in a language simple, sensuous and passionate.
What is true of early adolescence is equally true of the first meeting
of the adolescent girl and her aged lover. In Mithilā till very recently
boys of cultured families generally married at the age of about
twenty-five a girl of ten and this aspect of the social life of the land
is wonderfully reflected in the love lyrics of Vidyāpati. In the songs1
on early adolescence we have a detailed picture of the changes that
gradually take place in the growing girl perceived minutely and
feelingly, while in those2 on first meeting there are minute details
of the working of her mind, the psychological picture of the girl
going for the first time to meet her lover.
The most remarkable thing about Vidyāpati’s love lyrics is the
fact that he almost invariably looks at love from the woman’s point
of view. This is true of his Vyavahāra songs and of Śiva-songs also
but it assumes an importance all its own in the love lyrics. In this
respect he differs remarkably from both Jayadeva and Govindadāsa
and other Vaiṣṇava poets. It is always the attraction of the girl
for her lover (Pūrvarāga) which has been so finely portrayed by
Vidyāpati, not the attraction of the lover for the girl. In one of his
songs3, Vidyāpati says that “he sings after visualising the hundreds
of mute pleasing desires and longings that secretly pass through a
woman’s heart”. From early adolescence to full maturity, there is no
stage of a woman’s growth of which Vidyāpati has not drawn full-
length pictures and he has drawn largely from nature and art to
describe the charm. From the hairs to the nails of the feet, each part
of the body is described in the spirit almost Hellenic and the sense
1. e.g., songs Nos. 3 to 11, 13, etc.
2. e.g., songs Nos. 150 to 214, etc.
3. e.g., song No. 829.
60 VIDYĀPATI

of colour is so correct and penetrating that the picture becomes

wonderful, ideally attractive and captivating. He had, likewise, a
wonderful insight into the working of a woman’s heart and mind.
An analysis of any song of Vidyāpati can bear witness to this basic
fact but I cite here three examples to show how penetrating and
revealing his love lyrics are. In one set of his songs (No. 330 and the
following) we have the advice of a friend to a girl going to meet her
lover and the advice is so true to nature, so revealing of the coquetry
common among young girls. In another (No. 334) the girl describes
her helplessness when she was face to face with her lover alone and
the state of her mind, so true to nature, so simply told, so very
sensuous and so passionate. In the third (No. 288) a girl has come
out of her room fully prepared to go out to meet her lover whom
she had promised to meet that night under the impression that it
would be the new-moon night, but now perceives that the whole
sky is bright in moon-shine. She is in a fix. She cannot disappoint
her lover but she cannot also take the risk of being seen on the
way. The whole is a picture of her perplexed mind, torn between
her love and her prestige. This speciality of his talents endeared his
poetry to the women-folk at large who have kept him alive in their
throats. There is, indeed, no aspect of the sexual life of a woman,
in union or separation, her joy or sorrow, the longing and regret,
the hope or despair, the doubt or determination, which he has not
portrayed, and in everyone of them he has caught the true glimpse
of her heart by the force of his imagination in the most idealised
form, and expressed it in a language always in keeping with the
spirit of the theme. Still one can say that there are two aspects of
this physical love—the feminine form and lovers in union—which
throw Vidyāpati into lyrical raptures. Rabindranath has, indeed,
made the correct evaluation of Vidyāpati’s poetry when he says
Vidyāpati was the poet of pleasure, the pleasure of the union of
lovers.
Vidyāpati had, however, the complete picture of sexual life
clear before his mind, a very clear concept of the philosophy of
sexual love. It was to him not merely a primary emotion of the
 VIDYĀPATI 61

human heart, nor even a prime purpose of human life, a biological

necessity only. To him love was a source of joy in this joyless life.
His songs which are things of beauty are, therefore, a source of joy
for ever.
And so true to life is Vidyāpati’s panorama of the sexual life
of a woman, so full and complete, so variegated and colourful, so
imaginatively conceived and so feelingly expressed and so sweetly
worded and melodiously tuned, that it served the purpose of
sexual education to the women-folk to cultivate feminine charms
to the fullest extent and enjoy their sexual life fully to the entire
satisfaction of their lovers.
One of the strangest results that followed Vidyāpati’s treatment
of love was the attraction that these songs so readily had for
Caitanyadeva. We know that Caitanya had his own peculiar way
of devotion which became the cult of Bengal Vaishnavism and
which in the hands of Caitanya’s very learned disciples made a
revolution in the concept of Bhakti and gave rise to what is known
as Madhura Rasa in Sanskrit poetics. Caitanya considered himself
Rādhā, the beloved of Kṛṣṇa, who surrendered herself to the love
of the Lord, and Caitanya’s companions considered themselves the
Gopīs of Vṛndāvana, all pining for meeting in union with the Lord.
Sincerely devoted as they all were, possessing really the feelings of
the beloved, their sensibilities were all feminine. Vidyāpati’s love
lyrics, therefore, seemed to them to portray their own feelings
and emotions, longings and desires. They vibrated the chords of
their hearts and as these songs were true and faithful pictures, they
appealed personally to these saintly beloved of Lord Kṛṣṇa. No
wonder, therefore, that every love lyric of Vidyāpati was to them
a delineation of the feelings of the devoted beloved, a woman that
the Gopī was and that they made themselves to be. This is why
Caitanyadeva was captivated so completely by these love lyrics and
felt an ecstasy on hearing his own heart’s throbbings portrayed in so
sweet and melodious a form. Thus what was merely secular poetry
was metamorphosed into devotional lyrics of Caitanyadeva’s school.
Vidyāpati, the singer of feminine charm and sensibilities, came to
62 VIDYĀPATI

be adored as a Vaiṣṇava Mahājana. This is why only Vidyāpati’s love

lyrics found their way into Bengal and spread all over Āryavarta
along with the cult of Caitanya of which these songs became the
sacred literature.
As a poet, therefore, Vidyāpati was a seer, and through the
veil of feminine beauty and feminine sensibilities he saw into the
mysteries of the sexual life of man.
9
But Vidyāpati was not only a seer; he was a master craftsman and
he produced poems that have proved through the ages things of
beauty and sources of joy.
There are two aspects of Vidyāpati’s craftsmanship which deserve
special mention. I would not repeat what I have already said about
the use of the spoken language in all the songs of Vidyāpati, how
he made available to the common men and women of Mithilā the
poetic delight which only Sanskrit poetry can give and by the use
of this language he did forge a bond of unity among the people
living in the land irrespective of caste or sex, riches or learning, on
a national plane.
The first thing about Vidyāpati’s art of poetry is the com-
plete fusion of music and poetry. Music, indeed, is th seasoning
of the language and without melody poetry would lack its perfect
charm. But Vidyāpati never gave us ethereal melody only for the
sake of music; the subject-matter in his songs is as important as
the melody and he expressed the ideas in a form which was in
complete harmony with the theme. The melody of his songs is
always appropriate to the mood which the song portrays.
Secondly, Vidyāpati used the language not for the sake of
meaning only; he had wonderful ears for the sound of the words
that he used and his songs are, therefore, really rhythmic creations
of beauty. His language is characterised by two of the Guṇas or
excellences described in Sanskrit poetics and they are sweetness
(Mādhurya) and lucidity (Prasāda). Sweetness in Vidyāpati consists
not only in the perfectly rhythmical arrangement and selection of
 VIDYĀPATI 63

words but his poetry reads sweet, sounds sweet and is sweet when
understood. Moreover Vidyāpati uses such idiomatic expressions
as have gathered special import through usage and when these
idioms are employed poetically, they appeal to the heart and please
the sensibility while conveying the ordinary sense. A proverb, for
example, contains within itself the observation or experience of the
people speaking the language and when such a proverb is used by
Vidyāpati it is used poetically with the full import of the proverb
throwing out its sweet suggestiveness .
Sweetness, however, is the virtue peculiar to erotic poetry in
general and in the field of Maithili literature there are other poets
too, Govindadāsa for example, who are as sweet as, if not more than,
Vidyāpati. What distinguishes Vidyāpati is the most simple, direct
and natural manner in which he expresses his ideas in the speech
actually spoken by the common men and women of his time. It
was indeed his genius to have used that language and invested it
with an expressiveness so very rare among the other languages
spoken at that time in this region. This is so characteristic of his
poetry that it can safely be taken as a guide to the genuineness of
Vidyāpati’s works. This is true not only of his Maithili songs but of
all his poetical works whether in Sanskrit or in Abahaṭṭa, and that
is the reason why the obscurities of Kīrtilatā or Kīrtipatākā give rise
to the suspicion if they are the creations of Vidyāpati or if they are
available as they were written by Vidyāpati.
And the most important thing about the lucidity in Vidyāpati’s
poetry is the naturalness of his expression. Vidyāpati wrote from
his heart without straining for effect, and the effectiveness of his
poetry lies in the absolute sincerity of his thoughts and feelings.
This is true about the mode of his descriptions also. Vidyāpati
took his ideas from the vast treasure of Sanskrit erotic poetry but
when he reproduced them, they were spontaneous outflowings of
his heart. His treatment of nature shows this at its eminence. He
observed nature minutely and did not take things as they had been
described by the poets. The season of spring as also the rains has
been described by Vidyāpati with a thoroughness hardly surpassed.
64 VIDYĀPATI

Nature for the most part has been treated by the Sanskrit poets and
their followers as the background of human emotions and Vidyāpati
has followed them. Thus we have beautiful descriptions of the rainy
season in the context both of the meeting and the separation of
lovers, but spring has been described by Vidyāpati as a person in
itself, and not only as a background. But whether it is the spring or
the rainy season, his descriptions are not stereotyped but realistic,
because they are natural and described from observation. They
appeal therefore direct to the heart and serve the purpose of exciting
the predominant emotions admirably well. His sense of colour
was acute and the word-pictures painted by him emerge most
impressive, life-like and therefore charming mostly by contrast.
All his images are concrete and vivid; he observed whatever was
beautiful and expressed it so naturally that the reader experiences
the same raptures therein as the poet himself.
But the most important thing about his perception of beauty
was that he observed not only what was beautiful externally to
the eye but also what was beautiful internally in the thoughts and
emotions on account of his accurate, realistic and penetrating
observation of the mind or heart of the women-folk.
And nothing illustrates the naturalness of Vidyāpati’s expres-
sion more clearly than his use of the Alaṅkāras or figures of speech
which consist in “the striking way of telling a thing”. They owe their
origin to the imaginative fertility of the poet. They have two-fold
functions, illumination and embellishment. Vidyāpati excels in
the vividness of his pictures and on account of his nimble wit and
imaginative alertness, his poetry is superbly picturesque. Vidyāpati
is a seer inasmuch as he perceives beauty wherever it may be found;
he is a poet in the real sense of the word, because he paints that
beauty so very vividly that anyone can perceive it. The range of
his imagery is, indeed, very vast. If we compare Vidyāpati’s use of
imagery with that of Govindadāsa, another master poet of Maithili,
we shall find that Govindadāsa is at his best in the use of metaphor
 VIDYĀPATI 65

(Rūpaka)1 and when he imposes one thing upon another he does

it so completely that all the characteristic properties of the one are
imposed upon those of the other. He has the wonderful capacity
of concentrating on one picture. Vidyāpati, however, does not feel
content with one picture only but in one song he brings together
a number of pictures in so quick a succession that the whole song
becomes full of pictures, all beautiful. Vidyāpati excels, therefore,
in the use of what they call ‘fancy’ (Utprekṣā).2 Similarly Vidyāpati
excels in the use of indirect description3 (Aprastutaprasamsa). But
whatever they are, the images are always concrete, easy to visualise
and beautiful because true to nature, accurately observed and
faithfully expressed.
If we try to arrive at a clear definition of poetry with an
objective differentia, certainly the definition will revolve round the
concept of Alaṅkāra, the word Alaṅkāra being taken in the widest
sense of the term. Alaṅkāra is the beautiful in poetry, the beautiful
form. In a great poet, the Alaṅkāras form the inevitable incarnation
in which ideas embody themselves. But the importance of form
notwithstanding, one should not misunderstand rhetoric as poetry.
It is possible to sacrifice poetry at the altar of Alaṅkāras. There is such
a thing as ‘Aucitya’, appropriateness, harmony, proportion, which is
the ultimate beauty in poetry. “The final ground of reference for
this Aucitya, the thing with reference to which all other things are
appropriate is the soul of poetry, Rasa.”4 The body becomes a carcass
when there is no soul there and of what use are ornaments on a
carcass? The poet can make Alaṅkāra render the help its name im-
plies if he introduces it in such a manner as will be conducive to the
realisation of the chief object, namely, Bhāva and Rasa. Walter Pater
in his essay on style speaks of ‘permissible ornament’, being for the
most part ‘structural or necessary’. A talented poet so manipulates
it that it is borne along with his delineation of Rasa and becomes
1. Śṛṅgārabhañjana Gītāvalī, edited by Dr. Amaranatha Jha, Darbhanga. Part J,
Nos. 5, 6, 11, 12, 42, 44, 45, etc.
2. Songs Nos. 12, 14, 16, 20, 21, 23, 36, 47, 52, 541, 573, 584, 586 to 592, etc.
3. Songs Nos. 84, 96, 140, 384, 417, 440, 452, etc.
4. Raghavan, Dr. Y., Some Concepts of Alaṅkāra Śāstra, Adyar, 1942, p.54.
66 VIDYĀPATI

a wonder in the proper context. It may appear that the Alaṅkāra is

artificial, elaborate and an intellectual exercise requiring great effort
in turning it out preciously but it is not really so difficult of effecting
for a master poet. “With him, as emotion increases, expression
swells and figures foam forth”.1 There is a strong tendency to wax
figurative in forceful situations. When the poet has talents and is
lost in Rasa, he produces excellent Alaṅkāras. In Vidyāpati we have
innumerable instances of Alaṅkāras rushing to the poet’s pen in
moments of overflowing Rasa. Such for example are the songs2
describing feminine beauty, or the songs3 describing the union of
lovers. These are the two subjects which inspired him to heights of
poetic fancy, evoked in him the true poetic delight. This does not
mean that Vidyāpati could not describe separation feelingly. In fact
there are many songs4 describing the state of separation, specially
of the heroine, and they are of so high-strung emotion that figures
are employed only sparingly and the sublimity or pathos of the
situation is left to itself to appeal to us with its own grandeur and
beauty.

10

And lastly, there are some songs—only half a dozen have been
available so far-where the vanity of human life is depicted, its
ephemerality and sordidness. Five of them5 are addressed to
Mādhava or Hara and one6 to Age, where the helplessness of
decrepit old age is described most realistically and feelingly. In
these songs the poet regrets that he traded in his life only in those
things which did not yield him any permanent gain that would help
1. ibid., p. 61.
2. Songs No. 14, 16, 19, 30 to 55, etc.
3. Songs Nos. 542, 584-587, 590, etc.
4. Songs Nos. 618 to 808.
5. Songs Nos. 437, 838, 839, 840 & No. 44 of Haragauri Padavali in N. Gupta’s
Devanugari edition.
6. Song No. 613 of Mitra & Majumdar’s edition.
 VIDYĀPATI 67

him in the end; that he spent all his life in crying “mine, mine” but
there was no one who proved his own when the time has come for
him to depart from this world; that in his youth he cast his eyes
on the wives and property of others; that this life was like a drop
of water on hot sands and no one, not even his son, wife or friend,
was able to help him when he was approaching death; that half his
life he spent in sleep, and then there were infancy and old age, but
even during his youth he was inflamed with sexual love so that
there was no time left to spend over the meditation of Lord who
alone can take care of him in the life hereafter; that having spent all
his life over the sordid affairs of life he was approaching the Lord
towards the evening of his life which was as absurd and ridiculous
as a wage-earner would go for a day’s job to an employer when the
day was coming to a close and the time for work has passed away;
that he was surrendering himself to the mercy of the Lord in the
hope that He would not take into consideration either his merits or
misdeeds but would vouchsafe to him the shelter of His unbounded
grace. Of old age Vidyāpati has drawn a very sordid picture so that
man may be forewarned of the shape of his existence as years roll
by. This would open his eyes to the reality of life and may induce
him to meditate on God who alone can help him in the end.
All these songs are Śānta or Quietistic in their emotional appeal
of which the ‘latent emotion’ is Nirveda or repulsion, and self-
disparagement its basic feeling. They are felt intensely and described
sincerely. Much has been made of these songs to show that they
are self-revealing or autobiographical inasmuch as having spent his
life in the love of others’ wives or in grabbing others’ properties,
Vidyāpati was penitent in his old age. It has been observed tbat
baving basked in the sunshine of the royal patronage of Shiva
Singha, Vidyāpati was frustrated when his patron disappeared so
mysteriously and these songs are born out of that frustration.
To me this does not seem quite the right view to hold of
Vidyāpati either as a man or a poet. He belongs to a tradition where
68 VIDYĀPATI

poetry is an expression of the universal element in human life. In

other words it is an idealised image of human life—of character,
emotion, action—under forms manifest to the senses, and it is
all ‘feigning’. As in the erotic songs, so in these quietistic ones,
Vidyāpati is objective and is never drawing upon his own personal
experiences. How can we reconcile the love of ‘Parakīya’, the extra-
marital love, with the piety of life which his name evokes? There
is nothing in these songs to warrant us to take tbem as revealing
his own past life when we do not do so in his love songs. They are
the common pictures of human life when looked upon from the
quietistic point of view. Vidyāpati’s lyrics are the creations of the
particular moods. As a poet he could write with intense feeling on
any topic that took his fancy, and he wrote from the fullness of his
heart which was overflowing with the particular sentiment or Rasa
of which he was writing. The sentiments expressed in these songs
are the common experiences of an average man of the world and
it is too much to say that these are the special experiences of the
poet who is penitent in his old age. A poet of Vidyāpati’s genius
could have seen and observed these common frailties of man so
that they could have a universal appeal. The feeling of repentance
or the sense of the sordidness, ephemerality or unsubstantialness
of life are all the common features of Śānta Rasa. Keeping therefore
in view the tradition which Vidyāpati followed so scrupulously in
his poetry and the facts of the poet’s life as far as they are known,
I do not believe that in these songs Vidyāpati was personal or
subjective while in his erotic songs he was impersonal or objective.
That there is perfect evocation of the Śānta Rasa in tbese songs as
there is perfect evocation of Śṛṅgāra in his love-songs goes without
saying. Vidyāpati observed and felt equally intensely the vanity
and sordidness of human life. The self-disparagement of these
songs does not belong personally to the poet as the obsession of
his hero in the sexual love of his beloved does not do so. To depict
the universal through the particular has been the highest aim of
poetry and Vidyāpati was able to achieve it eminently whether it
was the sexual love or spiritual, whether it was the joys of life or
 VIDYĀPATI 69

the disparagement of self when face to face with the vanity, frailty,
sordidness and frustration of life.
11
The fame of Vidyāpati as a maker of sweet melodious
songs, saturated with all the beauties of Sanskrit poetry, spread
phenomenally far and wide. Whoever heard these songs was
ravished by their melody and the sentiments expressed were so
common that they afforded aesthetic delight to even common men
and women till then strangers to it. At a time when Sanskrit was the
language of the cultured and in the land of Mithilā where to write
in any language other than Sanskrit was almost a sacrilege, he had
the courage and self-confidence to write in the language actually
spoken by the people of the land. He was derided by the orthodox
Pandits of the day for his adoption of the vernacular but when they
saw that this new poetry brought Vidyāpati unique popularity and
unprecedented fame, “that last infirmity of noble minds” induced
them to follow in the footsteps of Vidyāpati. Composing songs
on Vidyāpati’s pattern became a fashion for even talented Pandits
of Mithilā. It is true that they did not go beyond an imitation of
Vidyāpati but the process went on unbroken and Maithili literature
was built up on the tradition and the pattern set by Vidyāpati.
Outside Mithilā, Maithili literature flourished in Nepal under
the influence of Vidyāpati for almost three centuries. The Malla
Rajas of Bhatgaon and Kathmandu who claimed descent from the
Karṇāṭa rulers of Mithilā patronised Maithili literature and the
political condition of Mithilā after the fall of the Oinabaras led
Maithil scholars and poets to seek patronage under the Malla Rajas
of neighbouring Nepal. In imitation of Vidyāpati they produced a
vast literature, the most important of which is the large number of
dramas written in pure Maithili which were staged there regularly
and are indeed the earliest dramas written in any modern Indian
language. Till about the middle of the 18th century when the Malla
rule was supplanted, Maithili continued to be the literary language
of Nepal courts and Vidyāpati the one source of inspiration. It is
70 VIDYĀPATI

a pity that most of this vast literature has not yet been brought to
light and therefore it is very little known, but it is well preserved in
the libraries there.
But the most potent influence of Vidyāpati inspired the great
poets of Bengal and led to the growth of Bengali literature in its
early stage. The story of Vidyāpati in Bengal is indeed a romantic
one. Mithilā had cultural relations with Bengal since long and just
at that time the Pandits of Bengal used to come over to Mithilā
to brush up their learning and give it a finishing touch with the
great teachers of Mithilā. When they returned home, they took
melodious songs of Vidyāpati on their lips. To Caitanyadeva and
his companions these songs proved ecstatically appealing, because
under the influence of Sahajīya cult they felt divine love in a sexual
way. The love-songs of Vidyāpati became the devotional songs of
Caitanyadeva’s school and Vidyāpati became ‘Vaiṣṇava Mahājana’,
a great exponent of Bengal Vaiṣṇavism. Kīrtana or singing of
devotional songs was a chief feature of this new cult and hosts of
talented poets began composing songs, all on the pattern set by
Vidyāpati. In following Vidyāpati, they imitated even the language
used by Vidyāpati and since they could not write pure Mathili their
language was a strange admixture of Maithili and Bengali which
in later times came to be known as Brajabulī. For the followers
of Caitanyadeva Vidyāpati became the model and Brajabulī the
language of poetical composition. As the new cult of Caitanya
spread, Vidyāpati’s songs went along with it, and thus in Orissa
and Assam, as far as the distant Brajabhūmi, Vidyāpati came to be
recognised as one of the greatest exponents of Divine Love, and
songs became the form of their devotional compositions. In Bengal
itself Vidyāpati was revered as a leader of their cult and people came
to consider him a Bengali, one who was born in Bengal and poets
used his name at the end of their songs to lend prestige to them.
There was at least one poet who composed all his songs under the
assumed name of Vidyāpati. There is a vast literature in Brajabulī
which is a pride of Indian literature and when we remember that
Brajabulī is the language of Mithilā as used by people not born to
 VIDYĀPATI 71

it, and that all this was inspired by the love-songs of Vidyāpati,
we marvel at the unique phenomenon and admire the genius of
Vidyāpati.
It is remarkable to note in this connection that Vidyāpati
exerted his influence even on Rabindranath at the threshold of his
poetical life and he wrote his Bhanu Singher Padavali in what he
himself calls ‘Imitation Maithili’. The age of Vidyāpati thus extended
up to the end of the 19th century in Bengal as in Mithilā.
In Assam, the great Śaṅkaradeva and his disciple Mādhavadeva
wrote in Maithili under the direct influence of Vidyāpati and
though their works were designed to propagate Vaiṣṇavism through
entertaining stage plays, the inspiration carne from Vidyāpati
who employed the language actually spoken by the people in his
compositions meant for the people.
The talent to express and communicate poetic delight in
the language actually spoken proved so very popular and the
craftsmanship to employ melodious songs as the form of poetic
expression proved so very captivating that Vidyāpati established a
pattern which was followed by most of our great poets during the
centuries following and we can count Sūrdāsa, Mīrā, Tulsīdasa and
Kabīra among many others who drew inspiration from Vidyāpati,
maybe indirectly.
12
Vidyāpati was the brightest product of the Maithil renaissance. He
was not a poet by profession. He had varied interests in life; his
outlook was most liberal; his views were far ahead of his times.
It is a pity that during the centuries since he flourished, there
was a cultural degeneration in the land of Mithilā. Consequently
Vidyāpati the man and the ideals he stood for were forgotten and
he was turned into a legend, a myth. But ever since he sang the
melodious songs to people around him, his fame as a poet has
never diminished. Vidyāpati still lives as a poet and will live as a
poet. He has been par excellence a maker of Indian literature and
will remain immortal as such in the annals of Indian literature.
72 VIDYĀPATI

Bibliography

1. Vidyāpati ki Padavali. Edited by N. Gupta. Devanagari Edition. Indian

Press, Allahabad. 1910. (All the numbers of songs given in this book are
from this edition unless otherwise indicated.)
2. The same edited by Dr. B.B. Mazumdar. Devanagari Edition, Patna.
3. The same published by Rastrabhasa Parisad, Patna. 2 Vols.
4. Bhasha Geeta Sangraha. Edited by Ramanath Jha for the Maithili
Development Fund, Patna University. 1970.
5. Kīrtilatā of Vidyāpati. Edited by Dr. Vasudeva Sharan Agrawal. Sahitya
Sadan, Chirgaon, Jhansi.
6. Kīrtilatā of Vidyāpati. Edited by Ramanath Jha for the Maithili
Development Fund, Patna University. 1970.
7. Puruṣaparīkṣā of Vidyāpati. Edited by Ramanath Jha for the Maithili
Development Fund, Patna University.
8. Maṇimañjarī Naṭikā of Vidyāpati, Edited by Ramanath Jha for the
Maithili Development Fund, Patna University.
9. Gorakṣavijaya Natak by Vidyāpati. Edited by Dr. Jayakant Mishra,
Allahabad.
10. Kīrtipatākā by Vidyāpati, Edited by Dr. Jayakant Mishra, Allahabad.
11 Likhanāvalī by Vidyāpati. Edited by Dr. Indrakant Jha, Patna University,
1969.
12. Danavakyavali by Vidyāpati. Edited by Pandit Fani Sarma. Published by
Victoria Press, Varanasi. 1883.
 VIDYĀPATI 73

13. Gaṅgāvākyavalī by Vidyāpati. Edited by Dr. J.B. Chaudhary. Vol. IV of

the Contribution of Women to Sanskrit Literature Series, Calcutta. 1940.
14. Durgā-Bhakti-Taraṅgiṇī by Vidyāpati. Published by Raj Press, Darbhanga.
1902.
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College, Calcutta.
17. Śaivasarvasvasāra by Vidyāpati. Manuscript in the Library of the
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18. The Test 0f a Man, being the translation of Vidyāpati’s Puruṣaparīkṣā by
Sir G.A. Grierson, R.A.S., London, 1935.
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20. Padāvalī. Edited by Benipuri. Pustak Bhandar, Laheriasarai.
74 VIDYĀPATI