Published Paper Details:

This article examines the political and cultural processes through which Maithili was negotiated as a distinct linguistic identity in twentieth-century Mithila. Drawing on periodicals, literary debates and public interventions produced within the emerging print culture, the paper analyses how language became a site of collective self-definition and political contestation. Three interrelated arenas are explored: debates over script and the symbolic revival of Mithilakshar, shifting negotiations between Maithili and Hindi within provincial and national imaginaries, and efforts to regulate linguistic respectability through discourses of purity, vulgarity and cultural refinement. The article argues that these debates were not merely technical questions of grammar or orthography but reflected deeper struggles over cultural authority, social hierarchy and regional belonging in a rapidly transforming colonial and postcolonial public sphere. While early twentieth-century actors often framed Maithili's claims defensively against the expanding dominance of Hindi, post-independence discussions reveal new strategies of inclusion, mobilization and cultural legitimation. By situating Maithili within broader processes of vernacular modernization and linguistic standardization in South Asia, the paper highlights how regional language movements simultaneously articulated aspirations for autonomy, respectability and participation in the national political order.