The Strange Afterlife of Vidyāpati Ṭhākura (ca. 1350–1450 CE): Anthological Manuscripts, Linguistic Confusion, and Religious Appropriation

ABSTRACT

This article examines the difficult aspects of working with anthological manuscripts and printed editions of lyrical vernacular poetry in South Asia by focusing on the textual reception of Vidyāpati Ṭhākura. In his own life, Vidyāpati wrote technical treatises in Sanskrit, historical narratives in Apabhraṃśa, and a corpus of lyrical poems (padas) and two dramas in the vernacular Maithili language. While his technical works remained relatively static and limited in their circulation, Vidyāpati's lyrical poems had a more enduring and geographically widespread effect on the languages, literatures, and religions of Mithilā and Eastern India (Bengal, Orissa, and Assam). The anthologies of padas, usually called "padāvalī's", whatever their historical manifestation or locality, were usually collections of disconnected padas without contextual narratives or explanations.

This analysis focuses on the difficulty of working with free-standing small lyrical poems, which were never conceived of as unified textual entities, in both organized padāvalīs and small disposable manuscript handbooks (pothīs). The padas were used pragmatically by elite poets, devotional saints, and musicians from the 15 th century CE onwards. This creates problems when one tries to trace physical remains and textual sources from this period. There exists a gap between the Maithili padāvalīs of the 16 th and 17 th centuries and the Bengali Vaiṣṇava padāvalīs writing in a hybrid Bengali-Maithili kuntsprache of the 18 th and 19 th centuries. Since the linguistic and poetic variations and total number of attestations are so extensive, what relationship can be inferred between the Maithili padāvalī tradition and later anthologies based on manuscript and other textual evidence? I argue for a strategy of closely reading the variances and additions to the bhaṇitā (poetic signature) that reveal an appeal to the courtly prestige of Mithilā, even in the devotional communities of Bengal.

The Problem with Padas

The study of premodern manuscript traditions of lyric poetry and poetic anthologies (padas and padāvalīs) from eastern India presents a paradox. As one of the most widespread of the padāvalī traditions and one of the earliest North Indian vernacular sources, the padas of Vidyāpati (a Maithili poet of the early fifteenth century CE) accurately represent the kind of textual paradox in question. Namely, that there exists a large number of small pothīs (loose-leaf manuscripts), without attribution of scribe or patron, scattered around the region, large poetic compendiums from Bengal (pada-saṃgrahas), and conversely, an abundance of later period texts in Bengal belies the scarcity of attested manuscripts from the period between Vidyāpati's life and his renewed popularity during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries CE in both Mithilā and Bengal. This incongruity not only has stymied a stemmatological study of the transmission and circulation of Vidyāpati's vernacular corpus between Mithilā and wider eastern India, but also has led to scholarly neglect of small, semi-disposable pothīs of padas across the region.¹ The conflict between the self-presented narrative of the manuscript tradition, the narratives of long-accepted literary historians in the modern period, and popular traditions presents an opportunity to scrutinize the fractured process of memory and meaning making for premodern literary texts.

The incongruence caused by the lack of sources from the earlier Maithili period and the profusion of sources from the later Bengali period raises several questions. With only a handful of padas occurring across all, or the majority, of older sources, what is the internal relationship among the "earlier" Maithili sources, and what kinds of textual development can or should be mapped? In the eighteenth through nineteenth centuries CE, the number of padas attributed to Vidyāpati in Bengali padāvalīcollections multiplied dramatically. Though only rarely coinciding with the older Maithili sources, padas attributed to Vidyāpati occur in large numbers in both large pada-saṃgrahas (padacollections) and small padāvalī pothīs. In the premodern period, the attribution of poems to early and more authoritative poets was a frequent phenomenon.² This created problems for any would-be stem-matologist trying to assess authenticity. Preferring older sources that exclusively feature the padas of Vidyāpati, most modern scholars have discounted and ignored the widely distributed and extant pothīs containing padas of Vidyāpati along with those of other lyric poets. Instead of trying to find the "real Vidyāpati" by relying on stemmatological studies of textual transmission, what can these "fake" Vidyāpatis in later centuries tell us about the poetic aspirations and designs of their actual authors and readers? What quality of Vidyāpati's do they emulate or state explicitly?

The compilers and authors of both Maithili and Bengali padāvalīs and pothīs capitalized on the literary prestige and authority of Vidyāpati and the court of his patron Śiva Siṃha (r. 1410–1414 CE).³ Thematic and narrative elements that were adapted from the courtly Maithili culture of Vidyāpati to the Vaiṣṇava Bengali milieu feature most prominently in the bhaṇitās of each pada, which are often dedicated to the kings and queens of the court of Mithilā.⁴ While a few dozen padas occur across the major Vidyāpati sources, the small, but numerous pothīs of later centuries rarely feature any but the most famous padas. Evaluating the language, literary style, and historical references of the bhaṇitās across these sets of manuscripts uncovers a tradition of literary self-fashioning by the compilers and consumers within the Vidyāpati tradition that hints at a more dynamic history of vernacular transmission and identity-making.

Though the approaches of this study could be applied broadly to lyric poetry collections from the early premodern to colonial periods, I have chosen to focus specifically on Vidyāpati due to his early date (ca. 1350–1450 CE) in relation to other north and east Indo-Aryan vernacular traditions, the breadth of his influence in eastern India (from Nepal to Odisha, Assam to Bihar), and the independent textual histories of his poetry in Mithilā and Bengal.⁵ This article is an articulation of the status quæstionisof the Vidyāpati textual tradition and is an attempt to map the relationship between the sources for a Vidyāpati tradition, which are often considered in a segregated manner. After comparing a select pada that occurs in three of the Maithili padāvalī manuscript sources along with an "inauthentic" pada of a small pothī from nineteenth-century Bengal that features many commonalities, it becomes clear that it is impossible to develop any clear picture of direct transmission directly from Mithilā to Bengal (and by extension to Assam and Odisha) that does not selectively ignore a large number of manuscript sources. An examination that considers the actual state of affairs of manuscripts (of all varieties) as they are currently accessible along with practices of memorialization serves to problematize long-held assumptions of historical continuity. Twentieth-century literary historians, often lionized because of their social status within South Asian literary institutions, claim an unbroken lineage between the "original" Maithili Vidyāpati and the Vidyāpatis who emerge in later centuries. This study attempts to reconstruct literary methods of self-presentation and memorialization on the part of the compilers, editors, and readers of the padas of Vidyāpati. Instead of taking the assumptions of literary historians literally, this study aims to take their imaginaries seriously and to investigate the methods of their construction.

This short study is not intended to be a comprehensive study of the Vidyāpati tradition in either the Maithili or Bengali/Brajabuli recensions. Even so, it is useful to provide a survey of the current status of manuscripts relating to the Vidyāpati tradition and to consider their relation to one another.⁶ This will progress to a close reading analysis of one of the very few padas that occur in the majority of Vidyāpati-related manuscripts. The final section of this paper concerns a pada found in a small nineteenth-century pothī from the Asiatic Society of Bengal in Kolkata. This pothī, while "inauthentic" according to traditional perspectives, contains a reference to Vidyāpati's famous patron, Śiva Siṃha, and his queen, Lakhimā Devī. This reveals an interesting impressionistic association on the part of the author between Vidyāpati and his patrons as a source of meaning and authority.

It is necessary to discuss his life and context briefly before turning to his manuscript and textual tradition. Said to be born in the village of Bisphī, in the Madhubanī district of Mithilā, Vidyāpati was closely associated with Oinvāra kings of Tirhut (ca. 1325–1556 CE), especially with Śiva Siṃha and his queen and later independent ruler Lakhimā Devī (r. 1416–1428/9).⁷ The courts of both monarchs are remembered in colonial and modern plays, novels, and film as the golden era of culture and scholarship in Mithilā.⁸ This contributes to the later assertions of this paper that Vidyāpati's memorialization is largely due to the imagined courtly culture of the Oinvāra court. As an orthodox brahmin-smārta (ritual specialist of the priestly caste) courtier of a small, quasi-independent Hindu kingdom, Vidyāpati's main intellectual and artistic contributions were a set of technical treatises on ritual and ethical issues (inheritance, letter-writing, and so on).⁹ Being versatile, Vidyāpati also composed two historical narratives (the Kīrttilatā [ca. 1420] and the Kīrttipatāka) on the political and military exploits of Prince Kīrtti Siṃha.¹⁰ Vidyāpati's vernacular corpus includes between two hundred and three hundred padas and two small plays (Gorakṣavijaya and the Maṇimañjarī), which also contain lyric poems.¹¹

Vidyāpati's legacy extends to other cultural spheres within premodern South Asia. He is cited in the 'Ain-ī Akbari of Mughal historian Abū al-Faẓl as a famous composer of the popular song genre of Bihar designated as "laccharis."¹² There is some confusion of whether a "lacchari" is identical to the more well-attested genre name of "nacārī." This refers to the erotic padas or life-cycle songs that are devoted to Śiva and the Goddess, both of which feature in the Maithili and Nepali padāvalī manuscripts and in oral performances. Bengalis Vaiṣṇavas (a.k.a. Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇavas) revere Vidyāpati for being a favorite composer of Kṛṣṇa songs of Caitanya (1486–1534). In the Caitanya-Caritāmṛta of Kṛṣṇdās Kavirāja (b. 1496), Caitanya is described as both reciting and attentively listening to his disciples, Svarupa Dāmodara and Rāmānanda Rāya, recite the verses of Vidyāpati.¹³ The layered pedigree from secondary sources often obscured the accounts of Vidyāpati's Maithili works by historians of early vernacular eastern Indic literatures. It often had the effect of presupposing literary prestige and eminence when in reality we cannot say with any surety as to whether manuscript versions of Vidyāpati's padāvalīcirculated as far and as deeply as has been claimed.

The Maithili Manuscript Sources

While Vidyāpati's memory is alive and well in contemporary South Asia, the actual trail of manuscripts falls short of leading us back to the "original" Vidyāpati. Generally, three manuscripts from the earlier Maithili period (fifteenth to sixteenth centuries CE) have been used as sources for the Vidyāpati tradition. All but the earliest manuscripts have been destroyed or have disappeared. Even between the three earlier sources, only a handful of padas occur in all three. Similar problems of attribution occur in other early North Indian poet corpuses. In the case of the burgeoning Kabīr tradition across North and Western India between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries CE, Callewaert describes interaction of oral traditions and scribal-manuscript culture, "act[s] like a fog and pollution, creating a nebulous environment in which is becomes difficult to find the original version of the songs."¹⁴ Like Callewaert, I seek to turn "fog" itself into insight.

Nepal Manuscript

The oldest and most "authoritative" palm-leaf manuscript (tālapatra) still available, the Nepal Manuscript (hereafter NM) has been the standard authoritative source for twentieth-century scholars of both Mithilā and Bengal by which later collections were assessed. This manuscript was first reported by Kāśī Prasād Jayasvāl in 1936 in the Government Library of Nepal (a.k.a. The Nepal Darbar Library).¹⁵ Later, the Maharaja of Darbhanga, Kāmeśvara Siṃha (1907–1964), sponsored two copies of the manuscript to be deposited in the Patna College Library and the Patna University Library.

This manuscript probably dates from the first half of the sixteenth century, though no date, location, or name of a patron or scribe is included in the text itself, which is written in the Maithili script, variously called Mithilākṣara or Tirhutā.¹⁶ This manuscript contains 288 total padas, of which 261 are ascribed to Vidyāpati in the bhaṇitā. According to Subhadra Jha, a few stanzas are missing in various padas. He is clear that this is not due to any degradation of the manuscript but to scribal omission. He infers this from missing end-rhymes and interlinear poetic allusions.¹⁷

Table 1.

Number of padas from the "Nepal Manuscript" also appearing in other sources.

Twenty-six other poets' padas are included in this collection. Thirteen padas are ascribed to eleven different poets, and thirteen are unattributed. Rādhā-Kṛṣṇa, Śiva, and Śakti are the focal subjects of the padas. The poems dedicated to Śiva and Śakti/Devī (also called nacārīs) are usually said to be devotional, while the nominally Rādhā-Kṛṣṇa-centric padas are said to be more overtly erotic, mannerist, and courtly. Many twentieth-century collections of Vidyāpati's padas have included the padas of the NM with varying levels of acceptance and authority. Nagendranath Gupta's influential collection included 219 of the 261 padas.¹⁸ This edition has been influential for later editors in Bengali and Hindi language collections. A recently republished edition of the NM, by the Bihār-Rāṣṭrabhāṣā-Pariṣad, has made the task of collating occurrences of particular padas much easier. According to this edition, there are concurrences in other manuscripts as shown in Table 1.¹⁹

Rāmbhadrapur Manuscript

The Rāmbhadrapur Manuscript (hereafter RM), discovered in the eponymous village in North Bihar, was the second major source of Vidyāpati's padas for twentieth-century scholars seeking to authenticate padas found in Bengali sources. It is regarded by some to be of equal age as the NM. This manuscript "disappeared" in the late 1980s, stolen from the archives at Patna University. Unfortunately, this "theft" is a common story for many manuscripts relating to the Vidyāpati tradition.²⁰

From the description given in the Bihār-Rāṣṭrabhāṣā-Pariṣad's edition, we know that this palm-leaf manuscript was incomplete, missing the first ten folia. While only sixty padas include a bhaṇitā clearly attributing them to Vidyāpati, many later editors attribute a larger number of padas from this manuscript to Vidyāpati. Śivānanda Ṭhākur, in his well-regarded and conservative Viśuddha Vidyāpati Padāvalī (1938), cites forty of these padas, and Mitra and Majumdar's more wide-ranging collection includes ninety-three.²¹

Taraunī Manuscript

The Taraunī Manuscript (hereafter TM), also named for the village of its discovery in the Madhubanī district of Mithilā, was originally made available to several scholars in Calcutta by Mohinīmohan Gupta. Nāgendranāth Gupta eventually came to use the TM for his influential edition of Vidyāpati's Padāvalī.²² After completing his work, Gupta donated the manuscript to the library at Calcutta University. Since then, the manuscript, like so many others, has been lost. Nāgendranāth Gupta's edition and a more recent edition by the Bihār-Raṣṭrabhāṣā-Pariṣad are the only sources available for this manuscript. Because the manuscript is missing and because of an unclear publication history, there are a disputed number of padas in this text. Gupta cites that there were 231 padas, of which 101 clearly had Vidyāpati's bhaṇitā.²³

The Bengali Padāvalīs

The padas of Vidyāpati and his successors in Bengal can largely be tied to the literary history and output of the Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava followers of Caitanya (1486–1534). Caitanya himself is said to have enjoyed Vidyāpati's padas not as a rasika (connoisseur) of literature, but as a bhakta (devotee) by Kṛṣṇadāsa Kavirāja in the Caitanya-Caritāmṛta. From the eighteenth to the nineteenth centuries, several large compendia of padas were assembled. These padāvalīs are distinct from their Maithili counterparts in their devotional and liturgical provenance. The language of these devotional anthologies of Bengal is usually said to be "Brajabuli," variously claimed as a dialect of Maithili, a Mischesprache or a Kunstsprache. There are varying opinions as to whether this is closer to Maithili or Bengali, but it is usually described as Maithili-inflected Middle Bengali used only in the context of devotional padas. An analogous tradition exists in Assamese (called "Brajavuli") and in Oḍiā.²⁴ The tradition of Brajabuli literature in Bengal extends from the time of Vidyāpati until the late nineteenth century CE, when Bengali reformers began using contemporary Bengali as their preferred poetic medium.

Though most of the large Bengali pada collections contain thousands of individual padas by historically Maithili and Bengali poets, a much smaller number of padas can be traced directly from the older Maithili sources. Out of the more than three thousand padas in Vaiṣṇava-dāsa's (née Gokulānanda Sen) Padakalpataru (late eighteenth century CE), only four padas can also be found in the NM, and an additional ten can be found in other Maithili sources.²⁵ Other prominent Bengali/Brajabuli padāvalīs/pada-saṃgrahas include the Kṣaṇadā Gitacintāmaṇi (early eighteenth century CE), Radhāmohan Ṭhākura's Padāmṛta-Samudra (mid-eighteenth century CE),²⁶ Dīnabandhu Dāsa's Saṁkīrtanāmṛta (1771 CE),²⁷ and the Kīrttanānada (likely early nineteenth century CE).²⁸

Additional Sources

Two centuries after his death, Vidyāpati evolved from being merely a successful and popular local court poet to be the very standard by which Maithili lyric poetry was discerned and emulated.²⁹ In addition to the padāvalīs, which are contextualized collections of padas, there are a few additional textual sources for Vidyāpati's padas. In the seventeenth century, Locanadāsa, under the order of either Narapati Ṭhākura or Mahinātha Ṭhākura (ca. 1690–1720 CE), composed a long treatise on the classical music of then contemporary Mithilā, focusing upon local regional variations of music and poetry, called the Rāgataraṅgiṇī ("Waves of Melody").³⁰ This treatise in Sanskrit, Maithili, and Braj Bhasha describes the technical features of various rāgas (melodic structures), tālas (rhythmic cycles), candas (meters), and mātrās (metrical units/morae). The majority of the technical explanations are illustrated with Maithili padas. Vidyāpati features as the most prominent poet of this collection, with sixty-three padas. Twenty-eight other poets are included in this collection, including the poems of the complier Locana-dāsa himself. It is clear from the prominence of Vidyāpati's padas that Locana incorporates them as exemplars of the tradition as a whole. Vidyāpati is also mentioned in the introductory verses of the third taraṅga (lit. 'wave,' here 'section') of the text.

Another source often cited by contemporary Vidyāpati scholars is the "oral collection" of George A. Grierson. His 1882 grammar and chrestomathy include thirty-four padas of Vidyāpati that he recorded during his field research.³¹ Though I will not consider this collection here, it is important for the record of the popular historical performance tradition of Vidyāpati's padas before the complications of modern recording and distribution practices. This collection shows substantial linguistic divergence from the "classical" Maithili and embodies the non-textual tradition of pada transmission within Mithilā.

A Comparison of Sources

After considering the larger mapping of Vidyāpati's padas across Maithili and Bengali sources in several centuries from the precolonial period, a different sort of relationship has to be mapped between the manuscripts that remain. This is due to an unclear lineage of manuscripts and the current logistical problems of obtaining further evidence. Comparing one of the padas that exists with three of the older Maithili sources, one gets a sense of how the tradition of Vidyāpati expanded and commented upon itself within the very body of the padas. Because the tradition of Maithili/Brajabuli lyric poetry did not have a commentarial tradition until the modern period, the insights of minor textual variance and emendations deserve added attention.

Three Overlapping Padas

NM (Song 24)³²

Vibhāsa Rāge—

Suraja sindura vindu cāndane lihae indu |    Tithi kahi geli tilake ||Viparita abhisāra amiña galae dhāra    Aṅkasa kaela alake

||dhruvapada||Mādhava bheṭali pasāhana beri |

Ādhara haralaka puchiö na puchalaka |    Catura sakhijana melī ||Ketaki dala lae campaka dala dae |    Kabarī thoelaka ānī |

Candane kuṁkume aṅgaruci kaelaka    Samaya niveda sayānī ||

        Bhanaï Vidyāpatītyādi |

Trans.³³

In Rāga Vibhāsa—

The sun is a spot of vermillion and the moon is a spot of sandalwood written [upon her forehead].    The date has been told from her tilaka.A torrent of nectar flowing backwards,    She goads her hair into submission.

(Refrain)Oh Mādhava! She has been encountered during the time of her adornment.Stealing all her dignity without even asking,    Along with the group of her clever female companions.Bringing ketaki leaves and placing the campakapetals,    They are brought and placed in her tied-up hair.

Her limbs are colored with sandalwood and vermillion.

            Vidyāpati says this amongst other things.

TM (Song 78)³⁴

Suraja sindura bindu caṃdane likhae indu    Tithi kahi geli tilake |Viparita abhisāra amiya barisa dhāra    Aṅkusa kaela alake ||

(Refrain)Mādhava, bheṭala pasāhani beri |Ādara haralaka puchiona puchalaka    Catura sakhī jana merī ||

Ketaki dala dae campaka phula laë    Kabarihi thoelaka ānī |Mṛgamada kuṁkuma aṅgaruci kaëlaka    Samaya nibeda sayānī ||

Bhanaï Vidyāpati Sunaha abhayamati    Kuhū nikaṭa paramāne|Rājā Śivasiṃha rūpanarāyana    Lakhimā dei viramāne³⁵ ||

Trans

The sun is a spot of vermillion and the moon is a spot of sandalwood written [upon her forehead].    The date has been told from her tilaka.A torrent of nectar flowing backwards,    She goads her hair into submission.

(Refrain)Oh Mādhava! She has been encountered during the time of her adornment.Stealing all her dignity without even asking,    Along with the group of her clever female companions.

Bringing ketaki leaves and placing the campaka petals,    They are brought and placed in her tied-up hair.Her limbs are colored with musk and vermillion.    The time is made apparent, oh clever lady!

Vidyāpati says, "Listen without fear!    It is plain to see that Amāvasyā is soon."King Śivasiṃha is the very image of Narāyaṇa,    [And] is the Lord of Lady Lakhimā.³⁶

Rāgataraṅgiṇī (Song 26)³⁷

Ramyā Bhīmpalāsī -Suraja sindura bindu cāndane lihae indu    Tithi kahi geli tilake |Viparita abhisāra barisa amiña dhāra    Aṅkuśa kaela ti(la)ke ||

He Mādhava bheṭali pasāhani beri|Ādhara haralaka puchi (on ne puchalaka    Catura sakhi ja)na meri||

Ketaki dala lae campaka phula daya    Kabarī phoelaka ānī |Mṛgamada kuṁkumeṃ ñagarucita laölaka    Samae niveda sayāṃni ||

Bhanaï Vidyāpati sunu varajauvati    Kuhu nīkaṭa paramāne |Rājā Śivasiṃha rūpanarāëna    Lakhimā devi ram(ā)ne ||

Trans

In [Rāga] Ramyā Bhīmpalāsī—The sun is a spot of vermillion and the moon is a spot of sandalwood written [upon her forehead].    The date has been told from her tilaka.A torrent of nectar flowing backwards,    She goads her hair into submission.

(Refrain)Oh Mādhava! She has been encountered during the time of her adornment.Stealing all her dignity without even asking,    Along with the group of her clever female companions.

Bringing ketaki leaves and placing the campaka petals,    They are brought and placed in her tied-up hair.Her limbs are colored with musk and vermillion.    The time is made apparent, oh clever lady!

Vidyāpati says, "Listen without fear!    It is plain to see that Amāvasyā is soon."King Śivasiṃha is the very image of Narāyaṇa,    [And] is the Lord of Lady Lakhimā.

What to Do with the Pothīs?

When shifting focus from the Maithili padāvalī manuscripts to the more plentiful and neglected Bengali pothīs, several challenges arise. The sheer number of pothīs, their small size, the lack of contextual information, and the difficulty of collating the individual padas all make it difficult to undertake any sort of philological extrapolation of patterns of circulation and reception. Although manuscript collections in Bengal, such as the Manuscript Resource Centre at Calcutta University or the Baṅgīya-Sāhityā Pariṣat, contain many hundreds of padāvalī pothīs, scholars pay little attention to them.

Evoking the prestige of the court of Śiva Siṃha and Vidyāpati is a unique feature of what many call the Vidyāpati tradition of padas. When adapted to the devotional Vaiṣṇava context in Bengal, the courtly elements never entirely disappeared. While only a few dozen padas exist across the Bengali and Maithili manuscript sources, the bhaṇitās of Vidyāpati referencing his patron (and his qualities as connoisseur, or rasika) were maintained. W. L. Smith emphasized that the relative antiquity of Old Maithili (vis-à-vis Bengali, Assamese, or Odia) and the cultural memory of Mithilā as a center of Nyāya and Sanskrit studies in eastern India led to the enshrinement of Old Maithili poetic standards as part of the embodiment of that culture.³⁸ While Smith and others have focused on the linguistic effects of this memory tradition (a path of enquiry that needs further exploration), I propose that an analysis focused on specific cultural markers and clues of rhetoric within the padas can also be beneficial for understanding the process of vernacular literary memory and identity formations.

Figure 1.

Vai.s. nava Pada, Accession Number G4876. Kolkata: Asiatic Society, n.d.

Moving onto one pothī-style held in the Asiatic Society in Kolkata, a "close reading" of the poetic-signature (bhaṇitā) of Vidyāpati reveals a link between the uniquely Bengali attestations of particular padas and the royal Oinvāra patrons of Vidyāpati in historical Mithilā. While I do not have permission from the Asiatic Society of Bengal to reproduce entire pages of the concerned nineteenth-century pothī in their entirety, a small selection of the bhaṇitā in this manuscript demonstrates a clear relationship between the Vaiṣṇava Bengali Vidyāpati tradition and the original court of Vidyāpati and Śiva Siṃha.

Bhanae vidyāpati varayuvati iha vasa koī na jani |Rāja Śiva Siṃha rupanārāyana Lachima deī parināma ||23||

Says Vidyāpati, "Oh best of the young women! There is no [other] such compulsion."The King Śiva Siṃha, the very image of Nārāyaṇa, Devī Lachima [sic] is his perfection.

The rest of the pada, not appearing in other padāvalī sources, could be dismissed as insignificant ephemera, but if we take the bhaṇitā seriously for a moment, clear structural and thematic connections to padas of the Maithili substrata of the Vidyāpati tradition are visible. Ignoring the linguistic irregularities of this closing distich of the pada, there are two elements directly parallel to the earlier example padas. Namely, that in the first hemistich, Vidyāpati beseeches the best of the youthful women, and in the second half, he evokes the figure of Śiva Siṃha.

A "throwaway" pada in a "throwaway" nineteenth-century pothī can tell us about how the poets and audiences, removed from Vidyāpati by time, region, and linguistic variance, thought of the poet within their own literary and cultural history. Invoking the names of Vidyāpati and Śiva Siṃha also has the effect of elevating purely devotional-oriented (bhakti) padas to the realm of high or courtly literature. This pothī, like dozens of others, also contains the padas of Govinda-dāsa (1535–1613), often called the second Vidyāpati, though usually taken as more overtly Vaiṣṇava than Vidyāpati. The combination of Vidyāpati and Govinda-dāsa's padas within a single small pothīhas the effect of devotionalizing Vidyāpati's padas and literarizing the padas of Govinda-dāsa by mutual association. This pairing of Vidyāpati and Govinda-dāsa (and in other cases Caṇḍī-dāsa) was exceedingly common in nineteenth-century padāvalīs. The manuscript collection at Calcutta University contains more than two dozen such small pothīs. Many more are scattered and neglected in other collections.

One of the largest accessible collections of pothī-style collections of Vaiṣṇava padāvalīs is the manuscript library of Calcutta University. Alongside roughly two dozen edited Bengali/Brajabuli volumes, like the Padakalpataru, this manuscript collection holds nearly seventy-five small pothī-style manuscripts. Facing the challenges of a physically degraded archive, a large number of fragmented manuscripts, and colophons that are either missing or not supplied makes it difficult to divine textual patterns or literary associations. For example, taking a step back and performing a "distant reading" of the archive collection as a whole, one can understand the way that Bengali-Gauḍīya poets imagined Vidyāpati to feature in their own tradition.

In Table 2, one can see all of the pothī-style Padāvalīs in the Calcutta University Manuscript Collection that feature both Vidyāpati and at least one other Maithili/Brajabuli poet. It is clear that there is a much stronger association between Vidyāpati and his fellow Maithili poet Govinda-dāsa and another pre-Caitanya poet Caṇḍī-dāsa than other late-period Brajabuli poets with clearer Gauḍīya identities. While definitive conclusions about the imagined history of Vidyāpati in the Bengali/Brajabuli canon cannot be drawn from a sample reading like this, it can help to nuance qualitative "close readings" and to understand their place in the archive.

Table 2.

Poets featured in Calcutt a University Manuscript Library's Padāvalī collection alongside Vidyāpati.

Toward a New Perspective

Many have begun to question the utility and feasibility of finding any pre-modern poet in their pristine, original Ur-state.³⁹ This challenge to traditional methods and attitudes can help to shift the conversation and focus when considering poets like Vidyāpati who have complex histories of memorialization that sometimes obscure the ability to map the paths of transmission and circulation. Instead of finding an "original" Vidyāpati or ignoring the Bengali/Brajabuli Vidyāpati for the lack of corresponding sources, the new task becomes mapping trajectories and signifiers of memory construction and appropriation. This manner of examining manuscript trajectories based on both textual history and a history of memorialization can also help to conceptualize the more abstract aspects of developing vernacular identities in eastern South Asia over the last half millennium and premodern traditions of lyric poetry more generally.

For the particular case of Vidyāpati and the tradition that was constructed around him (both poetic and narrative), instead of removing focus from the manuscripts as the primary site of investigation, accessing additional sites of memorialization, whether it be song, film, or physical monuments, expands the number of manuscripts that could be considered as viable sites of critical examination. What has happened is the complete disregard or segregation of the Bengali/Brajabuli Vidyāpati tradition from the Maithili manuscript sources. This is completely at odds with the self-perception of the tradition itself, which maintains its own historical and linguistic continuity. Tracing both the disjunctions and intersections between the tradition's self-perception and the manuscript evidence becomes the object of study that evinces more realistically productive pathways of inquiry. This article is only a summary of the status quaestionis of the current state of Vidyāpati studies. Much remains to be done even through purely textual/philological studies. Even so, the stagnating field of Vidyāpati studies can be refreshed and opened to many more perspectives with a few of the suggestions of this study.