Beyond the local and the universal: Exclusionary strategies of expansive literary cultures in fifteenth century Mithila

Abstract

On rare occasions when historians study political thought articulated in Sanskrit in pre-Mughal and Mughal north India, they do it in isolation from studies of ‘religious’ or legal ideas. This article focuses on Vidyapati, a prolific but neglected poet and scholar of north Bihar from the understudied fifteenth century. A historical–critical examination of two of his Sanskrit texts, Puruṣaparīkṣā and Likhanāvalī, reveals that he used his expertise in Sanskrit literary and philosophical tradition as well as his familiarity with the other cosmopolitan culture—that of Persian—to weave together a discourse on nīti (ethics/state policy). He drew ideas and authority from an earlier ‘classical’ tradition but anchored them in recent history and articulated them in contemporary flavour. Drawing upon dharmic and dharmaśāstric injunctions, he treated gender, varṇa and state as part of a continuum, a singular domain of socio-political order.