Region, Politics and Literary Culture: Reflections from Mithila in the Long 15th Century

Abstract

This paper examines the notion of region as they figure in certain literary texts of the medieval and early modern north India across diverse linguistic archives. The idea is to look at and beyond how these compositions understood and represented the region. What were the constituent factors of the region, and how do they manifest themselves? As an imagined, lived, constituted and contested idea, what are the varying set of traits associated with regions? Is it possible to make a repertoire of such traits outside of contemporary and temporally-spatially specific discourses available within particular literary cultures? No less important is the question of how modern historians might fruitfully relate to, and deploy, the fraught category while researching any aspect of pre-modern past, and not just while dealing with local/regional/vernacular. The paper argues that the question of what constitutes region and what constitutes a grander totality, of which a region is but a part, is a matter of contesting claims to power that are settled as much in the domain of cultural representations and resources as in actual political might.