Two Vidyapatis: Maithili, Sanskrit learning, and law

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learning, and law Governing distinction: two Vidyāpatis This history adopts a two-Vidyāpati reconstruction as a governing rule of attribution. Mahākavi Vidyāpati is treated as the earlier, pre-Jyotirīśvara poet of the Maithili Padāvalī tradition. Vidyāpati Ṭhakkura is treated as the later Oiniwar- period intellectual associated with Sanskrit and Avahaṭṭa works, including Kīrtilatā, Kīrtipatākā, Puruṣaparīkṣā and Likhanāvalī. The distinction is applied throughout the book to chronology, language, patronage, caste claims, legends, bibliography, glossary and index. A work or anecdote is not moved from one figure to the other merely because later tradition uses the same name. This is an explicit historiographical position of the present book rather than a claim that all modern scholarship already agrees. The mainstream one-author model remains influential: Ramanath Jha’s Sahitya Akademi monograph and Pankaj Jha’s study of the fifteenth century both organize major corpora under one Vidyāpati. Yet Ramanath Jha also warns that Vidyāpati was a common name, that several authors of that name—including more than one Thakur—survive, and that identification from the name alone is hazardous. That warning supplies an important methodological bridge between the conventional model and the sharper separation adopted here. Why the distinction is historically necessary Conflation produces more than a literary inconvenience. If the Padāvalī poet and the later court intellectual are treated as one person, the biography of an Oiniwar scholar is projected onto a vernacular song tradition; the date of one corpus is made to control the other; court patrons become patrons of every song; and later genealogical or caste narratives can be transferred backward without an independent witness. The 275 result is a circular biography in which works authenticate a life that was itself reconstructed from the same works. The two-person model breaks that circle. Each corpus must first be dated and attributed on its own evidence: manuscript colophons, internal royal names, linguistic register, citations, early anthologies, performance history and external references. Only after those controls are established may biography be reconstructed. The burden of proof therefore rests on the proposed identification, not on the assumption that a famous name must designate one individual across centuries of t