Special Issue — Asian Ethnology, Vol. 85, No. 1 (August 2026)

Critical Contours of Mithila Studies

Guest Editors: Pranav Prakash, Christopher L. Diamond, and Coralynn V. Davis

Open Access

Growing out of the 2022 preconference seminar of the same name at the Annual Conference on South Asia (University of Wisconsin-Madison) — the event that founded this network — this special issue brings together scholars from across the humanities and social sciences to establish Mithila Studies as a new, inclusive, and critical field of academic inquiry.

Articles in this issue (9)

1. Guest Editors' Introduction: Defining and Contextualizing Mithila Studies
   Pranav Prakash, Christopher L. Diamond, and Coralynn V. Davis
2. The 'Indescribable Country': Locating Mithila between Bengal and the Hindi Heartland in Raghunandana Das's Mithilānāṭaka
   Christopher L. Diamond
3. Shadings of Languages: A Study of Maithili Marṣīya in Nineteenth-Century Bihar
   Ufaque Paiker
4. Jagatprakasha Malla's Grief for His Bosom Friend: Affection Expressed in Maithili and Newari
   Makoto Kitada
5. A Cowherd's Chapbook: An Inquiry into the Ethics of Literary Historiography
   Pranav Prakash
6. The Cultural Politics of Classifying Mithila Painting
   Paula Richman
7. Mithila Painting and Feminism in the 1970s: Constructing Women Painters as Heroines of Western Vanguard Journals
   Hélène Fleury
8. A Ghumakkaṛ of Modern Mithila: An Interpretative Reading of Baba Nagarjun's Personhood
   Dev Nath Pathak
9. Collaborative Scholarship and the Politics of Participation: Linking Expressive Arts and Social Change in Mithila
   Coralynn V. Davis