Maithili

The Maithili people are of Mithila, the plain north of the Ganges around Darbhanga, a country whose ancient King Janaka and his daughter Sita appear in the Ramayana. Their language, Maithili, descends from Magadhi Prakrit and was written in its own Tirhuta script before Devanagari became dominant.

Under the Karnat dynasty, whose last king Harisimhadeva ruled until 1324, the poet Jyotirishwar Thakur wrote the Varna Ratnakara, the earliest known prose in a modern Indian language. In 1324 Delhi's Ghiyasuddin Tughluq overran Mithila and installed Brahmin Kameshvar Jha, beginning the Oiniwar dynasty of 1325 to 1526, under which the Maithili lived in 1337.

Court poet Vidyapati, writing from about 1360 to 1450 under King Shiva Simha, left over a thousand songs shaping Vaishnava devotion in the region. The last Oiniwar king fell to the Bengal sultan Nusrat Shah in 1526, and after decades of strife the Raj Darbhanga dynasty took over; Nepal's Malla kings made Maithili a court and theatre language.