Conclusion

This chapter argues about language as a marker of identity and also as a conceptual category that can be a powerful tool for exploring the varied experiences of different linguistic communities with modernity or our ‘colonial modernity’. Besides, it also allows us to revisit some of the important concepts like nation, nationalism, tradition and how these terms were used and understood by different linguistic communities in India particularly in the vernacular spheres. The study of a language is not merely the study of a speech form, but it also involves a whole web of interconnected themes, ideas, and activities which together constitute the totality of human existence. Language as a conceptual category provides a valuable link to approach that reality in all such complexities. Further, I have argued that the study of such language movements in the ‘Hindi heartland’ like the Maithili language movement would be incomplete unless it also takes into account the socialpolitical and historical context in which such movements have emerged. And then, I have explained the major shifts in and challenges to the Maithili movement in its over-a-century of struggles and contemporary developments.

Aesthetics · Articulation (sociology) · Context (archaeology) · Epistemology · Hindi · Identity (music) · Linguistics · Modernity · Movement (music) · Nationalism · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Vernacular · History · Philosophy · South Asian Studies and Conflicts