Jawaharlal Nehru University Mithila Manch or JNU Mithila Manch (JNUMM) is not a new phenomenon at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. There has been several attempts to create such a structure in JNU earlier as well. But each time it has met with some or the other problems and it went down the memory lane.

In the seven years of my stay at JNU I have seen three posters with the same name coming on behalf of some sort of a Maithil organisation. But I also saw that it went down after a few posters or pamphlets. The reason for this has been the lacklustreness on the part of the organisers or the members of the community itself.

Last year in October some people came to me saying that they wanted to organise a general meeting of the people from the Mithilanchal area in JNU. It was a welcome move for me. I was surprised to see that some people were still striving to do that.
With the previous history of such an organisation/association in my mind, I had the impression that people from Mithilanchal were just good enough in number in Delhi. And that they never felt the need to be in a close-knit association at JNU. The JNU community in itself is a close-knit society. Having a regional association might be not be a need for the people from that area. But given that there are associations based on other languages also functioning in JNU, this might be a good idea.

As a linguist, I understand the importance of language, I mean the mother tongue here. Being a Maithil myself I understand the importance or rather unimportance of Maithili in my life and work. It is a common fact that the use of Maithili outside Mithilanchal is really very neglibile. One uses it only when he/she is talking to someone who is known to him/her as a Maithil and is near to him/her. But it is also true that he/she uses other languages like Hindi or English as the first language for general purpose, which is just fine.

But for nearness that comes with the mother tongue can never be compared with any other language. When outside one’s linguistic area one is always with a vacume at the heart. This vacume is the use of the mother tongue and the related identity that comes with it. As human beings are social, the need for a society with which you can identify yourself is always there. It is basically to fill this vacume and to create that identical society within the small campus of our university that these people were striving for.

So with this we called for a general meeting of the Maithils in JNU in October, 2008. There was a reasonably good presence of the people-with about 60 present and ex-students participating. There were also a few non-student participants. It worked as a morale booster for the organisers- Mr. Gopal ji Gopal, Ashwini Kumar, Dinesh Kumar, Binay Pathak and Abdul Rafe.

For me it was a suprise. I had never seen these many Maithils together in JNU before. I had known only a few through direct contact. And to tell you the truth, there was not much affinity that should have emerged with the regional and linguistic similarity: the reason being simple, we did not talk in Maithili with each other nor did we talk about the generalia of Mithilanchal.

But at this meeting, people were speaking in Maithili. Even for those who did not or could not speak Maithili, the meeting was beneficial. At least they got a taste of what the language is like. The first meeting also gave a taste of being a part of society with the social thread encompassing deep contact of centuries!

So the first meeting was a great success! We decided to give it a formal structure and chose unanimously the office bearers for the association. There were great plans suggested. The name was decided to be JNU Mithila Manch. We decided this association would conduct public meetings, public and academic talks, debates and discussions on the topics relevant to the area of Mithilanchal and the Maithils.

We decided to hold a Maithil cultural programme in JNU to start with. We also started collecting funds for it. Despite good efforts put in by the now elected office bearers, we felt that it was not feasible in the current academic year. We met people inside and outside JNU and gauged the waters. But this only a futile exercise and gave us nothing tangible but some experience and a few contacts.

In time we also felt that people were loosing interest in it and we needed more people to actively participate in its activities. But, ah!, it was going the same way again! But for the efforts of the initiators i.e. Gopalji, Binayji and Rafeji, this association would have been dead in time. But these guys kept heads up in time and we strived again to show a presence in the campus.

We did a public meeting on the topic of “The Disasters of Flood in Bihar”, last month in July. As the new academic session has started, we plan now to hold two things at first – a Freshers Party and a Cultural Programme in the current year.

Let’s wish the best for JNUMM.

Amen!