- Lived:
- c. 1352–1448 (traditional) · born at Bisapī (modern Bisfi, Madhubani district, Bihar) → the courts of the Oinwar kings of Mithila, an exile in Nepal, and back; died, tradition says, on the bank of the Gaṅgā
- Field:
- poetry — court paṇḍit of the Oinwar dynasty; songs in Maithili, chronicles in Avahaṭṭha, treatises in Sanskrit
- The Big Idea:
- He took the love of Rādhā and Krishna out of Sanskrit and sang it in his mother tongue — proving that the language of the kitchen and the courtyard could carry the highest things, and giving eastern India the songbook it has been singing from ever since.
- In their words:
- "For millions of ages I have held him heart to heart, and still my heart is not cooled." (from a song of Rādhā's; the translation is ours)
- If you remember one thing:
- Six hundred years after his death, women at weddings in Bihar still sing Vidyāpati's songs without thinking of them as literature — and Bengali devotion so wanted to sound like him that its poets built an artificial language, Brajabuli, in his image. Few writers anywhere have been loved like that.