#Vidyapati

“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.”

“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.”