Why Kathakar Ashok – the quiet flame of Mithila

Indian Express

7 hours ago

(Written by Ashutosh Kumar Thakur)
He was a name carried on the wind. I first heard the name Kathakar Ashok in 2007. Two remarkable voices in contemporary Maithili literature, Taranand Viyogi and Gaurinath, spoke of him with unmistakable reverence. 'He is one of the most important fiction writers in Maithili today,' they said, almost in chorus, in two different places. Their conviction stayed with me for years, like a quiet whisper you know you must one day answer.
That moment came in late November 2012. My brother, Atul K Thakur, and I had just returned from Madhubani and were on our way back to Delhi after Diwali and Chhath celebrations. We stopped in Patna to visit him. The meeting, held in his residence, turned into a marathon night of literary exchange. His younger son, Prabhat Jha, then student of Patna University and now teaches English in a college, joined the conversation. What followed was an intense and wide-ranging discussion on Maithili, Indian, and world literature. It was that night I understood Ashok was not merely a writer. He was a thinker deeply rooted in his language, and even more deeply in his time.
As the conversation deepened, Ashok spoke warmly of his dear friend Shivshankar Srinivas, whose brilliance in fiction he holds in the highest regard. He talked about the incisive critical mind of Mohan Bhardwaj, whose seminal contributions to Maithili literary criticism he considers foundational, helping map the shifts in sensibility, narrative form, and aesthetic engagement within Maithili literature. Of Taranand Viyogi, he spoke not just as a poet but as a voice of pluralistic imagination, whose poems, steeped in history and the search for self, carry the pulse of a changing Mithila.
Reading Ashok's stories, and listening to him reflect on these literary friendships, feels like stepping into a layered world where memory meets myth, and where the influence of postmodernism and the anxieties of the post-truth world ripple quietly beneath the surface. His fiction is deeply aware of fractured identities, cultural dislocations, and the urgent need to reclaim language as a site of meaning. And yet, his writing never abandons clarity; he embraces complexity without becoming obscure.
Since that first meeting, I have had the privilege to read nearly all his published works and conduct a long-form interview with him. Each encounter, each text, has only deepened my belief that Kathakar Ashok is a writer who deserves far greater attention in India's literary mainstream, and beyond. He is not only one of the most important voices in Maithili but also a bridge between traditions and transformations, between the rooted and the restless.
Ashok Kumar Jha, born on January 18, 1953, began writing in the sacred and intellectually fertile environment of Kashi. His father, Late Umapati Jha, was the manager of the historic Ram Mandir built by the Maharani of Darbhanga. The temple was not only a spiritual center, but also a cultural nucleus. The Maithil Chhatra Sangh hosted literary events, recitations, and anniversary celebrations of Maithili writers. The young Ashok absorbed it all.
His first poem, a tribute to poet Chanda Jha, appeared in Batuk, a children's magazine. But the shift from verse to prose was fraught with uncertainty. His early stories were rejected, even by well-meaning mentors. But rejection, in Ashok's case, was only a redirection. He rewrote. He refined. He returned. In 1969, the poem 'E New Lightak Faishion Thik' was published, and in 1971, Viram San Pahine appeared in Mithila Mihir. The storyteller had arrived.
Ashok's literary corpus spans decades, but his storytelling retains a deep moral consistency. His landmark short story collections—Ohi Raatik Bhor (1991), Maatbar (2001), and Daddy Gaam (2017)—were written over nearly five decades. They explore caste, identity, communal tensions, migration, alienation, and hope, always through characters drawn from real places, speaking real language, living real dilemmas.
His stories are not sentimental recollections. They are structured acts of conscience. In Derbuk, Mirza Saheb, and Daddy Gaam, he examines the tension between memory and modernity, between inherited identities and chosen ones. These are stories that do not scream. They hold your gaze and do not blink.
His characters are often caught between conflicting forces, tradition and transformation, locality and globalisation, belonging and estrangement. Yet, he treats each of them with a profound empathy, never reducing them to sociological types. His stories open slowly, like the turning of soil before sowing seeds, giving space to nuance, contradiction, and self-discovery. What makes his stories endure is their ability to echo far beyond Mithila, into the moral ecosystem of anyone who has ever wrestled with identity, dignity, or the quiet ache of displacement.
Kathakar Ashok's writing process defies formula. Stories take months, sometimes years, to form in his mind. 'I write only when it becomes necessary,' he says. His work is not an act of production; it is an act of purification. Often, the story finds him, not the other way around.
His use of magic realism, like in Kotha and Sanesh, is not borrowed, but indigenous. Ministers with serpentine tongues, caste leaders with dismembered limbs—these are metaphors shaped by Mithila's folk traditions and the disturbing realism of contemporary India. His narratives carry not only literary weight but political urgency.
While reading him, I often find myself drawing comparisons, not to reduce his work, but to place it within a broader lineage of literary excellence. There are shades of Gabriel García Márquez in how he merges the mythical with the everyday, creating a reality richer than reality itself. Like Milan Kundera, his stories interrogate history, memory, and identity with a quiet philosophical force. And in the Hindi world, his lyrical restraint and tender surrealism often remind me of Vinod Kumar Shukla.
Yet, Ashok stands apart. His metaphors are born from the lived textures of Mithila—its rituals, its fractures, its silences. He writes not to imitate any tradition, but to extend his own. And in doing so, he invites us to witness a world that is at once intensely local and profoundly universal.
Ashok's contribution to Maithili letters is not confined to short stories. His critical essays (Maithil Aankhi, Katha Path) and the study Kathak Upanyas: Upanyasak Katha offer some of the most rigorous readings of Maithili literature to date.
Kathak Upanyas charts the early decades of Maithili fiction, capturing its social reformist bent and its silent revolutions—from widowhood to women's education, from caste rigidity to individual freedom. His literary essays are not just reflections, they are frameworks, setting the foundation for future scholarship.
Ashok's work as an editor (Samvaad, Pratiman, Sandhaan) and as convener of the Maithili Literature Festival in Patna (2014, 2016) shows his enduring commitment to community-building through literature. His column Thain Pathain, later compiled as Neek Dinak Bioscope, remains a beloved commentary on Maithili life, at once personal and political.
There is a heart-wrenching truth at the centre of Kathakar Ashok's literary life. He has yet to receive the Sahitya Akademi Award. I say this with both disbelief and disappointment. It is an omission not just startling in its oversight, but symptomatic of a larger apathy toward significant regional voices that have quietly transformed Indian literature from the ground up.
Ashok's body of work in Maithili fiction spans decades, themes, and generations. That he has not been recognized by the country's highest literary body is not merely a personal slight—it is a missed opportunity for the Akademi to honour a voice that has persistently stood for literary depth, social realism, and cultural rootedness.
In a post-Geetanjali Shree, Perumal Murugan, and Banu Mushtaq world, the translation of Indian regional literature into English and other global languages is no longer a literary aspiration—it is an urgent cultural imperative. As Indian writing steps confidently onto the world stage, languages like Maithili, with their deep-rooted and centuries-old literary traditions, must not remain in the margins.
Ashok's works, particularly Daddy Gaam, Ohi Raatik Bhor, and Maatbar, must be translated. Not only because they are exemplary works of fiction, but because they hold the pulse of a people and a place. Within them resonate the lyricism of Vidyapati, the rebellion of Nagarjun, and the quiet, enduring stillness of a land often forgotten in national narratives.
Kathakar Ashok is acutely aware of the representational imbalance in Maithili literature. He acknowledges in his literary criticism works the growth in women's writing, with figures like Lily Ray, Usha Kiran Khan, Nirja Renu, and Vibha Rani making substantial contributions, but laments the underrepresentation of Dalit and minority voices.
Writers such as Taranand Viyogi, Mahendra Narayan Ram, and Mukhtar Aalam are breaking ground, as are voices from backward castes and the Maithili-speaking community in Nepal. But the road ahead remains long. Literature, as Ashok sees it, must represent all of Mithila—not just its upper-caste memory.
Contemporary Maithili literature, Ashok believes, is finally beginning to engage meaningfully with themes like feminism, subaltern identity, urban decay, and ecological anxiety. Novels such as Allah ho Ram, Kalash-Yatra, and O Je Kahiyo Gaam Chhal mark a welcome shift. But the literature still struggles to breach its geographic confines and find a sustained presence in the national literary discourse.
The digital age brings paradoxes. Access has grown, but attention spans have withered. Young writers are emerging, yet the publishing landscape remains fragmented and fragile. 'Maithili literature is still surviving because of the hunger of its writers,' Ashok says, with both pride and concern. What it needs now is not just talent, but a sustainable literary ecosystem—committed publishers, visionary translators, meticulous editors, and a wider circle of engaged, curious readers.
And then comes the question I have often asked him: When will you write a novel? He smiles. 'There is pressure from friends and readers. I think I must try next year.' That novel, whenever it arrives, will not just be a literary event. It will be a culmination of a life spent walking alongside the truth, writing not for fame but for faith.
To read Kathakar Ashok is to encounter a voice that does not shout, but it stays. A voice that believes in the dignity of the ordinary, the mystery of character, and the weight of silence. His stories are not only literature, but they are also documents of cultural memory, chronicles of the heartland, testimony of resistance. And they must travel beyond Mithila.
As Namwar Singh once said, 'The survival of Indian literature depends on the dialogue among Indian languages.' Ashok's work reminds us why that dialogue must be nurtured—because in it lies the plural imagination of our future.
Because when India's many languages begin to speak to one another, not just in theory, but through translation, then perhaps we will finally hear the full music of our republic.
Until then, we listen closely. Because Kathakar Ashok is still writing.
(Ashutosh Kumar Thakur is a bilingual writer, literary critic, and curator based in Bangalore. He is a keen observer of South Asian literature and a lifelong student of Mithila's cultural memory. He can be reached at [e-mail])