Vidyapati and the idea of ecological sacredness

I come from the Maithili-speaking region of Madhubani, along the India–Nepal border. Growing up, the verses of Vidyapati were not something I merely read, they were a part of our life. In village gatherings, in the rhythm of festivals, in the murmurs of the river and the shade of groves, his songs were ever-present. They shaped how I heard the land, how I understood love, devotion and ethics.

Vidyapati Thakur (1352-1448) was a Maithili poet, philosopher and chronicler from Mithila whose voice straddled the personal and the universal. Writing in Maithili, Sanskrit and Avahatta, a transitional vernacular, he transformed the poetic space of eastern India.

His Padavali, a lyrical collection devoted to Radha and Krishna, gives women a voice of desire and agency centuries ahead of its time. His other works, like Bhu-Parikramanam, Purusha-Pariksha and Likhanavali, maneuver ecology, ethics and governance, showing that poetry in his hands was never separate from life itself.

Beginning in the river

Vidyapati’s story starts, not in grand palaces, not in the corridors of Sanskrit scholarship, but in the slow, shining flow of water through Mithila’s terrain. Some of his most memorable works were on the Ganga and Yamuna rivers.

In his Bhu-Parikramanam, the river is not an inert element; it is moral agency, witness, blessing, trees stand ‘as temples’ and the wind is ‘holy air’. The land breathes. One field, one grove, one stream at a time.

In an India where rivers are fought over, mined and dammed; forests cleared; winds harnessed without care for the poems of the place, Vidyapati offers something that reads like prophecy: an ethic of landscape.

He was not a poet who merely admired nature. He documented it with journalistic precision. He marked the faultlines: When you degrade water, you degrade life; when you ignore the grove, you ignore memory; when you treat wind as commodity, you lose the breath of the world.

This attentiveness reached devotional and ethical culmination in his famous Ganga Stuti:

बड़ सुखसार पाओल तुअ तीरे, छोड़इत निकट नयन बह नीरे।
‘O Mother Ganga, at your banks I have found supreme joy; leaving your side, tears flow from my eyes.’
एक अपराध घमब मोर जानी, परमल माए पाए तुम पानी।
‘O Mother, knowing my misdeed, please forgive me; though I have touched you with my feet, grant me your grace.’
कि करब जप-तप जोग-धेआने, जनम कृतारथ एकहि सनाने।
‘What need have I of penance, meditation, or austerity? A single bath in you has made my life complete.’

In this stuti, the Ganga is not just a river; she is moral presence, sanctuary, ethical interlocutor. She mediates human action, forgives mistakes, sanctifies life itself. The river, in Vidyapati’s vision, is alive, responsive, sacred. Every wave carries memory; every current teaches humility. Ecological awareness and spiritual devotion merge: To honour the river is to honour life, to treat water as sacred is to live ethically with the land.

Vidyapati’s attention to the river, to the grove, to the wind, is not ornamental. It is active witnessing, an assertion that human life cannot be disentangled from the care, respect and ethical treatment of the environment. To read him is to learn that sacredness is inseparable from ecology; reverence is inseparable from responsibility.

Poetry in people’s tongue

In his era, Sanskrit ruled the court. It was an exclusive language, synonymous with prestige and power. Vidyapati chose Maithili. His declaration ‘Desil bayana sab jan mittha’ (The language of the land is sweet to all) is not a flourish, it is a manifesto.

He gives Radha a voice rooted in the daily life of the everyman. In the same breath, he writes of her and the trees, rivers, vines, wind in Maithili. He does not pull nature aside as an illustration; he lets the landscape speak through his poetry.

That matters because in the present moment the faultline isn’t just between culture and politics, it also runs between language, land, belonging. Vidyapati shows that writing in the tongue of land is itself an ecology of culture.

Nature’s instructions on ethics

How many poets of the fourteenth-fifteenth century invite you to hear the wind as sacred? To see the grove as temple? To treat the river not as corridor of commerce but as conduit of blessing?

In Purusha-Pariksha, he writes, ‘Neither by wealth, nor by strength, nor by noble birth is a man made; through knowledge and humility alone is one called a true man.’

Notice how ethics link with ecology here. Humility before knowledge. Knowledge that attends. To attend the land is to know it; to know it is to live humbly with it.

When he writes of the place where ‘trees and vines stand as temples’, he is not being poetic for poetry’s sake. He is saying: When you treat the vine as sacred, you behave differently towards it. That shift, from commodity to kin, from backdrop to actor, is what makes his vision so urgent.

Locality & memory

Vidyapati’s Bhu-Parikramanam is a travelogue. But it isn’t detached. He didn’t roam for spectacle. He moved through his region, naming rivers, groves, sacred sites, winds, people. He anchored the universal in the particular.

That holds a lesson for today. Global environmental language often floats free of place: ‘ecosystem’, ‘biodiversity’, ‘carbon’. But Vidyapati goes into the field: He walked the river, listens, “Janam dhanya hoi kṣaṇamātra” (Even a moment’s birth by the stream is blessed). There is memory here. There is local architecture of feeling. He is not simply lamenting what will be lost. He is describing what lives. That matters. Because to protect you must know.

Even when he was being regional, Vidyapati was not narrow. His songs travelled Bengal, Odisha, Assam; they entered Brajabuli; they spoke across tongues. He shows how regional does not mean parochial.

In the era of dominance of a few languages, of cultural centralisation, his example is subversive. By writing in the language of land, he argued that local language matters; local ecology matters; local voice matters. And yet, because the land and river and grove are living, his voice becomes universal. That duality, rooted and wide-reaching, is what literature should aim for.

Why this matters today

We live in a time when rivers are diverted, and forests cleared for our selfish needs. The ethics of landscape, that land might be interlocutor, kin or temple, is weakened. Global analysis abounds.

But the local field, the local tongue, the local memory? They find fewer voices. Vidyapati’s regional perspective of looking at natural elements as sacred is urgently needed.

It is about how we conceive land, how we speak of it, how we live with it. Because ecological crisis is not just technical; it is cultural. 

In India’s moment of linguistic anxiety, regional assertion, cultural tension, the fact that a fourteenth-century Maithili poet wrote with such clarity about land, language and love matters. He reminded us that the voice of land matters. The voice of region matters. And that voice, when honest, becomes universal.

Yet, despite it all, many of Vidyapati’s works remain locked away: Travelogue, legal manual, administrative treatise. The lyrical songs of Radha and Krishna have been translated; the rest less so. That is a gap.

If we believe world literature means more than the Euro-American canon, then Vidyapati must be translated, annotated, published. Not as regional curiosity but as a thinker of ethics, ecology, language.

Vidyapati doesn’t leave us in nostalgia. He invites us into living, to recognise that every tongue, every river, every grove holds story, memory, moral weight.

In the end, to read him is to feel pulse of place. To hear his Radha is to see a woman speaking in her own voice. To heed his trees and rivers is to acknowledge that we belong to something bigger than ourselves.
And in that recognition, in that small act of listening, the future begins.

Ashutosh Kumar Thakur writes regularly on society, literature, and the arts, reflecting on the shared histories and cultures of South Asia. Views expressed are the author’s own and don’t necessarily reflect those of Down To Earth.