Sir George Abraham Grierson (1851–1941), the Irish administrator-scholar who directed the monumental Linguistic Survey of India, did more than almost anyone to put Maithili on the world’s linguistic map. Posted in Bihar, he produced An Introduction to the Maithili Language of North Bihar (1881) and a Maithili Chrestomathy, giving the language its first systematic modern grammar and helping establish it as a distinct tongue rather than a dialect of Hindi or Bengali.
Though not a Maithil himself, Grierson belongs to Mithila’s story: his scholarship armed later generations with the evidence for Maithili’s separate identity — the case that would one day win it a place in the Constitution’s Eighth Schedule. He also collected and translated the songs of Vidyapati, carrying the medieval poet to a scholarly readership far beyond the region.