# City in Literature: Urban Imaginaries in Vidyapati's Puruṣaparīkṣā **Presenter**: [[Sneh Kumar Jha]] **Session**: [[Session 9. Space, Place, & Devotion]] **Abstract**: This paper critically examines Vidyapati’s fifteenth-century composition, Puruṣaparīkṣā, a Sanskrit treatise on the ideals of masculinity, composed at the behest of Raja Śivasiṃha of Tirhut. Structured as a series of didactic tales, the text exemplifies desirable masculine virtues. While scholars such as George Abraham Grierson, later commentators, and more recently Pankaj Jha have established the historicity of Puruṣaparīkṣā, characterizing it as a comprehensive manual on political morality and ethics, its engagement with urbanity remains largely unexamined. The tales within the text are predominantly set in cities of both the classical past and more recent history, raising critical questions about the representation of urban spaces. This paper interrogates whether the urban depictions in Puruṣaparīkṣā reflect Vidyapati’s lived experience or if they merely conform to established literary conventions shaped by earlier poets. It explores intertextual resonances with past and contemporary literary works, questioning whether the text’s urban imagery aligns with the urban transformations initiated by the Turkish rulers or derives from alternative historical realities. Moreover, despite substantial historical evidence of urban centres in Mithila, why does Puruṣaparīkṣā remain conspicuously silent on them? This paper argues that rather than offering a conventional celebration of urban kāma culture, the text constructs a dystopian vision of urbanity, shaped by the tumultuous history of urban centres in Mithila and the Brahmanical sensibilities of its author. Keywords: City, Mithila, Vidyapati, Dystopia