Mirabai

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She is remembered first as a woman who walked out of a palace. The story the tradition keeps is of a Rajput princess of Merta, married into the ruling house of Mewar, who would not behave as a queen — who danced before an image of Krishna in the temple courtyard with anklets on her feet and her veil thrown back, who answered the demand that she conduct herself with royal decorum by declaring that she had another husband already, the dark cowherd god, and that the cup of her devotion belonged to him alone. The in-laws are said to have sent her poison; she is said to have drunk it as nectar and lived. In the end, the legend runs, she walked south to Dwarka, to the temple of Krishna by the sea, and there, in the last and strangest of the stories, the image opened and took her into itself, leaving only her garment behind. Almost none of this can be confirmed. All of it is sung. The distance between those two sentences is the truest thing about Mirabai, and the rest of her is best approached through it.

Mirabai depicted as a singing devotee — Raja Ravi Varma (1848-1906), via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The princess and the cowherd god

The conventional reckoning places Mirabai in Rajasthan between roughly 1498 and 1546, a Rathore Rajput of Merta, granddaughter of Rao Dudaji, married around 1516 to Bhoj Raj, the crown prince of Mewar and a son of the warrior-king Rana Sanga. Her husband was wounded in the wars against the Delhi Sultanate and died of his injuries within a few years, leaving Mira a young widow in the household of Chittor — a household for which widowhood carried, by the codes of Rajput honor, a heavy weight of expectation. Against that weight she set a single allegiance. The God she loved was Krishna in a particular aspect: Giridhar, the lifter of the mountain, the boy who in the Krishna story raised Mount Govardhan on one finger to shelter the cowherds from the storm. Her songs name him again and again as Giridhar Nagar, the clever mountain-lifter, and that name closes them like a seal.

A Pahari (Kangra-school) miniature of Mirabai playing the veena, the saint figured as a singer of Krishna — via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The love she sang for him belongs to the saguna register of Indian devotion — devotion to God with quality, name, form, and face, the deity who can be looked at, dressed, fed, quarreled with, and embraced. This sets her at a deliberate angle to the nirguna current that runs through the same centuries and the same north-Indian tongues. Where Kabir and the formless-devotion poets of the Sant tradition sang a Ram beyond image and beyond name, refusing temple and idol alike, Mira’s whole art is the art of presence: a particular blue-bodied boy with a peacock feather and a flute, whom she wants near her, whom she dresses in her songs, for whom she lights the lamp. The two modes are not enemies, but they aim at different things, and Mira’s poetry is one of the purest cases of the saguna aim — the soul does not seek to dissolve into a formless absolute but to be held by a beloved who keeps his shape.

Her dominant key is viraha: love-in-separation, the ache of the absent beloved. This is the inherited grammar of the older Krishna-devotional poetry, in which the soul takes the part of the cowherd women of Vrindavan pining for Krishna after he has gone, or of the bride waiting through the long night for a bridegroom who does not come. Mira sings in that voice as if it were simply hers. The songs are full of sleeplessness, of the bed of nails that the night becomes, of a body that has grown thin with waiting, of messages sent and unanswered, of a love that is a wound the singer would not heal even if she could. The register is erotic in its surface and devotional in its aim — the bridal longing of the human soul for a God who is loved as a husband, a relation the tradition calls madhurya, the sweet mode. To love God this way is to choose the most exposed of all the devotional postures: not the servant’s, not the friend’s, not the parent’s tenderness toward the divine child, but the lover’s, in which everything is staked and nothing is guaranteed.

What gives the Mira poems their peculiar edge is that the longing is not only metaphysical. It is also social, and it cuts. A woman of the warrior aristocracy who renames her widowhood as marriage to a god, who keeps company with wandering devotees and low-caste singers, who sings in the open of a love that overrides the claims of her marital house — such a figure carries an implicit refusal of the entire order that was supposed to contain her. The poems make the refusal explicit: she will give up shame, give up the world’s good opinion, give up the protections of caste and rank, because the only standing she wants is at the feet of Giridhar. The early devotional reception, and the modern one alike, has heard in this a voice of the powerless against the powerful — and a substantial recent reading, Parita Mukta’s Upholding the Common Life (1994), traces how Mira was kept alive less by court and temple than by laboring and lower-caste communities of Rajasthan and Gujarat, for whom her defiance of the Rajput household was the point, not an embarrassment to be explained away.

The unrecoverable life

And yet almost everything in the preceding two paragraphs is sung rather than known, and the difference matters more here than for nearly any comparable figure. Mirabai presents the most severe attribution problem in the whole north-Indian devotional corpus, and to write about her honestly is to keep two stories side by side: the Mira of the songs, vivid and complete, and the Mira of the archive, who recedes the moment one reaches for her.

The contemporary documentary trace is almost nothing. The mid-seventeenth-century Rajasthani chronicle of Muhnot (Munhata) Nainsi, the Khyat — a genealogical record of the Rajput houses compiled roughly a century after Mira’s conventional dates — contains a brief notice fixing her as the wife of Bhojraj of the Mewar line. The archival historian Frances Taft, sifting these Rajput genealogies for any firm footing, found only such fragments: enough to suggest that a woman so placed existed, far too little to recover a life. There is no contemporary collection of her poems, no manuscript in her hand or her century’s hand, no court record of the dramatic ruptures the legend turns on.

The poems themselves arrive late. The earliest manuscript witnesses that carry her signature are sparse: a small number of verses in early-seventeenth-century compilations, including the Sikh devotional anthologies, against the roughly two hundred padas that fill a standard modern Hindi edition. Of that modern corpus only a handful are attested in sixteenth-century manuscripts at all; the great bulk of “the songs of Mira” surfaces in manuscripts of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, gathering volume the further one moves from her supposed lifetime. The corpus, in other words, grows after the poet — the opposite of what a stable authorial body of work does.

The biography is later still, and more clearly made. The narrative outline that almost every popular life of Mira repeats descends from the early-eighteenth-century hagiographic tradition — Priyadas’s 1712 commentary, the Bhaktirasabodhini, on Nabhadas’s Bhaktamal, the great roll-call of devotees — and was given its modern, novelistic shape only in Munshi Devi Prasad’s 1905 Hindi life, an imaginative reconstruction whose conventions set the template for the films, schoolbooks, and devotional pamphlets that followed. The poison cup, the merging into the image at Dwarka, the cruel mother-in-law and the murderous brother-in-law: these are the furniture of hagiography, told of more than one saint, and they are best read as the tradition’s portrait of what Mira meant rather than as a record of what happened to her.

The decisive scholarly framing of all this is John Stratton Hawley’s, set out in his essay on authorship and authority in north-Indian devotional poetry and developed across Three Bhakti Voices (Oxford, 2005). Hawley’s point turns on the signature line, the bhanita naming Mira’s lord as Giridhar Nagar, that closes the poems. In this poetry the signature is not a claim of authorship in the modern sense but a performative convention: a way of singing as Mira, in Mira’s person, that later poets could and did take up freely. The name marks a tradition of voice more than a body of authored works. Hawley’s caution is the standard one, and it is severe: there is always a question whether the poems sung as Mira’s bear any verifiable relation to a historical Mira at all. What the tradition hands forward is not the woman but the persona — a way of singing the soul’s defiant, world-renouncing love that countless later singers could inhabit, each adding to “Mira” by speaking in her.

This is why the older comparativist habit of treating “the padas of Mira” as a fixed, recoverable songbook — and the still older devotional and Protestant-pietist habit of rendering them as “hymns” or “psalms” of a knowable saint — distorts the object. There is no single stable text behind the name. There are recensions, regional and sectarian, each with its own Mira; there is a growing tradition that has never stopped composing in her voice; and there is, somewhere at the vanishing point, a real Rajput widow of Mewar of whom the genealogies preserve a sentence or two.

Reception and the contested corpus

The instability has not weakened Mira’s hold; it may be the condition of it. Because “Mira” is a voice rather than a closed canon, she has been continuously available to be re-sung, and the singers have come from every quarter. Her padas entered the wider Krishna-devotional stream and the broader devotional movement of the north, and her name was claimed across sectarian lines — the Sikh tradition counted her among the bhaktas worthy of remembrance, and a folio of the late-seventeenth-century Prem Ambodh Pothi depicts her with Giridhar among sixteen exemplary devotees.

Mirabai with Giridhar (Krishna), a folio from an illustrated manuscript of the Sikh devotional text Prem Ambodh Pothi (composed c. 1693) — via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

She became, over time, the most widely known woman in the north-Indian devotional firmament, the figure to whom a girl who turned from marriage to God could be compared, and the patron voice of an enormous body of bhajan and film song that bears her seal without bearing her century.

The twentieth century made her again. The nationalist movement found in her a usable image of indigenous female heroism and spiritual independence; Gandhi prized the Mira bhajans and had them sung; the early Indian cinema returned to her repeatedly, fixing the hagiographic plot in the popular mind more firmly than any text. Each of these Miras is real as reception and unreliable as biography, and the contemporary scholarship — Hawley on the manuscript and the persona, Taft on the thin documentary floor, Mukta on the laboring communities that carried her, Nancy Martin on the autobiographical pose — has worked precisely to keep the two apart without dissolving either.

The textual record and modern scholarship

The pre-modern English-language apparatus for Mira is, by the standards of her contemporaries, remarkably thin, and this thinness is itself a fact worth recording. The early colonial and missionary scholarship that translated Kabir (the Tagore-Underhill One Hundred Poems of 1915, hosted as Songs of Kabir and available as Project Gutenberg ebook #6519), or Tukaram (the three-volume Fraser–Marathe Poems of Tukārāma), produced no comparable monument for Mira. The nearest public-domain English notice is the brief treatment in J. N. Farquhar’s An Outline of the Religious Literature of India (Oxford, 1920), digitized in the public domain through the Wellcome Collection — a survey written from within the missionary-comparative frame of the Heritage of India enterprise, useful as a thin historical anchor and to be read with that frame in view. A frequently cited “F. E. Keay, Mira Bai, Heritage of India series” turns out, on inspection, to be a phantom: Keay wrote a History of Hindi Literature (1920) with brief paragraphs on Mira and a separate study of Kabir, but no dedicated Mira monograph by him can be located; the citation most likely confuses his work with Bankey Behari’s devotional The Story of Mira Bai (Gita Press, 1935), a different book of a different kind.

The serious modern apparatus is entirely recent and in copyright. The standard scholarly translation is A. J. Alston’s The Devotional Poems of Mīrābāī (Motilal Banarsidass, 1980), worked from Parashuram Chaturvedi’s Hindi edition; the widely read English “versions” of Robert Bly and Jane Hirshfield, and of Andrew Schelling (For Love of the Dark One), are loose poetic recastings rather than translations and have shaped the Anglophone image of Mira more than any philological source. The decisive critical work is Hawley’s — Three Bhakti Voices on the manuscript history and the problem of the persona, and the wider account of how a unified “devotional movement” was assembled as a category in A Storm of Songs (Harvard, 2015) — together with Frances Taft’s archival note on the elusive historical Mira and Parita Mukta’s study of the communities that sustained her. The honest editorial posture, which this scholarship has converged on, is to name the recension behind any given translation, to flag the biography as hagiography, and to treat “Mira” as a re-sung persona rather than a fixed songbook.

A widow’s marriage that the centuries kept performing

Set the genealogist’s two sentences beside the two hundred songs and the gap does not close — but it stops being a defect. What the archive cannot give, the singing supplies, and it supplies it in a particular form: not a verified life but a perpetually re-enacted one. The Rajput widow of Mewar, whatever she was, set a vow against an entire order of rank and decorum, and the vow proved more transmissible than any biography. Each later voice that takes up the signature, each laboring community that keeps the bhajan, each girl said to be a little like Mira, performs the same renunciation again, marries the same cowherd god again, drinks the same cup again and finds it sweet. The woman is past recovering. The act she is remembered for is repeatable, and it is being repeated — which is, in the logic of a devotion built on love-in-separation, exactly the condition the songs always described: the beloved absent, the longing present, and the singing that turns the absence into a kind of nearness no record could hold.

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