Mirabai

The traditional life of Mirabai is a story of refusal. A Rajput princess, married into the ruling house of Mewar, she declares that she has only one husband and that he is Krishna, and she declines the duties of a royal wife: she will not worship the family goddess, she sings and dances in public temples with whoever is there regardless of caste, and she keeps the company of wandering devotees.

Her marital family, in the standard telling, tries to kill her. A cup of poison is sent, which she drinks as consecrated offering and survives. A basket said to contain flowers holds a snake, which is a garland when she opens it. Eventually she leaves altogether, going to Vrindavan, the country of Krishna's childhood, and then to Dwarka, where the accounts end with her disappearing into the image in the temple.

The songs attributed to her are what carried the story. They are direct, sung in the first person, and they use the vocabulary of a woman in love who does not care who knows: dark one, I am sold to you; the world says I have gone mad; let them say it. The refusal in them is double, of a marriage and of the social order that arranged it, and it is made in a register that religion permitted where nothing else would have.

Almost nothing about Mirabai can be established. She appears in no contemporary record, the dates given for her vary by decades, the identity of her husband is disputed among candidates in the Mewar line, and the earliest datable references to her come from well after the period she is placed in. The most detailed traditional accounts are hagiographies written a century or more later.

The songs are in the same position. They circulate in Braj, in Rajasthani, in Gujarati and in mixed literary dialects, in manuscripts and far more in oral performance, and the number attributed to her multiplied steadily over four centuries. Composing in the voice of a saint and signing with the saint's name was an accepted practice rather than a forgery, so what exists is a tradition of Mira songs rather than an author's collected works, and scholars have not been able to isolate a securely original core.

That does not make her unimportant; it changes what she is important as. She is the figure through whom the devotional traditions of northern and western India carried a woman's refusal of marriage and of caste sociability, and gave it religious authority. Her modern reception has kept doing the same work, in films, in the concert repertoire of Indian classical singers, and in feminist readings that take the songs as the earliest sustained female first person voice in the region's literature.