Person · Rajput princess & Bhakti poet
Mīrābāī
Also known as Mirabai, Meera, Meerabai, Mira
Rathore princess married into the Sisodia house of Mewar who refused the role and left it, calling herself the wife of Krishna and singing in public — which for a woman of her rank in the sixteenth century meant giving up caste, household and protection. Some thirteen hundred padas circulate under her name.
- Date
- c. 1498 – 1547
- Function
- Religious institution & practice
- Tradition
- Mīrā padas; Rajasthani and Braj bhakti tradition
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
Worth knowing
The songs are in mixed Braj, Rajasthani and Gujarati and were sung long before they were written, so the corpus grew by attribution; scholars accept only a fraction as certainly hers. Tradition has her survive poison sent by her husband's family and end at Dvārakā, absorbed into the image.
Connections (4)
- Devotional corpus onSanwaliya Seth, Chittorgarh
Sānwaliyā Sheth near Chittorgarh belongs to Mīrābāī's tradition, as does much of the Mewar Krishna landscape. She was married into the Sisodia house at Chittor and left it; the shrines that claim her are scattered across the country her in-laws ruled, which is a quiet reversal. Traders still write a share of their business into the god's name here, so the donation box functions as a silent partner's account and has made it one of India's richest shrines.
- Devotional corpus onCharbhuja Vishnu, Rajsamand
Charbhujā at Garhbor is one of the Mewar shrines strongly associated with Mīrā, below Kumbhalgarh where the Sisodias sheltered. Her songs are sung there still, and the association ties a woman who renounced her rank to the fort geography of the house she renounced it from. The Charbhujā image is said to have been recovered from a lake after Dvārakā's submergence, which ties a Mewar hill shrine to a Gujarat coastal myth by way of a woman from Marwar.
- Life routeDvārakā / Dvārāvatī
Tradition ends Mīrā at Dvārakā, absorbed into the image of Krishna in the temple, after a delegation came from Mewar to bring her back. Whether or not it happened, the story places her death at the far end of the country from Chittor and outside anyone's jurisdiction. Her corpus grew for two centuries after her death by attribution, so what is sung as Mīrā is partly the work of later women who found her name the safest one to sing under.
- Teaching lineageVachana sāhitya
Akka Mahādevi in twelfth-century Kannada and Mīrābāī in sixteenth-century Braj made the same move three hundred years and fifteen hundred kilometres apart: a woman of rank leaves a marriage, declares herself god's, and writes about it in the vernacular. Both traditions preserve the objections raised against them. The vachanas were nearly lost as a result and survived as bundles carried out of a burning city; they were only systematically collected and printed in the twentieth century.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Mirabai”. The subject’s own writings where they survive, and the standard biographical literature.
Open Mīrābāī in the repository →