Mirabai

Mirabai was a poet, mystic, and devotee of the Hindu god Krishna. As one of the most famous woman poets of India, Mirabai has become a figure of cultural importance and imagination. Her devotional songs are such a fixture in oral traditions across multiple languages that establishing the authenticity of the many songs attributed to her or constructing a verifiable biography through her consequent mythologization over the centuries is nearly impossible. 

Mirabai’s work has been translated into English by A. J. Alston in The Devotional Poems of Mīrābāī (Motilal Banarsidass Publishing House, 1980), Andrew Schelling’s For Love of the Dark One: Songs of Mirabai (Hohm Press,1998), and Bly and Hirshfield’s Mirabai: Ecstatic Poems (Beacon Press, 2004). She lived in what is now northern India. Born a princess in a Rajput family in Merta, she married Prince Bhoj Raj of neighboring Mewar, who died in battle five years after their marriage. Having worshiped Krishna since childhood, Mirabai devoted herself solely to him after her husband’s death. 

Her songs of devotion, or “ecstatic poems” as described by Robert Bly and Jane Hirshfield, belong to a tradition of bhakti, or devotional, poets of medieval India who used the analogy of human relationships to express their love of God, as in Mirabai’s invocation of a woman’s love for the beloved in her poems to Krishna. Her poems address Krishna as a cowherd, a flute player, a source of delight and mischief, a healer, and The Dark One, as a being of incomparable beauty.

Mirabai’s lyrics found an immense following because of her use of everyday images to convey the intensity of her love for Krishna. For instance, in “His Hair,” she writes, “Mira’s Lord is half lion and half man. / She turns her life over to the midnight of his hair.” Her poems focus on a personal relationship with Krishna and are suffused with her longing and readiness to surrender completely in union with him. 

In “Poison to Nectar: The Life and Work of Mirabai,” Madhu Kishwar and Ruth Vanita draw attention to Mirabai’s articulation of injustice within the family and other kinship models as a woman and the radical implications of a woman bhakti's self-directed choice to refuse any authority but God’s. Kishwar and Vanita note Mirabai's depiction of her relation to Krishna through sweetness and desire as opposed to fear as expressed in the melodic quality of her work. She wrote in the Braji, Rajasthan, and Gujarati languages and is widely sung in several other regional languages. In one of her most famous songs, “Mira Is Mad With Love,” she writes

O friends, I am mad with love, and no one sees.
My mattress is thorns, is nails:
The Beloved spreads open his bedding elsewhere.
How can I sleep? Abandonment scorches my heart.

This poem exemplifies Mirabai’s evocation of a domestic seared with longing, her abandon to love, and her conception of devotion as entangled with desire. Robert Bly writes, “As soon as we read the first poem by Mirabai, we know we are in the presence of someone who is unworldly.” Jane Hirshfield’s foreword in the same book declares, “To read Mirabai is to awaken more deeply into your senses.” Her songs continue to be widely sung throughout the world.