Meera, better known as Mirabai,^[2] and venerated as Sant Meerabai, was a 16th-century Hindu mystic poet and devotee of Krishna. She is a celebrated Bhakti saint, particularly in the North Indian Hindu tradition.^[3][4][5] She is mentioned in Bhaktamal, confirming that she was widely known and a cherished figure in the Bhakti movement by about 1600.^[6][7] In her poems, she expressed the madhurya bhava towards Krishna.

Most legends about Mirabai mention her fearless disregard for social and family conventions, her devotion to Krishna, and her persecution by her in-laws for her religious devotion.^[1][6] Her in-laws never liked her passion for music, through which she expressed her devotion, and they considered it an insult to the upper-caste people. It is said that amongst her in-laws, her husband was the only one to love and support her in her Bhakti, while some believed him to have opposed it. She has been the subject of numerous folk tales and hagiographic legends, which are inconsistent or widely different in details. According to legend, when her in-laws attempted to murder her with poison, Mirabai tied a sacred thread on a murti of Krishna, trusting in His divine protection, through which she was saved by divine intervention. This legend is sometimes cited as the origin of the ritual of tying rakhi on Krishna's murti.^[1][8]

Millions of devotional hymns in passionate praise of Krishna are attributed to Mirabai in the Indian tradition, but just a few hundred are believed to be authentic by scholars, and the earliest written records suggest that, except for two hymns, most were first written down in the 18th century.^[9] Many poems attributed to Mirabai were likely composed later by others who admired Mirabai. These hymns are a type of Bhajan and are very famous across India.^[10]

Some Hindu temples, such as one within Chittor Fort, are dedicated to Mirabai's memory.^[1] Legends about Mirabai's life, of contested authenticity, have been the subject of movies, films, comic strips and other popular literature in modern times.^[11]

Primary records about Mirabai are not available, and scholars have attempted to establish Meera's biography from secondary literature that mentions her.

Mirabai was born into a Rathore Rajput royal family in Kudki (modern-day Beawar district of Rajasthan), and spent her childhood in Merta. She was the daughter of Ratan Singh Rathore and grand daughter of Rao Dudaji of Merta, thus making her a great-granddaughter of Rao Jodha and a cousin of Jaimal Rathore.^[12][13]

Mirabai had an arranged marriage with Bhoj Raj, the crown prince of Mewar, in 1516.^[14] Her husband was wounded in one of the ongoing wars with the Delhi Sultanate in 1518, and he died from battle wounds in 1521. Both her father and father-in-law (Rana Sanga) died a few days after their defeat in the Battle of Khanwa against Babur, the first Mughal Emperor.^[13]

After the death of Rana Sanga, Vikram Singh became the ruler of Mewar. According to a popular legend, her in-laws tried to assassinate her multiple times. These attempts included sending Mirabai a glass of poison and telling her it was nectar, and sending her a basket with a snake instead of flowers.^[2][14] According to hagiographic legends, she was not harmed in either case, with the snake miraculously becoming, depending on the version, a Krishna idol or a garland of flowers.^[8][14] In another version of these legends, she is asked by Vikram Singh to drown herself. When she attempts to do so, she merely floats on the water.^[15] Yet another legend states that the third Mughal emperor, Akbar, came with Tansen to visit Mirabai and presented her with a pearl necklace. Scholars doubt this happened, as Tansen joined Akbar's court in 1562, 15 years after Mirabai's death.^[15] Similarly, some stories state that Ravidas was her guru (teacher), but there is no corroborating historical evidence for this.^[15][16]

As of 2014, the three oldest records that mention Mirabai^[17] are all from the 17th century and written within 150 years of Mirabai's death. Neither mentions anything about her childhood, the circumstances of her marriage to Bhojraj or that the people who persecuted her were her in-laws or from some Rajput royal family.^[18] Nancy Martin-Kershaw states that to the extent that Mirabai was challenged and persecuted, religious or social conventions were unlikely to have been the cause, rather the likely cause was political chaos and military conflicts between the Rajput kingdom and the Mughal Empire.

Other stories state that Mirabai left the kingdom of Mewar and went on pilgrimages. In her last years, Mirabai lived in Dwarka or Vrindavan, where legends state she miraculously disappeared by merging into an idol of Krishna after being poisoned by her brother-in-law in 1547.^[1][2] While miracles are contested by scholars for the lack of historical evidence, it is widely acknowledged that Mirabai dedicated her life to Krishna, composing songs of devotion, and was one of the most important poet-saints of the Bhakti movement period.^[2][15][19]

Hagiographical variations

Scholarly analysis of Mirabai's hagiography shows significant regional variation. In contrast to the traditional Mewari depiction of Mirabai traveling to Vrindavan and Dwarka after conflicts with her in-laws at Chittor, an early 18th-century Punjabi text written in Gurmukhi titled Prem Ambodh Pothi ("Ocean of Love", composed c. 1693 CE and related to the court of Guru Gobind Singh) portrays her as sedentary and residing in Udaipur. In this version, she is married to a man named Giridhar (Mountain Lifter) and her own father attempts to kill her with a poison and then a sword, the action of which is thwarted after Krishna manifests wielding the sudarshan chakra.^[20]

The earliest datable reference to Mira is a poem in her praise in Nabhadas's Bhaktamal, a hagiographical anthology composed in about 1600.^[22]A number of compositions by Mirabai continue to be sung today in India, mostly as devotional songs (bhajans) towards Krishna, though nearly all of them have a philosophical connotation.^[23] Her poems describe her love, salutation, and separation from Krishna, and her dissatisfaction with the world.^[13] One of her most popular compositions remains "Payoji maine Ram Ratan dhan payo" (पायो जी मैंने राम रतन धन पायो।, "I have been given the richness of God's name blessing").^[24][25] Mirabai's poems are lyrical padas (metric verses) in the Rajasthani language.^[15] Several meters are used within her padas, but the most common meter found is mātric (syllabic) poetic line. Rāgas or melodies are attributed to these padas, allowing them to be sung.^[13]

Her Poetry frequently invokes the epithet Girdhar nagar (the gallant "Mountain bearer) and emphasizes her total surrender to him as her only true spouse. In her poignant poems of separation, or viraha, she occasionally characterizes Krishna as a detached yogi or renouncer who seduces lovers only to leave them in agony, an emotional intensity often mirrored in her use of nature imagery - such as the arrival of the monsoon and the cries of peacocks and cuckoos - to reflect the shifting flavours of union and longing.^[26]

Mirabai's appeal transcends social boundaries, resonating with high-caste individuals through her royal suffering and with low-caste groups who admire her renunciation of status and her choice of the untouchable leather-worker Raidas as her guru. By identifying with the gopis of ancient Braj, she manifested a depth of unconditional love that the hagiographer Nabhadas noted as remarkable for a "degenerate age". While thousands of verses are attributed to her, scholars remain divided on how many she actually penned.

While hundreds of verses are attributed to her, scholars are divided as to how many of them were actually penned by Mirabai herself.^[27] The manuscript record for Mira's poetry is unusually thin. Only two poems attributed to her have been found in manuscripts dating from before the early eighteenth century, a far smaller number than survives for male poet-saints of comparable stature, and a search of manuscript libraries in Rajasthan found no examples earlier than the latter half of the eighteenth century, with only a handful predating 1800.^[9] The critical edition of Parasuram Caturvedi, on which most modern assessments of Mira rest, contains no reference to the manuscripts on which it is based. ^[22] Consequently, researchers often identify a specific Mirabai style of devotion, seeing her songs as inseperable from her lengendary life story and representing a unique identification between the author and the subject of her devotion.^[28]

Hindi and Rajasthani

The most extensive collection of Mirabai's poems exists in manuscripts from the 19th century. To establish the authenticity of the poems, scholars have looked at various factors such as the mention of Mirabai in other manuscripts, as well as the style, language, and form of the poems.^[9][30] John Stratton Hawley cautions, "When one speaks of the poetry of Mirabai, then, there is always an element of enigma. [...] There must always remain a question about whether there is any real relation between the poems we cite and a historical Mira."^[31]

In her poems, Krishna is a yogi and lover, and she herself is a yogini ready to take her place by his side in spiritual marital bliss.^[9] Meera's style combines impassioned mood, defiance, longing, anticipation, joy and ecstasy of union, always centred on Krishna.^[30]