History · Ch 6 — Bhakti–Sufi Traditions — Changes in Religious Beliefs and Devotional Texts
Mirabai, the devotee princess
Mirabai, the devotee princess
Mirabai is the most famous woman poet of the bhakti tradition. She lived around the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Everything we know about her life comes from the bhajans (devotional songs) that are attributed to her. These songs were passed down orally for centuries before being written down, so her biography is a reconstruction based on tradition, not on contemporary records.
According to these traditions, Mirabai was a Rajput princess born in Merta, in the Marwar region of Rajasthan. She was married against her will to a prince of the Sisodia clan of Mewar. From the start, she refused to accept the conventional role of a wife and mother. Instead, she declared Krishna — an avatar of Vishnu — to be her true lover and lord.
This defiance brought her into conflict with her in-laws. Tradition says they tried to poison her. Mirabai escaped from the palace and became a wandering saint. She composed songs that are famous for their intense, personal emotion and longing for the divine.
The textbook includes a verse attributed to Mirabai that shows the depth of her devotion. She sings of building a funeral pyre of sandalwood and aloe, asking Krishna to light it himself, and of her ashes being smeared on his limbs. The line "let flame be lost in flame" expresses the idea of the devotee merging completely with the divine.
In another verse, she asks: "What can Mewar's ruler do to me? If God is angry, all is lost, but what can the Rana do?" This shows her complete indifference to worldly authority, including the king (the Rana of Mewar), compared to her total dependence on God.
According to some traditions, Mirabai's spiritual teacher (preceptor) was Raidas, a leather worker. This is significant because leather work was considered an "untouchable" occupation in the caste hierarchy. By accepting a low-caste guru, Mirabai was openly defying the norms of caste society.
After leaving her husband's palace, she is said to have worn either the white robes of a widow or the saffron robe of a renouncer — both symbols of having given up worldly life. …
Source 11 — Love for the Lord. Part of a song attributed to Mirabai:
I will build a funeral pyre of sandalwood and aloe; / Light it by your own hand / When I am burned away to cinders; / Smear this ash upon your limbs. / … let flame be lost in flame.
And in another verse:
What can Mewar’s ruler do to me? / If God is angry, all is lost, / But what can the Rana do? …
This is a stone sculpture from fifteenth-century Tamil Nadu, carved in the round. It shows Krishna standing in a relaxed, elegant pose, holding a flute to his lips. The figure is youthful, with a slender waist and a slight bend in the body — the classic tribhanga (three-bend) posture that became standard for representing Krishna as the divine lover. He wears a tall crown, earrings, necklaces, and a dhoti, all carved with careful detail. The flute is the central object: it signals that this is not Krishna the warrior or the child, but Krishna the enchanter, the one whose music draws the gopis (cowherd women) away from their worldly duties.
The sculpture comes from Tamil Nadu, not from Mirabai’s own region of Rajasthan and Gujarat. That is the key point. It shows that the image of Krishna as the beloved — the form Mirabai worshipped — was not limited to the north. By the fifteenth century, this same vision of Krishna had spread across the subcontinent, taking local shape in stone in the south. The sculpture is evidence that the bhakti tradition was a shared, mobile culture: a Rajput princess in Marwar and a stone carver in Tamil Nadu were both working with the same idea of a personal, loving god. …