Mirabai

In the fort-town of Merta, on the flat scrubland of Marwar, a small girl of about five was lifted to a window one afternoon to watch a wedding procession pass below: drums, marigolds, a bridegroom on horseback wrapped in red and gold. She turned to her mother with the plain, devastating question every child eventually asks. And who will be my bridegroom? Her mother, half laughing, looking only for something to say that would quiet a persistent child, pointed across the room to the small dark image of Krishna kept at the family shrine. That one there, she said. Giridhar. He will be your husband. It was meant as nothing more than a mother's joke, said to close a conversation. The girl did not take it as a joke. From that afternoon on, Mirabai considered herself married, and no wedding a king could later arrange for her ever undid the vow her heart had already taken at a windowsill in Merta.

She was born into the Rathore clan that ruled Merta, a branch of the same house that held Jodhpur, and her people were devotees of Vishnu by long habit, not by fashion. Her mother died while Mira was still young, and she was raised afterward in the house of her grandfather, a man steeped in the old stories, who filled her childhood with tellings from the Bhagavata of the cowherd boy who lifted a mountain on his little finger to shelter his village from the wrath of the sky. Into this household one day wandered a travelling sadhu carrying a small murti of Krishna that he loved so fiercely he would not be parted from it even to eat or sleep. Mira, watching him worship it, wanted it the way children want the moon: completely, and without any capacity to be reasoned out of it. She wept until she made herself ill. Her grandfather, moved and a little amused, persuaded the reluctant sadhu to leave the image with the child, promising to see him fitted with another, and the old man taught her, before he left, how the god liked to be bathed, fed, sung to, and adored. She kept that murti, whom she would call Giridhar Gopal for the rest of her life, the Lifter of the Mountain, and it never again left her.

When she came of marriageable age, her family arranged a match worthy of a Rathore princess: Bhoj Raj, crown prince of Mewar, heir to the throne at Chittor and son of the great Rana Sanga. The wedding goods were assembled, new silks, new ornaments, and Mira, by every account, met the preparations with something close to grief. When the moment came to leave her father's house, she is remembered to have swayed and nearly fainted, and when her parents, mistaking the cause, told her to take whatever jewels and finery she wished and not to be sad, she answered through tears that she wanted none of it. Only give me Giridhar Lal, she said. Only let him come with me. Her mother, seeing how deep the color of devotion had already run into her daughter, wept, embraced her, and let her carry the small dark god into her palanquin. So Mira rode toward Chittor with her eyes fixed less on the road ahead than on the small painted eyes of the murti pressed against her heart.

The trouble began almost as soon as she arrived. The royal house of Mewar kept its own guardian goddess, and Mira's mother-in-law, following custom, instructed the new bride to bow before the family deity as every wife of that house had done. Mira refused, gently at first, then without any softness left in her at all. My head, she told her, is already sold into the hands of Giridharlalji. It does not bow to anyone else now; it wants only to bow to him. The older woman pressed her, arguing that devotion to the family goddess was what secured a wife's fortune and her husband's long life, and that stubbornness would ruin both. Mira only repeated herself, more plainly each time: I will never bow my head to anyone else. Better, she is remembered to have said in one of her fiercest verses, that this head be cut off and thrown down a well than that it should bend before anyone but the Lord of Braj. Her mother-in-law, humiliated and furious, went to the men of the household with the story, and Mira was given a house of her own, apart from the royal women's quarters, meant as a punishment and a quarantine. She received it instead like a gift. Alone with her god, she filled the house with singing, dancing barefoot with anklet-bells at her feet, and threw open her door to any wandering sadhu or pilgrim who wanted to sit and sing with her, a scandal to a court that expected its widows and wives to be seen rarely and heard less.

Bhoj Raj died young, from wounds taken in battle, only a few years into the marriage, and Mira was left a widow while still a young woman. Custom expected her to become sati, to die on her husband's pyre as the honorable end to a Rajput wife's life. She refused this too, and her reasoning was not defiance for its own sake: she considered herself already married, bound years earlier at a windowsill in Merta to a bridegroom who could not die. A prince's widow who would not burn and would not stay silent was, to the court at Chittor, close to unthinkable, and after her father-in-law Rana Sanga also died, the throne passed to Bhoj Raj's brother, Vikramaditya, who had no patience left for her at all.

What followed is remembered as a season of open persecution. One story, sung in Mewar for centuries, tells of a cup of poison sent to her rooms disguised as blessed nectar; she drank it without hesitation, trusting that whatever was given in Krishna's name could not harm her, and it left her untouched, while those who had sent it were the ones left shaking. Another tells of a basket presented to her as a gift, said to hold flowers, which instead held a venomous snake, coiled to strike the moment she opened the lid; when she lifted it, unafraid, she found inside only a smooth Saligrama stone, a form in which Vishnu is worshipped, resting where the serpent should have been. Whether these things happened exactly as they are told, the people who first sang them were certain of the point they were making: that a devotion as complete as hers could not be poisoned, only refined.

One of the best loved stories about her tells of a night when two travelers dressed as wandering renunciants slipped into the temple at Chittor to hear her sing, and were so moved that before they left, one of them laid a jeweled necklace at the feet of her little Krishna. Tradition names them as the emperor Akbar and his court musician Tansen, come in disguise because a Mughal emperor could not otherwise cross the threshold of a Rajput queen's private shrine. Later chroniclers have pointed out that Tansen is remembered to have joined Akbar's court only after Mira had already left the world, so perhaps the story reaches for the grandest witness memory could summon for her voice rather than recording an actual evening. What the story agrees on everywhere it is told is the aftermath: when it became known that a Muslim ruler had knelt in that temple, the family's shame curdled into rage, and Mira was told, in the harshest tellings, to drown herself in the river rather than live with the dishonor she had brought them. She did not drown herself. She left Mewar instead, and did not return.

Her wandering years took her toward Vrindavan, where the pastures Krishna had once walked as a cowherd were filling with communities of Vaishnava renunciants and scholars. One story from this period has become especially cherished: arriving to meet the learned Jiva Gosvami, she was told he could not receive a woman. Mira sent back an answer that has outlived nearly every argument made against her in her lifetime. I had always thought, she said, that there was only one man in Vrindavan, Krishna himself, and that everyone else here, myself included, was his beloved. Now I learn there is a second man in Vrindavan who still thinks of himself that way. Jiva Gosvami, hearing this, came out at once to receive her himself, humbled by a logic he could not answer.

Tradition also gives her a guru, the saint Ravidas, whom Mira names in her own songs as the one who ferried her across, gaayo satguru sant ravidas. No one can say with certainty that the two ever stood in the same room together; the timeline is uncertain and the meeting undocumented outside devotional memory. But the pairing itself carries the weight of a teaching Mira lived out in every other part of her life: that the people her own class considered beneath notice were sometimes the very ones who had already arrived where kings and priests were still struggling to go, and that a princess could kneel at such a teacher's feet without diminishing herself. Whether or not the two ever met in the body, Mira's padas insist that she met him in the way that mattered.

Her last years are placed, in the most widely told version, at Dwarka, at the temple of Ranchhodrai, the form of Krishna worshipped there as the one who withdrew from a battle he judged pointless, only to win by another road entirely. Some versions of her story keep her in Vrindavan instead, and even the compilers of her own hagiography, gathering her memory generations later, could not agree on when she was born or when she left, some placing her death decades earlier or later than others, one strand of memory even setting her as a contemporary of Chaitanya Mahaprabhu far to the east in Bengal. What the best known telling holds is this: that emissaries eventually came from Mewar asking her to return, and that she went to the temple one last time to take her leave of the god she had carried since childhood, and did not come out again. When the doors were opened, there was no one inside, only her veil found wrapped around the murti she had loved her whole life, as though she had finally walked all the way into the image instead of merely standing before it.

Nabhadas, setting down the memory of the great devotees a generation or two later, gave her story in a single unforgettable line: she cast off shame and worshipped Giridhar, keeping nothing of her family's code, and that very Mira stands renowned in the world, a manifest mine of bhakti. It is a hard verse to sit with honestly, because it does not soften what she actually did: she broke a wife's obligations, a widow's obligations, a princess's obligations, one after another, in public, and kept none of it back for the sake of appearances. She would say later, in a verse still sung in Rajasthan and Gujarat and wherever Braj Bhasha travels, that she had let go of shame long ago before the eyes of the whole clan, and would let go of it again. Devotional poets who came after her tried to give her a resting place worthy of that surrender; one, Dhruvadas, pictured her at the end being called forward with great tenderness by Lalita, one of the foremost among Krishna's eternal companions, and gazing at last, with a joy too full to hold, on the very pastures of Vrindavan she had sung of from a locked room in Chittor. It is the only ending her own tradition thought fitting for someone who never, from the age of five, believed that anyone else had a claim on her heart.