Mirabai of Merta Left a Mewar Court to Sing to Krishna, and the Bhaktamal Had Named Her Among the Great Devotees by About 1600

About 1600, a devotee named Nabhadas compiled the Bhaktamal, a verse anthology of saints, and gave Mirabai a place in it beside Kabir, Tulsidas and Surdas. That is roughly half a century after the death most accounts assign her. In Usha Nilsson’s translation, the entry says: “Fearless and free, she sang the praise of Krishna.”

Nilsson, writing in 1969 for the Sahitya Akademi, India’s national academy of letters, said Mirabai’s song-verses had been sung all over North India for four centuries. She finds them in Hindi, Gujarati and Rajasthani. What follows sets out her life as the main accounts give it, names who supplies each date, and says where the scholars part company.

A Rathor princess at Merta

By the account Nilsson calls generally accepted, Mirabai was born at Merta in 1498. The date comes from the historian Harivilas Sarda and was supported by Gaurishankar Ojha. Merta was a small kingdom that her grandfather Rao Duda had carved out for his son Ratan Singh, her father. Duda was a devout worshipper of Vishnu. The translator A. J. Alston gives the same outline, calls it the consensus view of modern Indian scholarship, and also calls it tentative.

Her mother died when she was very young, and she grew up in her grandfather’s palace. Educated at home, she had a rigorous training in music, which Nilsson says later shows in her verse.

Devotees hold that she loved Krishna from childhood. In the traditional account, a wandering mendicant gave her an image of Krishna, and she kept it for life. A further tradition, Alston writes, has her mother telling her in jest that Krishna would be her bridegroom. In one poem, in Alston’s translation, she asks, “O Krishna, did You ever rightly value my childhood love?” In her songs she calls herself Mertani, the woman of Merta. Nilsson counts that among the few facts about her that the poems themselves confirm.

Married into the Sisodia court at Chittor

In 1516, by both Nilsson’s and Alston’s accounts, she married Bhoj Raj, the eldest son and heir of Rana Sanga of Mewar. Sanga had ruled since 1508 from Chittor, the fortress now called Chittorgarh, which UNESCO inscribed with five other forts as the Hill Forts of Rajasthan on 21 June 2013. Alston reads the match as one of several alliances Sanga made that year. It was arranged with her uncle Viram Dev, who had succeeded Rao Duda at Merta. The two houses were the Rathors of Merta and the Sisodias of Mewar. Who were the Rajputs places both clans among the great Rajput lineages.

Priyadas, who wrote his commentary on the Bhaktamal in 1712, tells the wedding this way, as Hawley retells it. She asked for no dowry except the image of Krishna she loved. As she walked round the marriage fire, the vows she spoke in her heart were to her other husband, Giridhar, the Krishna who lifted Mount Govardhan. In her husband’s house she would not bow to the goddess the family worshipped.

Bhoj Raj died young, and the sources differ on when. By Nilsson’s reckoning it was 1521, probably from battle wounds. Alston says only that the marriage was childless and that he died before Sanga’s own death in January 1528. In 1527 Sanga led the Rajput armies against Babur at Khanwa and lost. Alston writes that Mirabai’s father Ratan Singh was killed there.

The songs that end in Girdhar Nagar

Her fame rests on her padas, short songs for singing. About 400 are attributed to her by Nilsson’s count, and Nilsson doubts that she composed all of them. A University of Illinois course exhibit gives a lower figure, saying scholars think she likely composed about 103 to 200.

Most of the songs are addressed to Krishna as Girdhar Nagar, a name she favoured, and a song often closes by calling him her Lord. One in Nilsson’s translation reads: “I have only Girdhar Gopal / And no one else at all.”

Nilsson reads the bulk of them as devotion in the mood of a wife, beloved and friend, and likens her to the gopis, the cowherd women of Vrindavan whom the Bhagavata Purana shows loving Krishna without limit. For that figure and his many roles, see Krishna: the many faces of a god. Nilsson notes that this separates her from Tulsidas, whose devotion is that of a servant.

The songs were made for singing. The anthologies name the raga for each one, Nilsson says, and tradition holds that she created a raga named Mira Bai Malar. She had no circle of disciples, as Kabir did, to write her verses down. Travelling ascetics and musicians carried them across North India, in Nilsson’s account.

Poison, a flower basket and a bed of spikes

Nabhadas says her enemies took her fearlessness for a fault and planned her death, and that she drank poison as if it were nectar. The fuller accounts, as Nilsson tells them, add a snake sent in a flower basket that turned out to hold an image of the god, a cup of poison, and a bed of spikes on which she slept as if on flowers. Devotees hold that Krishna saved her each time, and songs attributed to her mention the episodes.

Who sent them is where the accounts differ. Alston, following records the biographer Munshi Devi Prasad found in the Mewar archives, names Ratan Singh, Sanga’s son, as the Rana under whom the persecution began. He names the young Rana Vikramajit, who took the throne in 1531 at fourteen or fifteen, as the one who locked her in and tried to poison her. Modern Indian scholars, Alston adds, do not accept the rescues as fact but commonly accept that an attempt to poison her is probable.

Hawley observes that Nabhadas never names Mewar and that the word rana first appears with Priyadas. A Punjabi collection called the Prem Abodh, copied in 1783 from a manuscript of 1693, makes the persecuting king her own father, and ends with the king and his wife becoming her devotees.

Merta, Vrindavan and Dwarka

After the poisoning, Alston writes, several authorities suppose she took refuge with her uncle at Merta. She stayed there until the ruler of Jodhpur expelled him in 1538. Nilsson’s version has her leave Mewar for Merta, find Merta closed to her as well, and set out for Vrindavan, the Yamuna country of Krishna’s childhood, and then Dwarka on the Gujarat coast.

The support for Vrindavan is later. Alston names the poet Dhruvadas, of the first half of the seventeenth century, and Priyadas, who lived there, as saying she visited. For Dwarka, Alston cites the bardic chronicles and her own songs for the belief that she lived there a long time, worshipping at the temple of Ranchhor, the name by which Krishna is worshipped there.

A verse credited to the poet Hariram Vyas mourns her. Hawley reports that the scholar Heidi Pauwels traces it to Vyas himself, which would put it in the mid-sixteenth century or a little later. The earliest manuscript of the verse is dated 1737.

Alston and Nilsson both relate the traditional end as Priyadas gives it. Misfortunes came to Chittor, and her husband’s family came to think the cause was the persecution of a great devotee. The king sent priests to ask her to return. She went to spend the night in the Ranchhor temple, and by morning she was gone. Devotees hold that she entered the image. No one knows, Nilsson adds, whether she died there that night or left Dwarka unseen and spent her last years unknown, going from one place of pilgrimage to another.

The date is likewise open. Sarda gives 1546, the year Munshi Devi Prasad also gave on the word of a court minstrel, while Nilsson’s narrative says 1547. Alston finds no settled conclusion.

A popular story has Akbar visiting her with the singer Tansen. Tansen joined Akbar’s court in 1562, Nilsson notes, fifteen years after the 1547 date, and she calls the meeting improbable. See Akbar and the machinery of the Mughal state for the court he built.

What the old manuscripts show

Hawley found only twenty-two poems bearing her signature in manuscripts dated before the eighteenth century, far fewer than for male saints of comparable standing. He treats one as almost certainly from her own century. It sits in the Kartarpur manuscript of the Sikh scripture, dated 1604, in a hand different from the main scribe’s. He allows a second as possible.

When Kalyansimh Shekhavat searched Rajasthan’s manuscript libraries, the earliest examples he found dated to the later eighteenth century. A manuscript from Dakor in Gujarat, dated 1585 and holding 69 poems, was reported in 1949 by Lalitaprasad Sukul. Hawley, who had not seen it, writes that the published information about it made him doubt its authenticity.

Nilsson’s reason the songs lasted without a written line of descent is that they belonged to the people who sang them. Her popularity, she writes, saved some from oblivion.

Where the accounts of her life part company

James Tod wrote in 1829 that Kumbha, a Mewar ruler, married a Rathor princess of Merta whom he named as Mira Bai. William Crooke’s 1920 edition of Tod carries a footnote citing Sarda, who held that she was the wife of Bhoj Raj, Sanga’s son. Nilsson dates Kumbha’s reign from 1433 to 1467, three decades before the usual birth date, and reports that later historians accepted Sarda’s correction.

Hawley adds a caution about how the standard dates came to be. The marriage year 1516 first appears, he writes, in Munshi Devi Prasad’s biography, which he dates to 1898 and Alston to 1905. Hawley also cites a mid-seventeenth-century Jodhpur chronicle by Munhata Nainsi that records only that people say Mirabai Rathor was married to Bhoj Raj. Alston reports that the scholar Padmavati Shabnam finds Devi Prasad’s reconstruction untenable and inclines to Rana Raymal, who reigned from 1473 to 1508, as the husband, and adds that there is little positive evidence for that. Nancy Martin, in the Encyclopedia of Religion, writes that the dates and the husband’s identity should be treated as speculative.

Her teacher is another open point. Tradition names Raidas, and four poems attributed to her call him her guru, Alston writes. Historical evidence is lacking, Nilsson says, and Raidas would have been well over a hundred if he gave her the image in childhood.

Martin also notes that the scholar Parita Mukta has argued that Mirabai’s marital family tried to suppress her memory.

Meera on screen

Her life reached the screen in 1945. The Tamil film Meera, directed by Ellis R. Dungan with a script by Kalki Krishnamurthy, was released on Deepavali in 1945. M. S. Subbulakshmi played the title role. Her own biography covers the film in the context of her career. The Hindi version, Mirabai, premiered in 1947 with Jawaharlal Nehru and Lord and Lady Mountbatten in the audience.