Mirabai - Perspectives and Sources of History
Introduction
For most of us, Mirabai is a Rajput princess who rejected worldly ties, lived singing of her love for Krishna and is venerated as a saint in the Bhakti tradition. Mirabai lived in India in the 16th century, which is not that long ago, historically speaking. However, we do not have a single, reliable biography of her. What we have instead are stories and legends, each told and retold by different communities, each of which seems to present an image of her to suit their needs.
She is widely known as a poet and a spiritual icon, but she is also celebrated as a rebel. Mukta Parita puts it simply: “Mirabai is not a static figure, but one continually refashioned by the communities that claim her.” “There is no single Mirabai,” the narrator observes in Anjali Punjabi’s film; “there are as many Mirabais as there are voices to remember her” (Punjabi 2002). In other words, Mirabai’s story changes depending on who is telling it.
Mira’s Story
As Mukta points out, there are no credible contemporary sources that tell Mira’s story. The ‘primary’ material that forms the basis of later day Mira stories is Priyadas’ commentary on the ‘Bhaktamal’ written in AD 1712, about 160 years after Mira’s death. According to this and various other stories, Mira was born in a Rajput household around AD 1500. She was married to a prince of Mewar, likely to be Maharaja Kumar Bhoj, against her wish to devote her life to Krishna bhakti. She refused to accept the marriage and continued to be devoted to Krishna. In doing so, she rejected her husband and the authority of the ruling Rajput clan.
This was also the time Rajputs were dealing with the Delhi Sultanate through conflicts as well as alliances. Within 5 years of her marriage, Raja Bhoj died from wounds suffered in a battle. Soon after, her father and father-in-law also passed away. Mira is said to have left the palace and lived a life of a wandering saint thereafter. Her rejection of her husbands family, her duties as a Rajput daughter-in-law and her caste obligations, did not please the Rajputs. Hagiographical stories of how they tried to kill her and she survived miraculously abound. Some stories also mention her association with Rohidas, another bhakti poet from the untouchable Chamar caste, whom she accepted as her guru. Some stories detail how she was also rejected and abused by people from the Vallabha Sampraday, another vaishnav bhakti tradition prevalent at that time. Finally, she is said to have merged into an idol of Krishna.
Multiple faces of Mira
Mukta starts studying Mira in the 1980s. By this time, Mira is established as a poet-saint, and is popular within Gujarati middle class as a spiritual icon. Mukta attributes this to Gandhi’s portrayal of Mira as a Satyagrahi. When she tries to get historical material about Mira from Rajasthan where she was born and lived her early life, Mukta encounters a completely different story - Mira is not venerated there, her bhajans are not sung in Mewar. Mira is a term of abuse in Rajasthan, a charge of promiscuity (Mukta 1994). Contemporary historical records barely record Mira’s birth, marriage and death. However, there is a Mira Mandir in Chittorgarh, said to be built for her by the Sisodhiya ruler.
Mukta encounters Mira Bhakti among the dalit and peasant populations in Rajasthan. She also notes how “prevailing concerns and contemporary anxieties of the bhajniks” are bound in their Mira tradition. In one of the villages, after a Mira bhajan detailing her rejection of marriage, the women spontaneously turn to a discussion about social experience of women in their village. In another instance, a bhajan evoking Ravi Das ends with “bitter expressions about the attitudes of the upper castes” in their village. Thus, the tradition of Mira is not just historical but has contemporary relevance to the populations that practice it. Collective singing of bhajans also provides a forum for joint identification as people migrated from one place to another during times of drought. There is a “constant slippage between the messages which flowed out of the Mira bhajans, and the social experience of the various groups which sang these” (Mukta 1994)
Mukta also discusses contemporary Rajput attitudes to Mira. Rajput women continue to disrespect Mira and they do not sing her bhajans. None of the women want to follow Mira’s example. However, Mira’s courage to flout caste and gender norms is seen to have sprung from her caste attributes as a Rajput. Her actions and deeds are presented in a way that conforms with the notions of heroism and valour of Rajput community. Even her death, by merging into an idol of Krishna as legend has it, connotes Sati immolation to the Rajput women.
A linear model of making history
It is clear that there is not one Mira but a different one for different times and different classes. Some of the stories of Mira do not make much sense - for example, Mira could not have accepted RohiDas as her guru, considering their timelines overlap only slightly. Many stories such as Mira drinking the poison sent to her and miraculously surviving, are clearly hagiographical.
How does one approach such a historical figure, about whom little is known from written or other concrete sources and whose legend is so layered? Mukta critiques the various approaches taken to make the history of Mira. The early accounts are clearly hagiographies and inaccurate, as they give Mira, a Mewari princess, descriptions and motivations of a middle class household. Mira did not align herself with any of the existing sampradayas and appears to be an isolated, lonely figure which is not in keeping with a collectivist bhakti tradition.
Mukta examines the later day positivist and scientific rationalist approaches that sought to add facts to Mira’s history, based on the hagiographies or her verses. According to her, “The tools of analysis derived from positivism which hold ‘facts’ as sacrosanct were utilized upon the figure of Mira, wresting her out of the realm of collective social expression, and providing her with a chronology, which is so dear to a linear, bourgeois history”.Using this approach, Mira and other bhaktas like Narasinha were individualized, and an image of isolated, lone creator was placed on them (Mukta 1994).
In the nineteenth century, Mira’s story was feminized and placed within a history of the growth of vernacular literature. Nineteenth and twentieth century interpreters molded Mira figure within the parameters of high Hinduism, blending it with mysticism and elite literary tradition. Mukta points to the elitism of these interpreters, an elitism that seeks to merge Mira’s religious expression to the creation of high art, an elitism whereby Mira, as an individual, is held to be repository of the literary and social trends. By the 1990s, “Mira’s ‘obsessive religiosity’(Sangari, July 7, 1990: 1467)” is found to be “an obstacle in the drawing up of a progressive tradition”. This progressivism is itself premised on a linear model of the making of history.
A different set of questions
Mukta rejects the framework of methodological individualism, the quest for more facts of Mira’s biography or a linearly charted history of her life. Instead, she seeks to understand how Mira tradition was kept alive despite the attempts to silence her story. She finds a sense of community that emerges from Mira bhajans as well as the “processes and relationships involved in Mira spurning the princely community and forging other solidarities”. Through this approach, she “attempts to return Mira to recognizable communities and solidarities” and “to place Mira’s history within the history of a collective cultural revolt, within the context of a collective struggle for social emancipation”.
The community of Mirabai is a community of feelings, and it emerges out of the “feelings of those groups whose social experience provides a continuing depth and force to Mira’s own experience”. It is this community of Mira which historically has been responsible for providing a powerful social base to the Mira bhakti. This community of Mirabai provides the support, the network, the embedded social acceptance necessary to have kept her memory alive, all qualities denied to her by the Rajput community and the established religious sampradayas.
Mukta identifies three strands that emerge out of the Mira tradition - the attack on Rajput political authority, the defiance of patriarchal norms of marriage, and the attack on the caste system. Accordingly, it is the peasants, women and dalits that make up the community that kept Mira tradition alive.
The rise of Mira tradition
Mukta traces the rise of Mira tradition to the 16th and 17th centuries during which the number and strength of the weaving and leather working communities expanded. These communities were drawn into the “vortex of world production” while their social standing in the caste hierarchy remained unchanged (Mukta 1994). Along with the rise of Mira tradition, Mukta also identifies Eknath’s bharuds about the experience of oppressed people and the origin stories of depressed classes like Bhambhis, Regars and Chamars seeking Brahmincal ancestry, with “the growing strength of the artisanal classes and their search for a religious expression which would enable them a self-dignity (Habib, 1965)” (Mukta 1994).
Dalit communities who have continued to bear the stigma of social exclusion voiced their commitment to the breaking of caste hierarchies through the medium of Mira bhajans. Rohidas became an important symbol in the twentieth century movement for Chamar self-assertion in Punjab and Uttar Pradesh. The attempts of organized sections of Ravidas movement to subordinate Mira, a woman from a higher social group, to the spiritual authority of Rohidas the Chamar, can be understood from this point of view.
Peasant communities appear to have taken to Mira because she is an antithetical figure to the feudal power of Rajputs. Peasant communities of that time were completely under the control of the Ranas and had to pay taxes amounting to a third to a half of their produce. It was an unequal relationship which the feudal lords exploited. The peasants then found in Mira a symbol through which they have voiced their rejection of the authority of the Rana. The Mira bhajans as sung by the agrarian classes today mock, deride, and pour scorn on the figure of the Rana, and place great emphasis on the humiliation heaped by Mira upon the throne of Chittor (Mukta 1994). Women are the other upholders of Mira tradition. Punjabi’s film depicts how women find a resonance with Mira’s experiences with patriarchy.
The core of Mira’s life is built around her rejection of the princely society, and her preference for a life of a wanderer in her pursuit of a relationship with krishna. Around this kernel, voices of people who share her experience - dalits, peasants and women - have crystallized, giving birth to a powerful persona of Mira, in which she is larger than herself. As Chakravarti points out, “Through distinctive cultural representation, oppressed groups have created for themselves a normative world in which they have dignity, self-respect and even a measure of power” (Chakravarti 2018).
The course of the legend of Mira
Mira was a rebel that did not accede to the various intersecting social structures that sought to subordinate her. As a woman, she rejected patriarchal authority in refusing to accept marriage. As a citizen, she rejected the authority of the powerful Rajput rulers. As a wandering saint, she rejected the authority of the established religious orders. Through her life, she seems to have rejected the social hierarchies of caste and class.
Rajput power responded to her rejection by trying to suppress her story and casting her as a destroyer of the lineage. Her very name was forbidden in all the physical and cultural spheres they controlled. However, it is precisely her rejection of these authority structures that made oppressed people, dalits, women and peasants to own her and keep her memory alive. In more recent times, she was sought to be portrayed as a satyagrahi, a model of purity and virtue, and the Rajput community responds to this by paying lip service to her, by portraying all she did as an outcome of her essential Rajput character.
However, the oppressed communities, who kept her memory alive through centuries, continue to practice her tradition, as their current concerns and experiences continue to reflect Mira’s experiences with authority and oppression.
Conclusion
The lack of written records and contemporary sources makes the story of Mira difficult to construct, using the linear, positivist models seeking to chart a chronological history. It does not help that powerful forces sought to silence her story, displeased as they were by her rejection of various structures of authority. However, by asking a different set of questions, and considering varied sources like her bhajans and the experiences of the community that kept her memory alive, and focusing on historical processes, Mukta constructs a history that enriches our understanding not only of the legend of Mira but the processes of history making themselves.