Mirabai as Text: Contested Histories, Liminal Spaces, and Marginalities

Abstract

Mirabai, the sixteenth-century bhakti poet-saint, has a palpable presence in Indian literary-cultural tradition. Her lyrical compositions, popularly known as bhajans— distinctly established upon a private devotion and universal human suffering—are a pervading feature of the religio-political discourse in contemporary India, and have availed her a recognition that transgresses confines of time, space and culture. Bhakti, thriving around the margins in particular, evolved into a social renaissance that denounced ritualistic prayers and introduced liberal practices of performing devotion through the vernacular songs of personal suffering. Mira’s personal devotion toward the Hindu deity Krishna transgressed boundaries of class, caste, and gender hierarchies and had controversial reverberations in her told hagiographies, histories and legends. With the advent of the European orientalists in nineteenth century India, rewriting history became a trend as an inexorable strain of colonial poetics. With the intervention of native scholars and popular leaders, Mira’s legend metamorphosed into a counter-narrative of resistance and dissent against colonialism and the servile sensibilities it begot. However, while following Mirabai’s cultural footprints on their spiritual odyssey, they (mis)read her bhajans in their public and private dialogues to suit moral and nationalist ends. Consequently, her narrative underwent monumental alterations, depicting an erroneous image of Mirabai that contradicted both ‘factual’ aspects of her life and her perceived resistance. The Mira narrative(s) thus eventually transgressed into an epochal cultural renaissance by providing an alternative space for spiritual expression, and has accommodated generations of marginalized populace, especially women who have embraced the name, life, and suffering of Mirabai to voice their dissent through her bhajans till date. This thesis reads the shifting image of Mirabai as a literary-cultural ‘hybrid’ in Indian archives, including literary, critical and philosophical corpora, with particular focus on the politics of appropriation surrounding her canonical figure, and its implications on the gendered nuances of modern bhakti historiography. It subsumes within its operative locus the role performed by popular leaders such as M.K. Gandhi, Aurobindo Ghose, and Swami Vivekananda in recuperating Mirabai during the Indian freedom struggle movement to galvanize masses, especially women, to achieve moral and economic liberation, ascribing to her qualities that fit precisely into what was needed to become an ideal, chaste, all-enduring, and a ‘sacred’ woman-icon to emulate. Further, with the mobilization of women in the larger nationalist movement, they were able to transgress the thresholds of traditional domesticity and became active agents of non violent resistance, while subverting the idea of the ‘sacred’ and the ‘profane’ within the discursive ambit of the ‘nation.’ The thesis also explores contemporary literature on Mirabai, incorporating the ‘performative’ aspect of daily bhakti in public spheres, bridging the lacuna owed to centuries of cultural silencing and social oppression.