Title: Poems of Mirabai Author: Mirabai Creation Date: c. early 16th century CE Location: India (Rajasthan)
Summary
Mirabai's poems are songs of passionate devotion to the Hindu god Krishna, whom she addresses as her lover, husband, and lord. A Rajput princess who, according to tradition, refused to consummate her royal marriage because she considered herself already wedded to Krishna, Mira's poetry is a record of ecstatic love that defies every social convention of her time. She sings of dancing in public, abandoning the seclusion of the palace, drinking the poison sent by her in-laws (which turns to nectar), and wandering as a holy beggar. Her poems swing between the anguish of separation from her divine beloved and the bliss of union: "I have felt the swaying of the elephant's shoulders / and now you want me to climb on a jackass? Try to be serious." The voice is unmistakable — fierce, tender, witty, and utterly uncompromising.
Why This Book Matters
Mirabai is the most famous woman poet in the Indian tradition and among the most beloved figures in all of Indian devotional culture. Her poems matter not only as literature but as a sustained act of resistance — a woman defying her royal family, caste expectations, and patriarchal control through the claim that her love for God superseded all earthly authority. She became a model for women's spiritual and social independence across centuries, and her songs are still sung daily in households and temples throughout India. Her story and poetry challenge the common assumption that women in pre-modern India were uniformly silenced and subordinated. Mira spoke, and her voice was so powerful that neither her family nor the passage of five centuries could silence it.
Historical Context
Mirabai (c. 1498–1547) was born into the Rajput warrior aristocracy of Rajasthan, a society defined by rigid codes of honour, female seclusion (purdah), and martial masculinity. Her devotion to Krishna and her refusal to conform to the expected role of a Rajput wife and widow — including, according to legend, her refusal to commit sati — brought her into direct conflict with her husband's family. She eventually left the palace and became a wandering devotee, ending her life (by tradition) in Dwarka, Krishna's holy city. Her life coincided with the flourishing of the Bhakti movement across northern India, which gave her both a spiritual framework and a community of fellow poet-saints.
Literary Significance
Mira's poems are composed in a mixture of Rajasthani and Braj Bhasha, the literary Hindi of the period, and are structured as songs (padas) meant to be performed with musical accompaniment. Their literary power lies in their combination of intimate personal voice and universal devotional longing. Mira uses the conventions of secular love poetry — the ache of separation, the joy of the beloved's glance, the jealousy of rivals — but redirects them toward the divine, creating a poetry where the erotic and the spiritual are inseparable. Her directness and emotional authenticity set her apart from more ornate devotional traditions. The poems' continued oral circulation — they are still learned and sung as living music, not as museum pieces — testifies to their enduring emotional power.
Research Notes
Mirabai's textual tradition presents challenges similar to Kabir's — her poems were orally transmitted and exist in multiple versions. No autograph manuscripts survive. The attribution of specific poems to Mira is often uncertain. A.J. Alston's collection provides a solid scholarly edition, while Shama Futehally's translations are more poetically alive. Mira is included here alongside Kabir to represent the Bhakti movement, and specifically to centre a woman's voice within a devotional tradition that, despite its egalitarian rhetoric, was predominantly male.
The Reading
She was a Rajput princess, born into the warrior aristocracy of Rajasthan, a world governed by codes of honour so rigid they could kill: a world where a woman's virtue was her family's property, where widows were expected to burn alive on their husband's pyre, where the zenana walls enclosed a silence that no woman was supposed to break. Mirabai broke it. She broke it not with a sword or with a political argument but with her voice, lifted in song to a god she called her husband, her lover, her Dark One, her Giridhar — the mountain-lifter, Krishna, the blue-skinned cowherd of Vrindavan.
The poems of Mirabai are songs — padas meant to be sung, not read, carried on melodies that have been passed mouth to mouth through five hundred years of Indian life. They are still sung today: in temples, in kitchens, at wedding processions and funeral pyres, by women grinding grain and by professional musicians on concert stages. The voice that speaks in them is unlike any other in Indian devotional poetry. It is fierce, tender, witty, desperate, ecstatic, and utterly uncompromising.
The Princess and the Dark Lord
According to the hagiographic tradition — and with Mira, legend and poetry are inseparable — she fell in love with Krishna as a child. A wandering holy man gave her a small image of the god, and from that moment she knew herself to be his. When her family arranged her marriage to the prince of Mewar, she went through with the ceremony, but she did not consider herself married. She had already given herself to the Dark One.
"I am mad with love and no one understands my plight. Only the wounded know the agonies of the wounded, when the fire rages in the heart. Only the jeweler knows the value of the jewel, not the one who lets it go. In pain I wander from door to door, but could not find a doctor. Says Mira: her Lord is the Lifter of Mountains, and only He can cure her pain."
The poem establishes the terms of her world. She is wounded, and the wound is love. The wound is also liberation. No doctor can cure her because her illness is not illness — it is the condition of a soul that has recognised its true beloved and can no longer be satisfied with anything less. The closing signature line — "Says Mira: her Lord is the Lifter of Mountains" — is the stamp she places on nearly every poem, a public declaration of identity that no amount of persecution could silence.
The Poison Cup
The most famous episode of Mira's life, and the one that appears most frequently in her poems, is the sending of the poison. Her in-laws — the royal family of Mewar, outraged by her refusal to behave as a proper Rajput wife, by her singing and dancing in public, by her association with wandering holy men, by her refusal to worship the family deity instead of Krishna — sent her a cup of poison.
Mira drank it. She did not die. The poison turned to nectar in her throat.
"I drank the cup of poison, Rana, and found it sweet as nectar. You sent me poison and I drank it gladly — the name of Ram turned it to nectar."
Whether this happened literally is beside the point — the poem is the event. The poison is the world's hatred of a woman who refuses to be owned. The nectar is the protection that devotion provides. The message is devastatingly clear: you cannot kill me, because I have already given my life away to someone beyond your reach.
In other poems, the defiance is more pointed:
"Rana, I know you gave me poison. But I have the Mountain-Lifter on my side. Mira's Lord is Giridhar Nagar, He will save me as He always has."
The Rana — the king, her brother-in-law or husband, depending on the version — represents earthly power at its most absolute. Mira answers absolute power with absolute devotion, and the devotion wins.
The Body and the Beloved
Mira's poems are frankly, unapologetically physical. The love she describes for Krishna is not abstracted into theological categories. It is felt in the body — in the ache of separation, in the trembling of reunion, in the pulse of desire that she makes no attempt to sanitise.
"My eyes are thirsty for you, Beloved. I cannot sleep. I toss and turn, looking for you through the night. I have spread my bed, but whom shall I enjoy? My eyes are swollen with weeping. Come to me, O Merciful One! Without you, the bed is a bed of thorns."
The erotic charge of these poems is deliberate and essential. In the Bhakti tradition, the boundary between erotic love and devotional love is not a boundary at all — it is a continuum. The longing of a woman for her absent lover is the longing of the soul for God. The physical ache is the spiritual ache. By refusing to separate the body from the spirit, Mira makes a claim that is radical in any religious tradition: that the path to the divine runs not around the body but through it.
"I have felt the swaying of the elephant's shoulders, and now you want me to climb on a jackass? Try to be serious."
This poem, often quoted, captures Mira at her most devastating. Having tasted union with the divine, she cannot accept the diminished life her family offers her. The elephant is Krishna. The jackass is the ordinary world of duty, propriety, and social expectation. The humour is acid. The rejection is total.
The Wanderer
According to tradition, Mira eventually left the palace altogether. She could not be killed, could not be shamed, could not be silenced, and could not be contained within the walls her in-laws had built around her. She walked out and became a wandering devotee, joining the company of sadhus and saints, living on alms, singing her songs in the streets.
"I have given up my house and my household, I have left my in-laws and my family. Sitting among the holy men, I have lost caste and reputation. I pulled up the arrow of worldly ties and tore out the root of family pride. Mira dances before her Giridhar; she has bathed in the waters of bliss."
The poem catalogues what she has lost: house, household, in-laws, family, caste, reputation. In the honour-based society of Rajput India, each of these losses is a form of social death. But Mira does not mourn them. She lists them as a warrior lists battles won. Every loss is a liberation. Every tie severed is a chain broken.
The Dark Night
Not all of Mira's poems are triumphant. Some are raw with the anguish of separation — viraha, the pain of the lover divided from the beloved. In the Bhakti tradition, this separation is not a failure of devotion but its deepest expression. The lover who feels no pain does not truly love.
"Dark One, how can I sleep? Since you left my bed the seconds drag past like ages, each moment a new torment. I can't see to thread my needle; my hands won't work the spindle. The sky floods with moonlight, but without you the night darkness closes in around me. I wander in a wilderness, without water, the heat burns my body. Dark clouds gather on all sides — where is the rain?"
The poem is structured as a series of images of thwarted function: the needle she cannot thread, the spindle her hands refuse, the moonlight that should comfort but instead illuminates her solitude, the clouds that promise rain but deliver nothing. This is the dark night of the devotional soul, and Mira renders it without consolation.
The Song of Liberation
But Mira's dominant note is not sorrow. It is a fierce, singing joy — the joy of a woman who has recognised her own freedom and will not give it back.
"I don't care about social norms and I don't keep order. Some say I'm crazy; some say I'm mad. I'm not crazy or mad — I have simply seen the Beloved with my own eyes. The colours of the Dark One have drenched Mira; other colours are all false."
Here is the final claim: she has seen. Not believed, not hoped, not inferred — seen. The vision is self-authenticating. No argument can touch it. No social convention can override it. No poison can dissolve it.
"Mira is dancing with bells tied to her ankles. People say she is mad. Her mother-in-law says she has ruined the family reputation. The Rana sent her a cup of poison. Mira drank it, laughing."
She drank it laughing. The image is indelible: a woman in a world that could kill her for her joy, choosing joy, drinking the death they send her and tasting only sweetness. It is an image of absolute spiritual sovereignty, of a freedom so complete that even death serves it.
Mira's voice has never stopped singing. In India today, her songs are as alive as they were when she first opened her mouth and refused to close it. Five centuries of women have heard themselves in her — not because she was perfect or saintly, but because she was uncompromising, because she chose her love over their rules, because when they sent her poison she drank it laughing and called it nectar.
This post is part of Civilisations, a 149-book chronological journey through world literature. See the full collection →
A.J. Alston's The Devotional Poems of Mirabai (Motilal Banarsidass) provides the most complete scholarly edition in English. Shama Futehally's In the Dark of the Heart (HarperCollins India) offers more poetically alive translations. Both are recommended — Alston for scholarly completeness, Futehally for literary experience.
Translated and edited by A.J. Alston. The most complete scholarly edition in English — two hundred padas with three introductory essays on her life, the Bhakti movement, and the characteristics of her poetry.
Translated by Shama Futehally. More poetically alive than Alston — the translations capture the fierce directness of Mira's voice with greater literary immediacy.
Disclaimer: some links in this post are affiliate links. If you buy through them, I earn a small commission at no extra cost to you.
