Mirabai

A sixteenth-century poet-saint whose devotional verses to Krishna, composed in defiance of the social constraints placed on her, remain among the most widely sung bhakti poetry in the tradition.

scholarship. Modern scholarship — academic/historical analysis.
Tradition: hinduism Period: medieval-to-early-modern Theme: devotion Theme: poetry Theme: gender Theme: social-constraint

Mirabai is a poet-saint whose devotional verses to Krishna remain among the most widely sung bhakti poetry in the tradition centuries after her lifetime, and whose legend is inseparable from a defiance of the social constraints placed on women of her position. This archive treats her biography with the same caution it applies to other figures known chiefly through later devotional legend, while taking the surviving poetry itself seriously as a primary devotional voice.

A legend built around resistance

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Related in the archive

Concept

Bhakti

A path of loving devotion to the divine — one of the most influential and socially far-reaching currents in Indian religious thought.

Person

Andal

An early female poet-saint within the Vaishnava devotional tradition, whose verses of longing for Vishnu are recited as scripture and stand among the earliest attributed female voices in this archive.

Tradition

Vaishnavism

A major devotional tradition centered on Vishnu, distinguished by the doctrine of avatara — divine descent into the world across cosmic time to restore right order.

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Next → Andal An early female poet-saint within the Vaishnava devotional tradition, whose verses of longing for Vishnu are recited as scripture and stand among the earliest attributed female voices in this archive.