सनातन पुस्तकालय Sanatan Cultural Library

Mira was born around 1498 into Rajput royalty at Merta. The defining story comes from her childhood: watching a wedding procession, the little girl asked her mother who her bridegroom would be; her mother, half in play, pointed to the family's image of Krishna — Giridhar Gopal, the lifter of the mountain. Mira took the answer literally and never once let it go. Married in her teens, for reasons of state, to Bhojraj, crown prince of mighty Mewar, she performed her duties but declined her heart: it was given, she said simply, and had been since before the wedding fire. Widowed young — and losing father and father-in-law soon after in the wars with Babur — she dropped the last conventions: she sang in public, danced before the image in the temple, and kept the company of wandering sadhus and devotees of every caste. For a royal widow of sixteenth-century Mewar, each of these was scandal; together they were rebellion.

The palace answered the scandal, tradition says, with murder. The rana — remembered as her husband's brother — sent a cup of poison, told it was charanamrita; Mira drank it with Krishna's name, and it became nectar. A cobra arrived in a flower basket and was found a garland; a bed of iron spikes, a bed of petals. Sung in her own padas and polished by five centuries of retelling, these stories carry the community's verdict: the world did its worst, and love was not interrupted. Her songs — short Rajasthani-Braj bhajans, made to be sung, not read — are bhakti at its most fearless and first-person: mere to Giridhar Gopal, dusaro na koi — mine is Giridhar Gopal, no one else; "I have bought Govind — the price was everything, and the bargain was cheap"; "people say Mira has gone mad — only the wounded know the wound." She answers her critics inside the songs themselves, cheerfully: the family's honour? — she has taken up with the saints, and the world may talk.

Eventually Mira simply left — the palace, then Mewar itself — walking as a pilgrim to Krishna's own country: Vrindavan, and at the last, Dwarka. Vrindavan produced the story that measures her: the great Gaudiya theologian Jiva Goswami declined to receive a woman; Mira sent back word that she had thought Krishna was the only male in Vrindavan and everyone else a gopi — and the theologian came out to greet her. Tradition gives her an ending unlike any other saint's: around 1547, when emissaries from a repentant Mewar pressed her to return, she asked for a night in the Dwarka temple, and by morning had vanished — merged, the tradition holds, into the image of her Giridhar, leaving only her shawl draped on the deity. What remains is the most sung woman's voice in Indian history: her bhajans crossed every line she was told not to — caste, sect, region, empire — and Gandhi's ashram sang them beside the Gita. The princess who owned nothing is owned now by everyone.