Mirabai

As Nancy Martin shows us in her exhaustive study Mirabai: The Making of a Saint, the figure of Mirabai is everywhere—remembered across time and place, genre and context—and yet “there is at once too much information and too little” (2). Martin’s work synthesizes a wide range of scholarship and a wide array of sources to portray the “many Miras” of the past and the present to make the complexity of traditions about this figure available to a general and academic audience. Its accessibility makes it valuable in particular for undergraduate teaching, providing for example a valuable exploration of bhakti (devotionalism/participation) in general, , and a sense of the historical evolution of such a tradition over time. Throughout, Martin emphasizes how “complex understandings of gender are infused throughout the traditions that surround Mira” (11), which situates the work to contribute significantly to thinking and teaching about the history of gender formations in South Asia.

Martin’s introduction describes the multiplicity of frames for understanding Mirabai’s story and the continuities of interpretation and representation that have produced Mira as a figure over time, and the multiplicity of voices, communities, and texts (of different genres) that construct Mira as a person and as an ideal. The first chapter of the book brings us into the earliest of these stories, and the sometimes-competing representations of this figure in the early modern period. The chapter is most satisfying not in its explication of the five types of female saints outlined by A.K. Ramanujan, which provides one of the organizing frames for the chapter, but when it engages with the specifics, in historical terms, of particular textual representations. At times these two approaches are in tension.

The chapter delights when it engages with the specific historical contexts and textual forms in which representations of Mira emerge, focusing on a 1712 account by Priyadas and the Pothī Prem Abodh, a text from the Punjab region, in Gurmukhi, thought to hail from the 1690s. This is thought-provoking material. Comparison of the caste implications of the story of Mira in the Prem Abodh with other Punjab-situated texts in Braj or Punjabi could add further valences to this discussion (48-9). There are also important parallels regarding stories about women that invite comparison in that context: one wonders what resonance there might have been between the “stories of women,” the charitropakhyān, of the Dasam Granth, for example, and the representation of Mira. Not every tale about women was sanitized to abide by concerns for “family values” (63). The broader prevalence of Vaishnava imagery and language in Sikh texts in the late 17^th and 18^th centuries—in the Dasam Granth and the gurbilās (Sikh historiographical) literature, as Julie Vig and Robin Rinehart show in their work—suggests that there may be more to say about Mira’s representation in Punjab, as a Vaishnava, than has been said (65).

In chapter 2, Martin moves forward into the 18^th century to examine three versions of Mira’s life: one offered by the royal devotee Savant Singh, known as “Nagridas” (1699-1764), and the other two by Mahipati (1715-1790) and Sukhsaran (18^th c.). Martin’s valuable reconstruction of Nagridas as author, and the context for his representations of Mira, is compelling, drawing on Heidi Pauwels’ extensive scholarship. In Nagridas’ representation, we see “Mira inhabiting a potentially contested space, together with low-caste saints, standing on the side of a radically inclusive, egalitarian devotion to God” (85) that contrasts strikingly with the social vision of figures like Jai Singh II of Jaipur (r. 1699-1743), who promoted a more socially restrictive and caste-based understanding of religious life. We see a diversity of representations: Mahipati’s mid-18^th-century text which presents Mira as a child devotee, emblematic of the parent-child dynamics important in the Varkari tradition, and Sukhsaranpositions Mira as more than human—and less an explicit role model—revealing a “tacit and sometimes overt support for the caste system and gender norms” (103).

In the next chapter, Martin explores representations of Mira in the 19^th century: the ways that colonial officials/scholars represented Mira within broader representations of Hinduism—and in relation to certain romantic ideals (118)—as well as how Rajput historians constructed her story as they sought to present her as “one of them.” As Martin notes, “Mira was appropriated by all sides” (123), and Indian authors sought to portray her as an exemplar of a “new Indian woman” (126). But there is ambivalence, too, about Mira—visible in women’s accounts, and in the hesitation in claiming her among Rajputs. This ambivalence extends in chapter 4, which explores folk representations of Mira’s life and person, where she is portrayed with “a raw and powerful articulation of coercion and suffering, renunciation and defiance, as the tellers explore the dynamics of caste from lower-caste perspectives and the struggles of women in positions of subordination” (165). Such portrayals, which themselves are diverse and not univocal (167), directly counter many of the idealized portraits of Mira presented in chapter 3, which position her as adhering to conventional marital and family norms, and are mediated through performance; Martin’s main two examples are versions of Mira’s story in khyal (167-178.) and epic song (179-202), providing a vivid account of the communities formed around Mira’s story.

The final two chapters engage with the “uses” of Mira, in the nationalizing project of the late colonial period, as well as in the early independence periods, where Mira is asked again to do the work of representing an ideal for women under new political circumstances. In chapter 5, Martin explicates how Mira is portrayed by three key figures—Rabindranath Tagore, Mohandas Gandhi, and Mahadevi Varma—as “a precedent for women’s emancipation and self-realization” for Tagore, an “exemplary practitioner of non-violence” for Gandhi, and as an exemplar of the “wider possibilities” that emerged for 20^th-century woman for Mahadevi Varma (206-7). In the final chapter, she continues this line of thought by considering an array of images that define an “integrated Rajput-nationalist-devotional telling of Mirabai” (255) across print and film. That too could be challenged, as shown in her example of a daring woman named Basava (1896-1957) who defied family expectations to follow her own path of devotion (267-271).

Martin ends with the films produced after independence, bringing her readers not to an end to the story of Mira, but to a vantage point for understanding what comes next, in our present, as a part of a capacious portrait of the Mirabai tradition. This positioning of the work is both a strength and a challenge – the book spans such a wide historical period and diverse contexts that at times this scope undermines the detail and analysis that would enrich our understanding of the tradition. At the same time, the “grand scope” of the book does allow for appreciation of Mirabai’s outsize impact, and the diversity of interpretations of this figure and the significance of her work. The specifics of each historical moment, however, only add to that story.  

Anne Murphy is an associate professor in the Department of History at the University of British Columbia.

Anne Murphy

Date Of Review:

April 24, 2024