मीराबाई

Meerabai (traditional dates: c. 1498 – c. 1547) is the best-loved poet of the Bhakti movement and the immortal voice of Krishna devotion. Born into the Rathore royal house of Merta in Rajputana, Meera was married to Bhojraj, crown prince of Mewar, but had since childhood taken Giridhar Gopal — Krishna the mountain-bearer — as her true lord. After widowhood and the hostility of the royal household, her life became a story of rebellion and renunciation: tradition says even the cup of poison sent by the Rana turned to nectar by her Lord's grace.

Meera left the palace for the company of sadhus and the practice of kirtan — unthinkable audacity for a Rajput woman of the sixteenth century. Travelling to Vrindavan and finally Dwarka, she composed hundreds of padas — direct, burning devotional poetry built of household images: 'Payo ji maine Ram ratan dhan payo', 'Mere to Giridhar Gopal doosro na koi', 'Pag ghunghru baandh Meera naachi re'. Tradition holds that at Dwarka she merged into the image of Ranchhod.

Her padas lived four centuries in oral tradition, temple kirtan and the throats of household women — and in the twentieth century the gramophone, then film, made them national heritage. No poet is more sung in the Hindi world than Meera.

Born around 1498 at Kudki near Merta into the Rathore clan, Meera is said to have received a Krishna image as a child and declared the god her bridegroom. Her marriage into the Sisodia house of Mewar placed the most inward of devotees inside the most martial court of Rajputana — the collision that made the poetry.

After Bhojraj's death, Meera's public singing and saint-company scandalised Mewar; tradition records persecution — poison, a serpent, a bed of nails — survived by grace. She wandered to Merta, Vrindavan and Dwarka, composing padas in Rajasthani-Braj that were carried across north India by singers and sadhus. The padas were never 'published' in her lifetime; the song tradition itself is her collected works.

Meera is the supreme instance of poetry preserved by song: her padas survived not in manuscripts but in voices — temple singers, wandering mendicants, grandmothers, and from the 1900s the recording artists of the gramophone era, whose discs of 'Payo ji maine' and 'Mere to Giridhar Gopal' fixed canonical versions of fluid oral texts. Gandhi's prayer meetings, the classical concert stage and Hindi cinema all drew from her. Five centuries on, she remains the Hindi world's most recorded poet-saint.

Her padas are built for singing: a refrain that states the ecstasy, verses that argue it, and a signature line — 'Meera ke prabhu Giridhar Naagar' — that signs the song like a seal. The imagery is domestic (wealth, boats, bangles, sleep) and therefore universal. Musicians across five centuries have set her in every idiom from folk Maand to khayal-derived bhajan.