Breaking the Fetters of Family and Shame: Meerabai, Krishna Bhakti, and the Gendered Politics of Devotion in Sixteenth-Century Rajasthan

Abstract

Meerabai (also Mirabai; c. 1498–c. 1546), a Rathore princess of Merta who was married into the Sisodia house of Mewar, is among the most widely remembered women saints of the North Indian bhakti tradition. Later hagiography presents her as a widow who refused sati, rejected the honor codes of a Rajput court, sang and danced in public temples, kept the company of sadhus across caste lines, and survived attempts on her life before vanishing into the image of Krishna at Dwarka. This article reconstructs that story with scholarly caution. Court chronicles of Merta and Mewar are almost silent on her; the earliest firm literary notice appears in Nabhadas’s Bhaktamal (c. 1600). The immense padavali sung in her name is a layered, co-authored corpus rather than a closed authorial canon (Hawley, 2005; Martin, 2023). Reading life-narrative, attributed Hindi and Rajasthani padas, and modern critical literature together, the essay argues that Meerabai’s significance lies less in a fully recoverable biography than in a durable public language of devotion that made gender, caste, and royal honor contestable in the name of Krishna.