Historians differ with regard to the dates of Mira’s birth, marriage, and death.7 But all agree that she was a princess who belonged to the Rathor clan of Merta in Rajasthan. According to the most reliable account, Mira was born in AD 1498 when the Muslim dynasty of the Lodhis ruled in Delhi. Another Muslim king, Bahadur Shah, ruled Gujarat to the south. It was during Mira’s lifetime—in 1526—that Babur, the first great Mughal, invaded India, and established the famous Mughal dynasty in Delhi which went on to dominate India for 200 years. Thus, Mira lived in a time of exceeding political turmoil. Muslims and Hindus were constantly at war and there were bloody conflicts amongst the Rajputs themselves. Mira must have known frequent deaths amongst her Rajput relatives, whose first imperative was to maintain high traditions of martial valour and family honour. Rajput honour required courage in men, and chastity and obedience in women in an archetypal feudal patriarchy, whose extreme form was the custom of jauhar, in which women avoided falling into the hands of the enemy after a defeat by committing mass suicide in a ceremonial fire.
Mira’s great-grandfather was the famous Rathor noble Raja Jodhaji, the founder of Jodhpur. She grew up in the company of her cousin Jaimal, who would become a hero in Rajput history. She married the son and heir apparent of the great Rana Sangha, head of the Sisodiya clan and the ruler of Mewar, who was the unquestioned leader of the Rajputs at the time, and ruled from the famed citadel Chittor. Thus, she entered a life of unquestioning duty, heavy martial responsibility, and rigid domestic hierarchy. It is not quite clear when Mira abandoned the palace to begin the life of a wandering singer. Perhaps, the turning point was the bloody battle of Khanua in 1527, when the Mughals defeated the Rajput confederacy under the leadership of Mewar.
There are rich legends that try to explain Mira’s conversion. One says that she refused to perform the first duty of a new daughter-in-law which was to worship the family deity, the goddess Kali or Durga. Her obvious absorption in something other than her marriage bed is said to have aroused the suspicions of her husband who burst into her room one day hoping to surprise her in her adultery. But he found her deep in worship before the idol of Krishna. Another legend tells of a wedding celebrated in the house next door when she was a child. As the excitement grew in anticipation of the groom’s arrival, Mira asked her mother about her own bridegroom. Her mother laughed and pointed to Krishna’s statuette, saying, ‘There he is, your bridegroom.’ In yet another story the Sisodiyas sent her a cup of poison, which turned to ambrosia. A venomous snake was sent in a basket to kill her, but it turned into a garland of flowers.
In the end, Mira struck a radical blow at the feudal conventions of the Rajput aristocracy, and the mighty Sisodiyas of Chittor felt shamed by her public defiance. It did not come as a surprise to me, therefore, that in Rajasthan her name is sometimes used as a term of abuse for promiscuous women. By abandoning her husband, she had defied male prerogative and upset Rajput honour. The Rajputs in turn retaliated and suppressed her name not only in written records but deep within their society’s memory. Her devotional songs, so popular all over the country, were not sung in Rajasthan until recently.8
Although Mira was forgotten in Rajasthan, the mercantile middle classes in Gujarat preserved her memory over the centuries, linked to the rise of the weaving communities. It was Mahatma Gandhi who resuscitated her in the twentieth century when he entered India’s freedom movement in 1915. Through his writings, political speeches, and his prayer meetings Mira entered the national consciousness. Gandhi wisely tapped a reservoir of goodwill for bhakti in the Indian psyche and secured for Mira a wide popular base amongst the Indian middle and lower classes and a place in the nationalist political culture. Following his example, Tagore named his daughter after Mira. So did many others. My sister also has the same name—she is the Meera to whom this book is dedicated.
Mira’s poems are an outpouring of love and faith. No one hearing them can doubt for a moment the intensity and genuineness of her mystical faith. As a Rajput princess, she gave up the security of a palace and a husband, and took to wandering, singing, and dancing—a most courageous and extreme step for any woman to take in any society. The problem for the playwright is how to describe this transformation from a woman into a saint. And how does one begin to explain the immense faith of a devotee? God is ultimately a human endeavour by finite beings to overcome their incompleteness. Thus, a longing for completeness is the starting point of this lovesick, mystical way. And how does one describe the relation between the seeker and the transcendent something else in relation to which the world is flattened? Mira’s poems suggest that the heart feels him to be present when it feels his absence most keenly.
To solve these problems I imagined Mira as a high-spirited young bride, who comes and shatters the rigid and formal atmosphere of the court in sixteenth-century Mewar, a state much burdened by a sense of its historical destiny. I focused on the evolving relationship between husband and wife. Initially, there is novelty, the embarrassment of two young people discovering each other in the typical Indian situation where physical touch precedes emotional contact. As the novelty wears, the Rana becomes absorbed in the affairs of the state and the imminent war with the Mughal. And Mira feels the frustration of
