Mirabai
De Simple Silence.
Meher Baba mentioned Mirabai’s love for Krishna on many occasions.
Come, O aloof one a glimpse of your body has caught me. My name? Call me the girl who separation drove mad. Night and day there’s a fish thrashing next to the water, servant Mira dies at your feet — and she calls you the Giver of Joy.[1]
Most accounts agree Mirabai was born about 1498 into a Rajput clan, the Rathors, who ruled the city of Merta and its surrounding villages. Her great grandfather on her father’s side, Jodhaji, had founded the city of Jodhpur, one of Rajasthan’s centers of handcraft and trade. Her grandfather, Dudaji, had conquered the city of Merta along with 360 surrounding villages, and gave Mira’s father, Ratnasingh, twelve of them, including Kudki where Mira was born into a small but lavishly equipped fortress.[2]
The Rajputs exact a strict loyalty from their wives and sisters. Among the exogamous ruling clans, which pride themselves on the sexual virtue and exaggerated modesty of their women, marriage had one principal objective : the securing of military alliances. So, following the day’s custom, Mira’s family prepared to marry her into a neighboring clan, the Sisodiya Rajputs of Mewar, in order to stabilize local politics and perhaps avert a blood feud.[3]
Legend has it that as a small child Mira answered the palace gate to give food to a sadhu who whispered a few words in her ear and pushed into her fist a tiny statue of Krishna which she treasured for the rest of her life. In a few of her songs she remarks how she received « the words » of a guru. Since there exists no account of her having ever taken a teacher or undergone formal instruction, tradition ascribes to those few whispered words all the religious training she needed. Who was the sadhu? Nobody knows. But one day Mira in girlish curiosity pestered her mother about her future husband. To whom was she to be married? (A Rajasthani girl of her pedigree would know this is the great event her childhood prepares for.) Her mother in jest or exasperation swept her hand toward the little Krishna image. « To him. Krishna will be your groom. » From that moment Mira considered herself married to Krishna, whom she addressed by the tender name of Shyam — Dark One.[4]
King, I go to Girdhara, I’m lost in the love for Girdhara,
Our marriage is old, Our marriage is from the past.
To me it doesn’t matter, that we were married in a dream,
Mother, Dinanatha,[5] wed me, in my dream.[6]
Mira about the age of twenty arrived at the palace of her family by marriage to web Bhojraj, son of the fearsome warrior Rana Sanga. She felt the raw humiliation arranged marriage meant for a woman. She had a reputation for beauty, for a cultivated poise, for artistic and philosophic learning, for pride. But no one was prepared for the disturbance she would provoke in her demand for artistic, spiritual and sexual freedom.
The equally proud members of the Sisodiya clan were Shaktas — worshippers of the Goddess. Her religious duties were to be discharged in unquestioning service to her husband. She simply refused to carry them out. One account tells how she dutifully touched her mother-in-law’s feet but lightly walked past their image of Kali, saying she’d long been on the most intimate terms with the true Lord, and could not bow to a lump of stone.[7]
I will sing out his beauties! So what if the king goes into a fury? I can leave his domain but anger the Dark One where do I go?[8]
My breath, my breath, Hari, My shelter, Hari,
I saw the illusion, I saw the Three-Worlds
You alone can please,
Mira says, I’m yours, Don’t forget.[9]
Compounding the indignity, Mira insisted that Shyam pledged to her lifetimes ago, was her true husband. Shyam, the dark-skinned, mischievously seductive, adolescent flute- playing form of Krishna, whose cult had developed in village and marketplace, well outside the stiff guidelines sanctioned by theologians and officious priests. Mira, the stories tell us, refused to sleep with her husband. Details about Bjojraj remain sketchy — only in recent years have scholars managed to get clear who he was. Probably a bit weak-minded for a warrior, he scarcely figures in the Mirabai legends. It’s likely he died on the battlefield shortly after their wedding.
Mira refused to wear widow’s weeds though, and rejected every convention of widowhood. She took to singing and dancing, dedicating these acts to Shyam — whom she addressed in the most intimate terms. Her songs plead and adore, badger, scold, weep.[10]
Take a yogin for a lover, get nothing but grief.
He beguiles you with intimate whispers — all worthless.
Sister, he plucks your flower like a sprig of jasmine, then pulls on his robe and is gone.
Mira says, Dark One, I saw you once, but tonight I’m an utter wreck.[11]
Overstepping all propriety she would descend from the Sisodiya palace into town, where she consorted with sadhus and low-caste bhaktas (worshippers) in local temples. Vikram Singh, a brother-in-law who had succeeded his father as clan leader and prince, suspected her sadhu compatriots as spies — engaged by rival clans or hostile military powers. Vikram Singh, in a reflex of paranoia that is most certainly unjustified, imagined Mirabai’s songs to be coded messages detailing military information. Legend holds that after failing to subdue Mira by posting a guard at her door in the palace, Vikram Singh and his mother attempted on three occasions to kill her.[12]
Mira’s in-laws delivered a cupful of poison but I drank up ambrosia — they concealed a black cobra in a wickerwork basket, but I found a precious stone. O crazy Mira, she’s taken the Dark One off to her bridal bed![13]
Binding my ankles with silver I danced — people in town called me crazy.
She’ll ruin the clan said my mother-in-law, and the prince had a cup of venom delivered.
I laughed as I drank it.
Can’t they see? Body and mind aren’t something to lose, the Dark One’s already seized them.
Mira’s lord can lift mountains, he is her refuge.[14]
Trust in God but keep your powder dry. Mira’s God might keep a close eye out for her, but Mira knew the next step. She quickly departed from Sisodiya territories, took to the road on foot. The rest of her life she spent wandering the forests, villages, highways and temples of north India.[15]
O Friend, I’m maddened with love,
I can’t sleep on a bed of nails,
when the bed of love is near,
Which is the way to union?
Only the wounded know the wound,
Only the jeweler knows the jewel,
In pain, I wander from wood to wood,
In search of the doctor to heal me, Krishna.[16]
Mira crisscrossed northwestern India repeatedly, treading the roadways of Rajasthan and Gujarat, pursuing her elusive Krishna through the forests and villages he was rumored to frequent. At this point the accounts of her become complex, contradictory, embellished by numerous storytellers. Mira’s wanderings take her again and again into the Vaishnavite grounds known as Madhuban, Forest of Honey, or maybe Forest of Sweet Delights. It seems her songs passed among bhaktas like quicksilver.
Tales of Mirabai still circulate. One recounts how, on reaching the vicinity of Vrindavan, the woodland sacred to worshippers of Krishna, she encountered the famous theologian Jiv Gosvami. This redoubtable scholar and fear- some ascetic denied access to one of Krishna’s temples because she was a woman. Mirabai shamed him with the words, « Are not all souls female before god? » Jiv Goswami bowed his head and led Mira by the hand into his temple.[17]
Sister, I went into the market and picked up the Dark One.
You whisper as though it were shameful, I strike my drum and declare it in public.
You say I paid high, I say I weighed it out on the scales, it was cheap.
Money’s no good here, I traded my body, I paid with my life!
Dark One, give Mira a glance, we struck a bargain lifetimes ago.[18]
How can I write to Hari?
My pen, full, my heart, frail. In my mind, the words, silenced. In my eyes, tears.
If I can not write a letter,
How shall I touch his lotus-feet?
Mira asks Girdhara to take away her pain.
There is the account of an unknown sadhu who joined the company Mira was traveling with. This man insisted the Dark One had appeared in a vision, instructing him to seek out Mirabai and make love to her. Approaching Mira, he demanded she prove her devotion by complying with dark Krishna’s command. Mira turned on her heels lightly and led him to the city square where a crowd of bhaktas had collected to sing. She bundled an armful of robes into a bed in the midst of the crowd and scattered flowers across it. Announcing to the curious assembly that she was intended to honor her lord, she loosened her gown. « We shall honor the Dark One’s directive, » she smile. « Come you are among friends. » Surrounded by Mira’s watchful companions, the sadhu grew pale, started to tremble, then threw himself at Mirabai’s feet and begged her forgiveness. It is said he became a resolute follower of the prem-bhakti-marga (path of love and devotion), and one of Mirabai’s staunchest admirers.
Listen, friend, the Dark One laughs and scours my body with ravenous eyes. Eyebrows are bows, darting glances are arrows that pierce a wrecked heart.
« You will heal I’ll bind you with magical diagrams and crush drugs for a poultice But if it’s love that afflicts you my powers are worthless »
Sister, how can I heal? I’ve already crushed sandalwood paste, tried witchcraft — charms and weird spells.
Wherever I go his sweet form is laughing inside me.
Tear open these breasts you’ll see a torn heart!
Unless she sees her dark lover how can Mira endure her own body?
At one time about fifteen hundred mediators came down from the hills and sat together in a big hall in north India. The number of people doing hard inner work in that century was large. They asked Kabir to read to them, but had not asked Mirabai. Kabir entered the hall, and said, « Where is Mirabai? You know what I see in this hall? I see fifteen hundred male egos. » He refused to read until Mirabai came. So someone went for her — she was miles away — and they waited in silence, maybe one day or two. Mirabai at last arrived. She read for thirty-five minutes. At the end of that time it was clear that her bhakti was so much greater than anyone else’s in the room, that the gathering broke up, and all the meditators, reminded of how much they had to do, went back to their huts.
O I saw witchcraft tonight in the region of Braj.
A milking girl going her rounds, a pot on her head, came face to face with the Dark One.
My friend, she is babbling, can no longer say « buttermilk. »
« Come get the Dark One, the Dark One! A pot full of Shyam! »
In the overgrown lanes of Vrindavan forest the Enchanter of Hearts fixed his eye on this girl, then departed. Mira’s lord is hot, lovely and raven — tonight she saw witchcraft at Braj.
By her fiftieth year Mira had come to reside in the coastal city of Gujurat city of Dwarka. In Dwarka stands the Ranchorji temple, one of India’s four cardinal destinations of pilgrimage, the sea beating against its rear doors. In his biography, Goetz suggests Mira set up a soup kitchen and hospice alongside the temple where she would attend to the poor. Back in her homeland the Sisodiya clan meanwhile had suffered a series of devastating military reversals. Rumor flared through the region that the defeats had come as divine retribution for Sisodiya mistreatment of Mira. Confronted with a possible revolt in their domains, Mira’s in-laws decided to bring home their princess, hoping to manipulate Mirabai’s reputation in order to legitimize their rule in the eyes of the populace. They dispatched a crew of civic officials and Brahmins to Dwarka to fetch her. The envoy located her at the soup-kitchen clinic she’d founded, and threatened to starve themselves to death if she did not return with them. It was a blatant misuse of their authority, knowing Mirabai would not take on the karma of their deaths. Faced with the prospect of a return to the indignities of the Sisodiya household, the wealth that held no interest, the title she’d rejected once and for all as useless, Mira requested and was granted a final night alone in the Ranchhorji temple, which housed a favorite image of her god. In the morning when the envoi forced open the locked gates, all that remained — draped across the feet of the deity — were Mirabai’s robe and her hair.
My beloved came, I watched the road, and I, the solitary, attained Him,
I decorated the plate for puja, I gave my jewels to Him,
And finally, He sent messages, He came,
Bliss adorns me, Hari is a sea of Love,
My eyes are linked to His, in Love,
Mira, a sea of bliss, admits the Dark-one.
« I am Krishna, I want all of you to love me as Mira loved me. » Meher Baba
- ↑ from For Love Of The Dark One - Songs Of Mirabai Translations by Andrew Schelling - Revised Edition © 1993, 1996 Andrew Schelling pg 79
- ↑ pgs xv - xvi
- ↑ pg xvi
- ↑ pg xvii
- ↑ an epithet for Krishna, from the Sanskrit din, meaning poor, and natha, lord, master or protector, hence « protector of the poor »
- ↑ from Sweet On My Lips - The Love Poems of Mirabai Louise Landes-Levi © 1997 Louise Landes-Levi pg 32
- ↑ from For Love Of The Dark One - Songs Of Mirabai Translations by Andrew Schelling - Revised Edition © 1993, 1996 Andrew Schelling pgs xvii - xviii
- ↑ pg 38
- ↑ from Sweet On My Lips - The Love Poems of Mirabai Louise Landes-Levi © 1997 Louise Landes-Levi p. 23
- ↑ from For The Love Of The Dark One - Songs of Mirabai translations by Andrew Schelling revised edition © 1993, 1998 Andrew Schelling p. xix
- ↑ Ibid, p. 45
- ↑ Ibid, p.xix
- ↑ Ibid, p. 38
- ↑ Ibid, p. 3
- ↑ Ibid, p. xx
- ↑ from Sweet On My Lips - The Love Poems of Mirabai Louise Landes-Levi © 1997 Louise Landes-Levi p. 39
- ↑ from For The Love Of The Dark One - Songs of Mirabai translations by Andrew Schelling revised edition © 1993, 1998 Andrew Schelling p. xxi - xxii
- ↑ Ibid, p. 69
