The Autobiographical Pose: Life Narrative and Religious Transformation in the Mirabai Tradition

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe literary corpus of the sixteenth-century North Indian bhakti poet-saint Mirabai has grown over time as devotees have used (and continue to use) her name, life story and first-person voice in poems. Drawing on hagiographies, written and oral poems, printed collections and performative engagements with Mira, I argue that these moments of autobiographical ‘posing’ reveal autobiography as powerful for speaking about religious transformation, in particular the issues of authority, experience and critique. Furthermore, the centrality of autobiographical speech in the tradition is linked to an increasing emphasis on Mira as a figure of religious transformation, and bhakti itself as a transformative path.