An intriguing juxtaposition
Reflecting on the complex relationship between gender and festival culture
Across north India, the brief season of spring weather erupts with the festival of Holi - a no-holds-barred celebration in the villages and city streets. Water sprays everywhere, children throw coloured powder at each other, and soggy T-shirts and kurtas abound. It's a holiday some girls experience as an equalizing moment, a rare chance to play freely with boys. Other girls, though, view Holi warily - as a celebration that gives cover to sexual harassers. It's a charged moment in the gender politics of Indian life, and in many communities the soundtrack to that experience is 'Rang Barse', as performed by the Bollywood legend Amitabh Bachchan in a film from the 1980s.
The lines of this famous song are suggestive, as are many Bollywood lyrics: they tell of a beautiful woman, damp and colour-stained from playing Holi, besotted with a man who is not her husband. Men deceived in love - it's a familiar trope in Hindi music. The only atypical thing about this song is the strong-willed woman it celebrates: she's over 500 years old. The film lyricist based it on a centuries-old song about Mirabai, a mystic poet of spiritual love and longing, who lived during the sixteenth century and is today one of India's most revered female saints.
The thought of this post came to me in a serendipitous moment: I was listening to this song as part of a Holi playlist while running around my neighbourhood the other day. As I listened to the lyrics, which spoke of love, joy, and were replete with double entendres, I found myself reflecting on the complex relationship between gender and festival culture, and how it is particularly relevant this year as Holi and International Women's Day are coinciding.
To explore this intriguing juxtaposition, we turn to Mirabai, an ancient saint of the Bhakti movement whose life and poetry embody the tension between these two celebrations. A few weeks ago, I found myself immersed in the rich history of the Bhakti movement, a spiritual revolution that swept across India in the medieval period. The Bhakti movement was characterized by its emphasis on love, devotion, and inclusivity, and it gave rise to a rich tradition of poetry and music that continues to inspire artists and thinkers to this day.
She was born Mira, into an elite and conservative warrior caste, the Rajputs of Rajasthan (the 'bai', a term of respect, came later). A flouter of conventions whose family tried to suppress her ecstatic religious longings, she broke with them and their Rajput social codes. She took to the road, singing and mixing freely with people of all types. She later became a heroine of the bhakti tradition, which encouraged devotion to one's personal god, without the intermediaries of priests, rituals or temples. In bhakti, all you need is a simple offering of your love— a flower, a fruit, a song. In her lifetime, Mira composed perhaps a hundred songs called bhajans, which were passed down through the centuries by oral tradition, as with Khusrau and Kabir. And, like their bodies of work, Mira's expanded as her legend grew.
According to Wendy Doniger, Professor at the University of Chicago, there were few important women in early Indian religious history. 'Women originally were not allowed to learn Sanskrit, were not supposed to speak Sanskrit. They're quoted a lot in religious texts written by men, but a real woman's voice is hard to find. Not impossible - there are women from time to time. But Mirabai is the first loud and clear woman's voice.'
Few women since have engaged the popular Indian imagination like Mirabai. Even Mahatma Gandhi was a fan: her songs filled him with 'rare joy'. 'Mira sang because she could not help singing. Her songs well forth straight from her heart.' He celebrated his last birth-day, in October 1947, listening to one of her songs, sung to him by the south Indian Carnatic singer M. S. Subbulakshmi.
Subbulakshmi helped spread Mirabai's fame through a remarkable screen performance, in Meera, directed by an American, Ellis R. Dungan. At the November 1947 premiere of the Hindi version of the film, Nehru and the Mountbattens were in the audience. 'She became Mira herself,' Dungan said of Subbulakshmi's mesmeric incarnation of the medieval princess, which set off a revival of the cult of Mira in the newly independent nation.
How will the night pass?
How long have I been standing Gazing down the road?
The pain of absence keeps me awake night and day.
The one Mira is yearning for, here and in all her bhajans, is her god, Krishna. And when her songs are performed in some rural villages, Mira is a simple paragon ofreligious devotion. But her historical uses have been expansive. In her afterlives, she is both an enemy of caste hierarchy and a rebellious feminist icon. You can understand why: the central challenge of her life— how to overcome rigid social expectations in order to pursue one's own, freely chosen values— is a struggle women all over India are engaged in today.
Some praise me, some blame me.
I go the other way.
On the narrow path I found God's people.
For what should I turn back?
As with all legends, there's a dense thicket of hagiography surrounding Mirabai. But her royal Rajput ancestry is historically clear. In the Rajasthan dry lands, where warring factions were ever vying for dominance, her grandfather founded a little kingdom. Mira grew up, most likely an only child, in the fief - perhaps twelve villages-controlled by her father.
As the story goes, Mira's religious fervour surfaced early and provided some family amusement. When she was four or five, a wandering ascetic came to the family home. Mira wheedled from him a doll-like icon of Krishna, the mischievous boy-god also called Girdhar. She became so attached to the icon that her mother teased her, saying Krishna would be her bridegroom. It turned out to be a prophetic jest.
Mira's mother died when she was small, and the girl's religious worship grew still more intense— excessive, even. Sensual and physically uninhibited in her rapture, she broke the strict purdah rules imposed on Rajput women, and proved ungovernable in her spiritual energy. As rumours of wanton and unstable behaviour chased, her family arranged her marriage. She was given to a Rajput prince. In the Rajput tradition - as with many other traditions across the world in medieval times— daughters were married off to seal poltical alliances or quell potential wars. Bur Mira's marriage failed to bring about peace even in her own household.
Soon, though, her husband was dead — perhaps poisoned — and her father died too. Mira found herself under the thumb of her of conservative in-laws, who were swarming her fike bees, she sang. She had insulted them by not throwing herself one her husbands funeral pyre— committing sati in accordance with some Rajput traditions. They responded, according to the songs, by trying to kill her with a venomous snake. She managed to pacify it, and wore it as a necklace.
How can anyone touch me?
I will not descend From the back of an elephant
To ride upon an ass.
Social scientist Parita Mukta wrote about history and legacies of Mirabai, and the tradition of vair, or vendetta, among the Rajputs in one of her piece published in The Hindu:
I think the very fact that Mira survived says so much about her. The workings of Rajput society are based around vair and hatred, where women are exchanged as part of a process of subjugating lesser chiefs or lesser Rajput lords. And Mira stood up against it. She absolutely did not want to participate in the politics of hatred, the politics of revenge, or the politics of subjugation.
‘Your slanders are sweet to me’, Mira sang defiantly of her community's attacks. The supposed privileges of her birthright felt to her like chains. So she broke them, seeking her freedom by mixing with very different kinds of people - with itinerant thinkers, and with people from ostracized castes, the leather workers and the weavers. It's said that she took up with a teacher and poet, Ravidas or Raidas, who was an untouchable.
Singing her songs of devotion to Krishna, she wandered through Rajasthan and into northern India, her hair unbraided, her eyes unrimmed with kohl. Ankle bells and karthals, or castanets, were her chosen adornments. As she moved from village to village, her following grew, and soon she was leading a popular push against social boundaries.
The era of Muslim rule across parts of India had loosened the grip of Hindu orthodoxy, leading to the rise of movements that questioned the hierarchies of caste. The egalitarian spirit of bhakti that arose in southern India had slowly spread north, reaching Rajasthan around the fifteenth century. The paradox of bhakti travelled too. While each individual might find her own link with God, devotion was stronger when people gathered together to sing. As Parita Muka observes, after watching many village performances of Mira's song, collective singing is 'a regenerative power, a power which nourishes the spirit, which nourishes one's whole being actually, and which nourishes a community to search for a better alternative:
On your lips there is a flute
And a garland of jasmine adorns your chest.
Mirabai says, the Lord is a giver of joy to the pious
And the protector of the poor.
In independent India, where protecting the poor and so-called backward classes and castes is a constitutional concern, Mira's embrace of the lower castes has kept her memory alive in some villages and city slums, where contemporary performances of her songs are sometimes tuneful protests against the privileges of the elite. The humiliations of being at the lower end of the social order often get brought out sharply in such performances - and the religious devotion rings out too. But Mira's rejection of traditional family life and of curbs on women gets elided, even today. The need for girls and young women to subjugate their personal hopes and desires to the aspirations of their families is still seen as essential to Indian social cohesion. Postcards and comic books often show Mira singing or dancing seductively— your typical pin-up girl saint. The subversive and sometimes bitter transgressor of gender conventions— the Mira bai that Indian feminists embrace— figures little in popular culture.
Still, it would be a mistake to construe Mirabai and the bhakti tradition as nearly modern in their egalitarian impulses. Several aspects of the historical tradition were suppressed in the nationals appropriation of bhakti, because they failed to set salutary examples for contemporary India. Allison Busch, a scholar of Hindi literature at Columbia University, notes the advice mentioned by another bhakti poet, Tulsidas that women, like drums, are suitable for beating. In some of the older stories, Mira herself beats her low-caste servants when they try to force her to get married.
Gender, caste and class don't always align as comfortably in historical works as modern sensibilities might like. Lives get sifted, and reassembled, in light of contemporary desires. As Wendy Doniger puts it, 'The stories about who she was and what she did, they're pure hagiography - and Bollywood is welcome to it as far as I see. Now, you can't say they're wrong. But obviously she serves different purposes for different generations.'
It's an observation borne out when I ask schoolchildren in my neighbourhood to tell me who Mirabai was:
'Mirabai was a freedom fighter.'
'Err . .. she was Krishna's lover?'
'She's written poetries and songs.'
'Mirabai? I don't know. I don't study history.'
So which Mirabai to choose? We can return to where we began, with Holi. How you experience it depends on who you are - or maybe on how much power you have. Is Mira a passionate religious inspiration? An emblem of caste blindness and inter-caste friendship? A potent symbol of feminism and self-transformation— a one-woman protest movement as much as a saint? History can't quite decide. So, perhaps fittingly, given Mira's own independent-mindedness, the choice is ultimately our own.
Approve of me or disapprove of me:
I take the path that human beings have taken for centuries.
Happy International Women’s Day and Holi to all of you! 😃