The village of Kudki, also written Kurki, sits in the Jaitaran country of central Rajasthan, and it is where Mira, remembered across India as Mirabai or Meera, is generally said to have been born around 1498. The district it belongs to has moved on paper more than once: Kudki lay for a long time in Pali district, and since the redrawing of Rajasthan's districts in 2023 it falls within the new Beawar district. The village itself has not moved. Her father, Ratan Singh, was a Rathore nobleman who held Kudki; her grandfather Rao Duda ruled Merta, and the family traced itself to Rao Jodha, the founder of Jodhpur. Mira was therefore born into the Rajput aristocracy of Marwar, and the whole force of her later life comes from the fact that she walked away from it.

Merta, marriage and widowhood

She was raised chiefly at Merta, in a household that was unusually devotional even by the standards of a Vaishnava Rajput court. The story most often told of her childhood concerns a small image of Krishna that came into her hands, which she is said to have treated from the beginning not as an object of worship but as a husband. Around 1516 she was married to Bhoj Raj, the crown prince of Mewar and eldest son of Rana Sanga, in what was plainly a political alliance between two of the strongest houses in Rajputana. Bhoj Raj died of wounds within about five years, and Rana Sanga himself died in 1528, not long after his defeat by Babur at Khanwa. Mira was a widow before she was twenty-five, in a court where a royal widow's options were narrowly prescribed.

What she did instead was continue an already public devotional life: singing in temples, dancing before the image of Krishna, keeping company with wandering ascetics and with devotees of low caste, and declining the seclusion expected of a woman of her rank. Later hagiography turns her in-laws' hostility into a sequence of assassination attempts, a cup of poison that did not harm her, a venomous snake delivered in a basket of flowers, an order to drown herself. Historians treat these as legend rather than record. The underlying friction, between a widowed princess who would not observe caste and household discipline and a court that expected her to, is entirely plausible and needs no miracles to explain it.

Leaving, and the years of wandering

At some point she left Mewar. Tradition takes her north to Vrindavan, the country associated with Krishna's youth, and then west to Dwarka on the Gujarat coast. One well-known account has an embassy from Mewar arriving to bring her home, and Mira asking for a night in the temple first, after which she was found to have vanished into the image of the god. Her death is usually placed around 1547, in Dwarka, though the year is not securely established and dates from 1546 to the late 1550s appear in different sources. The lifespan sometimes printed for her of 1504 to 1552 has no real support and appears to be a transcription error; the conventional scholarly range is roughly 1498 to 1547.

The poems, and what can honestly be claimed for them

Mira composed padas, short metrical songs meant to be sung rather than read, in a Rajasthani idiom shaded with Braj, and in some versions with Gujarati. Their subject is almost always the same: Krishna as Giridhar, the lifter of the hill, addressed as lover, husband and only legitimate claim on her loyalty. The tone is what sets them apart from most devotional verse of the period. They are direct, often defiant, and frequently frame renunciation as a kind of scandal she is happy to cause. One of the most widely sung declares that she has found the jewel of the divine name; another states flatly that Giridhar Gopal is hers and no one else is.

Honesty requires a caution here. No manuscript of her poetry survives from her own century. Only a couple of poems attributed to her appear in manuscripts predating the eighteenth century, and the great mass of written attestation is later still. Thousands of songs now circulate under her name; scholars who have examined the language and style think a few hundred at most could plausibly be hers, and some argue that the Mira of the songs is partly a figure the tradition built. Her existence, though, is not in doubt. She is named admiringly in Nabhadas's roll-call of devotees composed around 1600, within living memory of her death, and a commentary of 1712 expanded that notice into the fuller life story most people now know.

Why she still matters

Mira's importance to the Bhakti movement is not only that she wrote well. It is that a woman of the ruling class publicly chose devotion over dynasty, refused the roles of obedient wife, compliant widow and caste-observant aristocrat, and turned that refusal into songs ordinary people could sing. Her verses travelled far beyond Rajasthan and entered Gujarati, Braj and Punjabi repertoires; a few compositions attributed to her circulated in Sikh devotional collections. In the twentieth century she reached an even wider audience through cinema and through the concert performances of classical singers, and her songs remain staples of both the temple and the recital hall.

Rajasthan keeps her memory in stone as well as sound. There is a memorial at Merta, a Mira temple within the fort at Chittorgarh, and a shrine at Kudki itself, where visitors are shown the site associated with the house she was born in. For a village that produced no army and no empire, it is a considerable claim: that the most enduring voice to come out of sixteenth-century Rajasthan belonged not to a warrior king but to a woman who left the palace and would not stop singing.