station should, singing and dancing in public temples and conversing with holy
men and people from all castes. In her deeply personal songs she pours out her
defiant love and intense longing for her Lord. Not a preacher in the style of Kabı ̄r,
she rejects caste and gender restrictions through her actions more than her
words, and she need undergo no imaginative change of gender to identify with
thegopı ̄sas Su ̄rda ̄s did, giving her words an unmatched emotional directness.
Songs attributed to her share some of the imagery of Vr.nda ̄van but also speak
her love in the first person. She draws, as do other poets, on the tropes of classi-
cal and folk love lyrics as well as the forms and themes of other folk and women
songs, as she declares her love and renounces her royal life and marriage to take
up the life of a wandering mendicant.
When she is said to have a guru at all, it is almost always Raida ̄s the leather-
worker, but more often she has none, and her behavior as a woman leads to an
underlying ambivalence toward her just below the surface of an almost univer-
sal admiration. Clearly loved by people of many devotional sects, based on the
number who tell her story and record and sing her songs, she is still not formally
incorporated into any, perhaps because her challenge to gender norms is too
radical, because she is too sagun.in her devotion for the nirgun.samprada ̄ys, or
because she acknowledges no authority before Kr.s.n.a, even a guru. We have no
early manuscripts of her works, as we do of Kabı ̄r, Raida ̄s, and Su ̄rda ̄s, and the
traditions which surround her are unquestionably composite and stubbornly
multiple.
In one song she speaks audaciously of having purchased her Lord whom she
calls Govind, the Cowherd, in the market –
Mother, I bought Govind!
You say in secret;
I took him openly,
playing a drum.Some say she paid a high price, but she says no, having weighed him in the
balance and given so little in exchange, though she paid with her life. She begs
her Lord, the Dark One Sya ̄m, to come and dwell in her eyes – they have betrayed
her by letting him into her heart, and now she cannot bear to be away from him.
She claims to have married him in a dream, bound now irrevocably to him, and
she laments his seeming absence, charging him with being a renouncer, a jogi,
who having seduced her with sweet words now callously walks away. She vows
to become a renouncer as well and to go in search of him. In one such famous
song, she speaks of the annihilation of self in a union of merger, singing:
I will build a funeral pyre of sandalwood and aloe;
light it by your own hand
When I am burned away to cinders;
smear this ash upon your limbs.... let flame be lost in flame.
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