And in still other songs she addresses the ruler of Mewar, the rana(usually
identified as her earthly husband though sometimes said to be either her
father-in-law or her brother-in-law in order to soften the degree of her rebel-
liousness). She rejects all that he has to offer her and voluntarily takes on the life
of the poor. In successive verses and songs she rejects living in palaces, riding on
elephants, eating sweet confections, wearing fine clothes and jewelry, to live in
a hut, walk on foot, eat dry scraps of bread, and wear a rough shawl and the
white of a widow or the saffron of a renouncer, ornamented only with a string
of prayer beads. In a common refrain she sings:
What can Mewar’s ruler do to me?
If God is angry, all is lost,
But what can the Rana do?And what can he do if she does not want anything he has to offer? When such
songs are sung within low-caste communities, they provide a clear language of
resistance against the values and privileges of the ruling class and upper castes
as Mı ̄ra ̄baı ̄ stands in solidarity with the underprivileged (Martin 2000; Mukta
1994). Her compelling life story adds a deeper layer of meaning to this and many
other songs attributed to her, and the story of her devotion, suffering and
triumph is extremely popular, told in almost every conceivable narrative genre
from films, comic books, and novels to folk dramas, epic songs, and more
standard compendiums of the lives of saints.
Indeed we find the stories of the saints retold in a wide range of vernacular
literary genres, with the stories of over 200 appearing first in the Bhaktamalor
“Garland of Devotees” composed by Na ̄bhada ̄s (a member of the Ra ̄ma ̄nandi sect
living in Galta, Rajasthan) around 1600 ce(Callewaert and Snell 1994).
Na ̄bhada ̄s catches the essence of each saint’s life and character in a few short
lines of verse and sets the standard for subsequent bhaktamalsby Dhruvda ̄s (early
seventeenth century), Raghavda ̄s (ca. 1713), and others. Commentaries
attend each bhaktamal, offering fuller narratives, beginning with Priyada ̄s’s
Bhaktirasabodhini Tika(1712) commentary on Na ̄bhada ̄s. The recitation of these
texts remains an active part of devotional life, and though each of the composers
belonged to a different branch of devotional Hinduism – Na ̄bhada ̄s was a
Ra ̄ma ̄nandi, Raghavda ̄s a member of the Vais.n.ava Ra ̄dha ̄vallabha ̄samprada ̄y,
Dhruvda ̄s a nirgun.Da ̄du ̄ panthi, and Priyada ̄s a follower of Caitanya as well as of
Na ̄bhada ̄s – they all honored a broad family of saints devoted to God both with
and beyond form. Standard episodes structure the tales – tests the saints must
endure imposed by secular and religious authorities, experiences of conversion
for male saints, the overcoming of marriage for women saints, and more
(Ramanujan 1982; Lorenzen 1995b).
The saints’ lives are narrated in the Punjabi Pothipremabodh (1693) and the
Marathi Bhaktivijaya(1762) of Mahipati, and their songs are threaded together
with narrative, each composition contextualized in life events, in Nagridas’
Padaprasangmala(early eighteeth century) (Callewaert 1994: 28–9; Abbott and
Godbole 1988). Further, saints’ lives are individually the subject ofparcaisby
Anantada ̄s, Jangopal, Sukhsaran and others which provide both introductions
194 nancy m. martin