In the winter of 2014, when I was a precocious child of thirteen, I happened to visit the quaint city of 

 along with a team of passionate theatre artists; donned in black kurtas. It was to perform a 

 – a street play as part of an annual theatre festival held there. I vividly recollect that we were all feeling like revolutionaries that morning, even had our mufflers and a 

 and our voices croaked (from all the incessant practice!), but were still singing intoxicated with the fervour of that one single poem which I still remember–

Tu zinda hai to zindagi ki jeet par yakeen kar

Agar kahin hai swarg to utaar la zameen par.









If you are alive, then believe firmly that life has won.





And if so, then dare to bring down heaven – wherever it is,

At that time, I was oblivious to the fact that this piece of impassioned work had been written sixty-four years ago by a poor, Dalit poet – 

; who worked as a welder in the railway warehouse of 

, and who later went on to become one of the greatest and highest paid lyricists of 

; credited for writing the evergreen and eternal songs like – ‘

Nanhe munhe bacche teri mutthi me kya hai

Amongst which my all-time favourite is this song, from the movie 

 who in his usual chirpy and innocent-eyed style goes about singing this message of a tramp’s philosophy of life on the streets of Bombay –









To sacrifice everything for someone’s smile



To be a confidante in someone’s pain



To possess love for someone in your heart,



That is what makes this life is meant for.

Over the years after engaging with Shailendra and his works more consciously and critically, I concluded that one of the markers of his genius and success as a poet and a lyricist lies in the fact that his songs have become a part of people’s everyday conversations, commonly used idioms, proverbs, and puzzles, and are sung at almost all occasions in India be it birth, marriage, death, or divorce.

In other words, his words have transformed into a corpus of literature similar to the timeless and ancient wisdom of our saints and poets which, over the years, have become part of our folk culture. They are passed on, primarily, orally, generation after generation; with people being completely unaware that a leftist-socialist poet penned them down for the silver screen.

It can thus be said that like many great folk poets i.e., 

, Shailendra’s work precedes his reputation where almost every Indian kid whether he knows Shailendra or not but has heard the original or a reprised or, at least, parodied version of his many popular songs like – 

And this charm is not only limited to his songs; it is to be noted that Shailendra, much before he became a popular lyricist and that too on the insistence of Raj Kapoor, was a serious poet who used to recite his leftist and progressive poems in the annual events of 

IPTA – Indian People’s Theatre Association

And therefore, it is not just in his songs, but in his revolutionary poetry as well that we see the evidence of his talents as a wordsmith; the unique ability to weave the most sensitive of emotions and the deepest of philosophies in the simplest and effortless language.

And though his poems are lesser known, he wrote some of the best 

, and one of the most powerful, innocent, and effective war poems I have ever read – 

, in the aftermath of the Partition to his friend Rehmu who goes and settles in Pakistan. Here are a few lines from that poem –









What mean tricks the foreigner (British) had played,



By deluding us with false dreams.



With fear, he has given us freedom in a hurry,



But has left us divided in its wake.



Listen carefully to this O! dear friend Rehmu of Pakistan.

Besides, it needs no further explanation that Shailendra’s impeccable craft, as has been mentioned countless times by his critics, is indeed his innate quality to express the biggest and deepest philosophies about existence, life, love, wealth, class struggle, and world politics with no lofty ideals or abstract ideas, but through the simple, direct, and honest truths of the struggles of everyday existence.

This quality of his is manifested poignantly in the song – 

 (1959), where he talks about the pangs of hunger and poverty of kids in a slum, and how they are coming to terms to that with their innocence. He wrote –

Choolha hai thanda padra, aur pet me aag hai,

Garma-garam rotiyan kitna haseen khwab hai.









The embers have died, but the fire of hunger goes on.



The mere idea of well-baked pieces of bread is such a nice thought!

But for me, the more crucial and novel aspect of Shailendra’s works is that they are not just melodies of entertainment relevant only to a particular movie, a character, or a cinematic situation, but like all great literary works, they override boundaries and become a mouthpiece and the lifeblood of the great Indian philosophical tradition itself.

In other words, they have the essence of the indigenous Indian consciousness containing in themselves the rationality of ideas of 

, and most evidently, the inseparable humanism and deep optimism of the 

Thus, it becomes noticeable that unlike his contemporaries – 

; who wrote predominantly in the Urdu tradition and were poets first and lyricists later, Shailendra wrote in simple yet stylized dialects of 

 and drew his inspiration, his idiom, metaphors, and similes, from the poetic tradition of the Bhakti and Sufi poets. Take the song – 

 (1963) and which became widely popular in the voice of 









SEND my brother this year O! dear father



To take me away this monsoon.



And when my friends of childhood come to meet me



Do send the letter of summons along with them

This song has palpable influences from this 13th-century poem by Amir Khusrau (1253-1325); who was a Sufi poet –









Send my dear father O! beloved mother,



As the monsoons are here.



O! dear daughter, I can’t do that,



As your father is old and the monsoons are here.

Furthermore, Shailendra adds an overarching angle to this Bhakti streak in his poetry. As he was living at a time of great socio-political change in the Indian subcontinent- with the disillusionment of independence, the horrors of Partition, and the burden of poverty, and illiteracy, Shailendra could not help but react to these forces. And what he did was revolutionary in the sense that he fused these concerns of his age and his leftist leanings into the very fabric of his Bhakti-influenced works, in turn immortalizing them by giving a quality of folk poetry and eternal wisdom.

This is most apparent in this hypnotic and introspective song – 

, where we see Shailendra bringing in the key idea of the Bhakti tradition, which was championed by Kabir as well, that the ultimate truth rests inside the seeker and not outside in some external destination. He sums this up beautifully in these lines with the symbolism of a snake charmer befooled by his own tunes-









No one is there for you in this world,



Where will you go O! Traveller.



Stop and rest for a while,



Where will you find this shade of life!



Why do you keep dancing to your tunes?

And it is this folk quality, the trait to strike right at the root of the common man’s consciousness that immortalized Shailendra’s lyrics, and even now, decades after the films for which they were written, his lyrics continue to be heard, reproduced and kept alive in the corners of India; surpassing boundaries of languages and religions. 

, the famous Hindi poet has written on this novel quality of Shailendra’s effortless poetry –

Jahan kahin bhi antar man se rituon ki sargam bunte the

Taze komal shabdon se, tum resham ki jaali bunte the









From the depths of your conscience,



you used to create melodies like the seasons.



It was your craft to string verses like the nets of silk



From fresh and mellow words.

All translations of the works of Shailendra and Nagarjuna, used in this article, are done by the author himself.

On the Poetry of Shailendra: A Folk Poet of Hindustani Cinema

“The first and the foremost thing that must be recognized is that Hindu society is a myth,” wrote Ambedkar mercilessly criticizing the Hindu religion in his Annihilation of Caste. This thus, becomes a challenge, a paradox to the Hindu mind which is still trying to stomach his radical ideas. Many, in the process, have tried to ignore, erase, or forget, even distort, and appropriate him to suit their prejudices, confining him to dogmas and politics, tragically leaving behind, as Roy puts it, “the passions that were at the core of his life and thinking”.

History has been unkind to Ambedkar. First, it contained him, and then it glorified him

Arundhati Roy, ‘The Doctor and The Saint’

It is Ambedkar’s 131st birth anniversary today, and people across India, like every year, will be putting messianic quotes, glorified tweets, and over-romanticized images, to showcase for one day their cherry-picked ideas of the man who represents merely the soul of the Indian Constitution to them. On this, I take offense, not because I do not accept his contributions to India as the Head of the Constitution Drafting Committee, but because I firmly believe that it is unjust and also narrow-minded to see Ambedkar and his massive socio-political legacy being ignored and obliterated under the single, superimposing title of the “

In other words, what disappoints me is the persistence of people to contain Ambedkar within this or that dogma and glorify him for the same, causing them to not see the true intellectual genius that he was. More so when he was, as his writings reveal, a multifarious and complicated man whose contributions and achievements surpass almost everything that we typically give him the credit of. On this, eminent historian 

“Only his (Ambedkar’s) legacy is used and passed on but not his ideas and writings.”

I think a major reason for this selective ignorance is due to the incomprehensible challenge which Ambedkar and his subversive writings pose to the 

 mind. He remains a paradox who evades being pinpointed to a specific school of thought or a particular brand of politics. Moreover, this dilemma originates, in part, because Ambedkar stays, as far as I know, the bitterest and, till now, the most ruthless critic of 

Thus, the Hindu mind is in a moral fix when it comes to approaching Ambedkar because, on one hand, in him, they have a lot to admire and be grateful for, but at the same time, a lot to stomach because this very man mercilessly shattered the foundations of their dear faith with his implacable arguments. Ambedkar made his stance clear,

“I had the misfortune of being born with the stigma of an Untouchable. However, it is not my fault; but I will not die a Hindu, for this is in my power.”

Nevertheless, the obstinacy of people has led them to come up with a deceptive and dangerous solution to this dire predicament, which has instigated many distortions.

To begin with, I can simply put it like this – rather than going to the trouble of altering or, at the best, forsaking their parochial ideologies by engaging with the enlightened ideas that Ambedkar stood for, people have taken the easier way out. In the sense that not only have they been ignorant of Ambedkar’s thoughts but have also distorted and hijacked the little they know to suit their self-serving politics, propaganda, and prejudices. It is an act that is as absurd as if a tailor starts cutting the body of the wearer to fit the size of the clothes and not the other way round.

These astute appropriations and perversion of facts regarding the philosophy of Ambedkar have led to the creation of several Ambedkars in contemporary India, which are diverse in the kind of lies they are used to sell but are similar in the trait that they are all equally imaginary. Let’s behold a few of the ugliest ones raging in the country now:

 earlier this month said in a meeting, “

Ambedkar converted to Buddhism and not Islam or Christianity… otherwise there would have been another Pakistan in India.

In a similar tone in the year 2018, another senior 

 gave the following statement in a public meeting, “

Babasaheb was not against Hinduism. But he was against the caste system. He converted to Buddhism, and not Islam or Christianity because Buddhism is also part of the Hindu religion

This list of right-wing illicit and historically inaccurate claims on Ambedkar and his legacy goes on and on. Such perverse statements are clear evidence of their obsession to 

 Ambedkar and misuse his ideas totally out of context, to justify their pathetic anti-religious, aggressive nationalist propaganda, and, of course, to lay seizure to the 

 parties also try to entitle their religious prejudices with an air of intellectual superiority and historicity that comes with the name of Ambedkar. This sad act sounds all the more hideous when we realize that the man whom they are falsely laying claim to was, in fact, their worst critic. Ambedkar wrote in his book 

‘No matter what the Hindus say, Hinduism is a menace to liberty, equality, fraternity. On that account, it is incompatible with Democracy… Hindu Raj must be prevented at all cost.’

Besides this angle, on the other end of the spectrum, we encounter the second form of manipulation of Ambedkar’s image, done with a different intent and purpose but with similar warped results, which are equally far from the truth as the former. It entails a projection of Ambedkar by those who have over-romanticized him into a saint, an institution, a 

, even to the extent of considering him a kind of faith in himself. For them, Ambedkar is beyond the purview of right and wrong, and they owe their very existence to him. Some even go to the extent of saying that “

Such passionate allegiance sounds heroic, even applaudable, but it can, and often has, led to the display of massive ignorance and backwardness on the part of these audiences. It spawns the terrible social phenomenon wherein a person becomes greater than his ideas, and his image becomes so overpowering that his wisdom gets lost in the noise of pomp and revering.

Therefore, just like misinterpreting Ambedkar by the right-wing forces is a threat to his intellectual legacy, similarly, 

 of him also poses severe hazards of side-tracking people from his very ideas and arguments, causing them to be lost in the inconsequential and the mundane.

For instance, often when there is a debate on Ambedkar, a good number of 

 (ardent followers of Ambedkar) take issue with – ‘

Why Gandhi is called Gandhiji, and Nehru is called Nehru-Ji, but Ambedkar is not called Ambedkar-Ji?

’, or at other times people take offense on others calling him ‘

’, because they stringently insist to call him “

Now my argument is not to contend with the inconsequential paradox of the usage of ‘

’ (I think, if alive, even Ambedkar wouldn’t have bothered about that), but the very idea that rather than concentrating on the contemplations of Ambedkar, and having a discourse about that, people are quarrelling in a fit of superficial devotion on such petty issues, as whose name gets more respect with a 

 or whether we should call Ambedkar by his official name or his nickname.

 wrote in her beautiful book on Ambedkar and Gandhi – 

‘History has been unkind to Ambedkar. First, it contained him, and then it glorified him. It has made him India’s Leader of The Untouchables, the king of the Ghetto. It has hidden away his writings. It has stripped away the radical intellect and the searing insolence.’

But I believe, and therefore, I proclaim, that even if history has been unfair to him, at least, we should not be, and for that, we must not only show mere respect and adoration but close attention and careful readings of his seminal works without any pre-conceived lenses of distortions. Because, not as a worshipper but just as an academic, I can say undoubtedly that his rich corpus of writings is still a priceless treasure that holds sincere insights, if not answers, for the India of today.

On Ambedkar and his many Distortions by the Hindu Mind

It was in the Post-Independence Era, a period of colossal chaos, that Sahir found himself struggling to align his stance and his literary point of view. Interestingly, Sahir chose the middle path rather than going for the extremes. He kept himself aloof from becoming a complete advocate of revolution or love and chose to express the anguish of both; the personal and the political.

 of the Post-Independence, contrary to what popular culture has entrenched in our minds, was a land of disillusionment, chaos, and hopelessness. It was an era where the abominable ghost of our colonial past was still lingering heavily on our shoulders, and the romantic thought of a 

 seemed a distant dream of yore. In the words of the poet 

” (“It was not the morning [of independence] that people have wished for.”)

The reason for the despondency was the abdication of the 

, which created two immediate socio-political impacts in the subcontinent, one political and the other personal. Comprehending them will help us gain a better insight into the times which informed, in part, the genius of Sahir’s literary oeuvre.

 was the haste to fill the power vacuum left in the wake of the British by the dominant upper-class Indians, which gave rise to the establishment of yet another stratification of society into a social hierarchy. This led to the political disillusionment of millions of Indians who beheld with horror of the slow death of their cherished idea of an equal India, which was on the brink of being shattered by the same people who once promised its fruition. Politically, therefore, it was a time of utter disappointment.

, which is perhaps a reaction to the first, was the feeling of deep, personal tragedy and mass alienation. The horrors of the 

 were still fresh in people’s minds, which compelled them to reconsider their identities and existence itself. Moreover, the technological advancement, which the country embarked on as part of its 

, created a profound dilemma for the individual to reconsider his relation to the materialistic outer world regarding his spiritual salvation. Thus, it was a time of immense personal suffering coupled with immense political disenchantment.

It was in this period of colossal chaos, that Sahir, a perceptive poet, found himself struggling to align his literary point of view and find his poetic voice. Interestingly rather than going for the extremes, Sahir chose the middle path. He crafted his poetry not merely as a voice of revolution, neither entirely as a heart-stricken song of unrequited love, but rather as a bitter cry expressing the anguish of both; 

. He expressed his neutrality and abhorrence for extremes in the poem 

Jo dekhta raha hun vo kehta raha hun mai”

(“Am I conservative by nature, or a progressive mind?

This controversy is a trifle, I regard it a sort of bind

My verses are a mirror, to reflect the vagaries of nature

I have penned what I have seen, without an axe to grind”)

TRANSLATED IN ENGLISH BY KHAWAJA TARIQ MAHMOOD

This characteristic of assimilation lent to his verses a fascinating and exceptional quality, which is, simply put, the innate capacity to merge the political and the personal into the same verse. It was the ability to move from one’s afflictions to the sorrows of the lowly and the downtrodden and vice-versa within a single poem. It expressed the sensitivity of a poet to experience and then react to the suffering of the world as poignantly as one’s own.

In other words, Sahir in his poems is not just a heart-broken poet who sees nothing but love in every facet of the earth, nor a complete revolutionary whose sense of transformation makes him consider the upturning of the status quo as the only thing that makes life worthwhile. On the other hand, he is a person who sees both the personal and the political in one facet of life, that is, bitterness, since he faces betrayal by both. As he expresses in this couplet,

“Ham gham-zada hai laae kahan se khushi ke geet





Denge vahi jo payenge is zindagi se hum”









(“I am grief-stricken, from where will I bring the songs of joy.

Because that is all that this life has given me.”)

Because Sahir, like millions of Indians of that era, found no security in the outer world and discovered the same desolation in his heart, he resentfully decided to forsake them both in his poetry. He wrote about this anguish as,

“Tang aa chuke hai kashmakash-e-zindagi se hum





Thukra na de is jahan ko kahin be-dili se hum.”









(“I have turned weary of the sufferings of life now,

It’s not long, that someday I will cast this world aside heartlessly.”)

We notice this juxtaposition of the eternal struggle of the modern man between adjusting and reacting to the materialistic outer world and the emotional inner world consistently across Sahir’s entire literary output. More intriguing and evident of Sahir’s literary genius is that he brought this unique sensibility of his to the mainstream Hindustani cinema as well.

To substantiate this claim, one can quote countless examples from Sahir’s lyrics from the cinema that are nothing short of exquisite poetry imbued with meaning and written in perfect rhyme and meter. The most quintessential example, I believe, is the evocative song – ‘

Here, we notice that, in the song, he expresses the pain of the individual on realizing the hollowness of human relations as,

Ye duniya agar mil bhi jaae to kya hai”

(“This is a world, where life has no value

Where faith and friendship are meaningless

Such a world is worthless to me, even if I possess it all.”)

And in the second last stanza of the same song, he sums up the disenchantment with the moral and political order of the world in the cathartic exclamation,

(“Light a fire and burn down such a hollow world

It is yours; you keep it and revel in its madness.

I am tired of it, take it away from my sight

Therefore, Sahir aesthetically weaved the tensions of the individual and his political anxieties into the fabric of a single verse. This added a dimension of the duality of meaning to his work and transformed his poetry from mere tales of unreciprocated love to exquisite verses, where love became a social phenomenon, a form of revolution. He was, evidently, aware of this unique quality he brought to his words, as he summed up this philosophy in this couplet, from his poem – 

“Maine har chand gham-e-ishq ko khona chaha





Gham-e-ulfat gham-e-duniya me samona chaha”









(“I tried to forget the woes of love every moment, and for that

I tried to merge the pains of life and love into one.”)

One does not know whether he achieved success in implementing this in his life, but as we now realize, in his poetry, he was able to achieve so.

On the Poetry of Sahir Ludhianvi: The Personal and the Political

For decades, the tales about colonies were known solely as told by the colonial masters, where the aboriginal people were seen as Kipling wrote – “half devil, half child”. But this was altered for good when the 28-year-old Achebe “wrote back to Europe” with his epoch-making novel – ‘Things Fall Apart’, bringing a true story from the heart of Africa.

“… I had to be a writer. I had to be a historian…so that the story of the hunt will also reflect the agony, the travail – the bravery, even, of the lions.”

Reading as part of my class on world literature in high school, I recollect the lesson where my history teacher notably mentioned – the 

. At that time, perhaps due to my immaturity or maybe due to the dry nature of the facts, I perceived it as nothing more than just another figment of the countless texts I was being taught and was expected to learn.

But it was later in college while, I was reading and comprehending Chinua Achebe’s 

, that the utter bestiality of the European savagery of Berlin, dawned upon me. It was indeed, as Achebe’s acclaimed novel poignantly reflects upon, the beginning of the end of Africa’s freedom over its resources, the dignity of its people, and the falling apart of its indigenous culture.

Regarding this, I concluded and surmised that often history, with all its victories and defeats, becomes more comprehensible to us not only through raw facts but also via stories and fictional retellings of it. The necessity of individual stories, therefore, becomes pertinent all the more when we realize that histories are written by victors and not victims. In other words, the past is instilled with more meaning, appeal, and equal representation when we behold it through the lens of personal, or fictional narratives, through realistic and untold characters and their heroic and flawed lives.

Such a humanitarian perspective of history, which equally values not only the songs of valor of the victors but also addresses the tales of weaknesses and misery of the victims, is, therefore, closer to the truth, and also makes for a better story. In an interview in the literary journal – 

, Achebe said in relation to this as thus – “

… I had to be a writer. I had to be a historian…so that the story of the hunt will also reflect the agony, the travail – the bravery, even, of the lions.”

And this is precisely what he succeeded in giving words to in his magnum opus – 

 (1958), where he bases his story, primarily, into two time-frames in the world of the 

; one is in the pre-colonial times, where we delve into the dynamics and socio-cultural structures of the clan itself. In the second frame, we witness the initial violent encounters and the eventual cataclysmic end of the 

 society when it comes in contact with the European slavers in late nineteenth-century Africa (the aftermath of the Berlin Conference).

With this charged cultural and historic context, Achebe employs a definitive anti-European method of narration and turns the discriminatory method of English storytelling, especially with regards to African subjects, on its head and presents a very non-partial and humane portrayal of the 

“I wanted it (the Igbo tribe) to be seen with all its grandeur and weaknesses.”

Therefore, rather than casting them as the representatives of an “

” race, Achebe carved his characters right out of the very soil of Africa and depicted them as members seeped into an intricate society of a complex civilization. A civilization that, just like any other human society, is not inert, so to speak, and has an organic existence that is profoundly shaped by values and customs which are collectively held.

It is crucial to point out here that despite the profoundly anti-colonial stance of the novel, Achebe never lets his imagination run partial so as to lead him to sentimentalize or patronize the 

 community. That is to say, Achebe writes about his native culture with deep empathy but never outright prejudice. He makes it a definitive point and bases his entire plot on this premise that the eventual fall of the tragic protagonist – 

 is, in part, because of their unacceptance of the inherent weaknesses they possessed which, ultimately, made them vulnerable in the face of foreign opposition.

Therefore, over the course of the narrative, the novel ends up questioning not only the dynamics of 

 but also the obsolete, and often self-demeriting practices of the clan itself, the 

 of Okonkwo, and his repudiation in admitting his own tender emotions and failings. Hence, the story, at a philosophical level, becomes a rumination on the tragic flaws that can be possessed by the noblest of men, like Okonkwo, and the most cohesive, well-functioning tribal society like that of Umuofia.

Thus, Achebe, in the very act of bringing stories from the remote and misconstrued land of Nigeria nearer to the world, concocts a faithful, complex, and representative story of the African tribes. He offers numerous pages giving detailed insights into the tribal ceremonies, their laws of the land, festivals, folklore, marriages, their sense of loss and pride, and also their limitations. In the process, he succeeds in altering our perspective, which was conditioned of yore by the European telling of African stories, for good.

Chinua Achebe’s ‘Things Fall Apart’ as a Narrative Altering the Distortions of Africa by the West

Born in the 16th- century, a time of religious orthodoxy and extensive feudalism, Mirabai was a poet who transcended the limits of gender, caste, marriage, faith, and her time to achieve a union with her God, her consort and her lover – Krishna.

“Sati na hosyan girdhar gansyam, mhara man moho ghanasyami”

(I will not commit Sati; my heart and soul belong to Ghanshyam)

 represents a revolutionary epoch that challenged the whole idea of Brahmanical orthodoxy and feudalism by popularizing devotional surrender or ‘bhakti’ to a personally conceived supreme God. It was subversive for its time because, as the Bhakti saints and poets radically philosophized – the idea of bhakti rests on the core belief that a bhakta or devotee doesn’t need the means of organized religion, like priests, temples, rites, and rituals regarding the caste system and gender differences, to achieve moksha. The path to salvation, according to them, was, thus, a personal quest that was based entirely on one’s deeds in this world or karma and not, as was monopolized by the feudal lords, on one’s caste, gender, or faith 

Besides being a time of immense social change, the age of the Bhakti movement, quite fascinatingly, also represents an age of tremendous literary output with poetic giants like 

 writing ecstatic poetry to give vent to their progressive philosophies. It is evident, as the intrepid voice of a woman, in the poetry and philosophy of the radical and defiant Bhakti poet Mirabai, who believed in religious equality and identified herself, despite being a 

 by birth, with the sufferings of the lowly and the downtrodden.

 by birth, and her family folks were worshippers of 

 influence which had a lifelong impact on her. She was a powerful proponent of Vaishnava bhakti and composed thousands of verses and poetry set to music, called 

 – an incarnation of Vishnu. And it was this resolute devotion towards Krishna, her God, her consort, and her lover, that gave Mira the strength to go against the inhibitions that society and even her family put in her way. She writes about this deep surrender in her poem, ‘

I am pale with the longing for my beloved

"Don’t address me by my name It’s the name of God that has wounded me. They (People) have sent for a country doctor; He grabs my arm and prods it; How can he diagnose my pain? It’s in my heart that I am afflicted."

We behold this spirit of fearless rebellion, time and again, in Mirabai’s work and life. For instance, as the legend says, Mira disagreed to perform 

, which was customary on the death of one’s husband, because she asserted herself to be married to Krishna, her ‘

’. She exclaimed her love for him as thus:

"Mere to Girdhar Gopal, doosra na koye" (I only belong to Krishna and no one else.) "Jaake sir mor mukut, mero pati soye" (He (Krishna) who has a peacock-feathered crown on his head. He is my companion.)

This unconventional stance of Mirabai is also evident when we find that she stood against the conventions of her time regarding caste rigidities and accepted 

; an untouchable, as her religious teacher, or when she wrote, in a tone of defiance, such powerful verses confronting the men of power and their conception of beauty:

"Thara desa mein Rana saadh nahin chhe, log base sab kudo" (In your kingdom Rana, the people are all garbage) "Gehna gaanthi Rana hum sab tyaga, tyaga karro chuudo" (I have renounced all jewelry and finery, even my wedding bangles) "Kajal teeki hum sab tyagya, tyagya hai bandhan judo" (I have renounced all makeup and stopped tying my hair too)

Moreover, it is important to realize that the very act of Mirabai writing poetry was revolutionary in itself. She was composing verses in an age where women were considered subordinate to men in all respects, even in spiritual worth, and were, therefore, deemed appropriate to follow men and not lead them in their worldly as well as religious pursuits. And in such a patriarchal world, Mirabai as we see, in her non-conformist way, wrote about the freedom and fulfillment she derived from taking a seat at the feet of her 

 who is also her beloved, and her audacious love which forced her to not budge from that place, despite the objections from society.

Naturally, her poetry also resonates with this kind of absolute surrender and purity which very few of us can imagine let alone reach. In turn, it was her devotion for Krishna that made her so simple and transparent that the inequalities, differences, and obstacles of the world or 

 appeared nothing but an illusion to her.

Her bhakti had, thus, washed all her misconceptions and prejudices about the world, to such an extent, that she had gone beyond the petty barriers of caste, personal ego, and further ahead of caring how she looked or was perceived by the world. And it is because of this divine and humane love which Mira embodies that she becomes a poet of unity in discord, a spokesperson for the very equality of mankind, and a voice of dissent and devotion.

Articles by Vinay Rajoria

On the Poetry of Shailendra: A Folk Poet of Hindustani Cinema

On Ambedkar and his many Distortions by the Hindu Mind

On the Poetry of Sahir Ludhianvi: The Personal and the Political

Chinua Achebe’s ‘Things Fall Apart’ as a Narrative Altering the Distortions of Africa by the West

On the Poetry of Mirabai: A Voice of Dissent and Devotion from the Bhakti Movement in India

On the Poetry of Shailendra: A Folk Poet of Hindustani Cinema

On Ambedkar and his many Distortions by the Hindu Mind

On the Poetry of Sahir Ludhianvi: The Personal and the Political

Chinua Achebe’s ‘Things Fall Apart’ as a Narrative Altering the Distortions of Africa by the West

On the Poetry of Mirabai: A Voice of Dissent and Devotion from the Bhakti Movement in India