Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-zzh7m Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-27T14:27:37.178Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Gandhi's Mira: Debating “Female” Suffering and the Politics of Iconography

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2024

Ritu Varghese*
Affiliation:
School of Social Sciences and Humanities, Vellore Institute of Technology, Andhra Pradesh (VIT-AP University), Andhra Pradesh, India
Akshaya K. Rath
Affiliation:
Indian Institute of Technology Bhubaneswar, Odisha, India
*
Corresponding author: Ritu Varghese; varghese.ritu.roy08@gmail.com

Abstract

During the first decades of the twentieth century when the Indian freedom struggle movement gained momentum, M. K. Gandhi often evoked Mirabai—the sixteenth-century bhakti poet-saint—in his public speeches and voluminous letters. This article demonstrates the degree to which Gandhi's maneuver fundamentally altered Mirabai's image as a national and cultural symbol, and how it prompted the mobilization of women in the larger nationalist movement. Through the process of appropriation, Mirabai's image evolved in the Indian cultural realm from a woman charged with promiscuity into an ideal “chaste” woman. Gandhi's intervention further initiated a moral renaissance parallel to the nationalist current where women transgressed the thresholds of traditional domesticity and became active agents of non-violent resistance—Hindu/spiritual in essence—inspired by Mirabai's suffering and compositions. Gandhi's Mira emerged as a literary-cultural hybrid that circulated in public spheres, as Mirabai became a public icon and a vehicle for women's emancipation alongside national liberation.

Type
Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Hypatia, a Nonprofit Corporation

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Alston, A. J. 1980. The devotional poems of Mīrābāī. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass.Google Scholar
Besant, Annie. 1906. Children of the motherland. Benares: Board of Trustees, Central Hindu College.Google Scholar
Bly, Robert, and Hirshfield, Jane. 2004. Mirabai: Ecstatic poems. New Delhi: Aleph.Google Scholar
Chaturvedi, Parshuram. 1966. Mirabai ki padavali. Prayag: Hindi Sahitya Sammelan.Google Scholar
Choudhury, Chaitali, and Rath, Akshaya K.. 2023. The mahatma and the eunuch: Brahmacharya education in Gandhian nationalism. Journal of Gender Studies 32 (7): 683–93. https://doi.org/10.1080/09589236.2022.2039104CrossRefGoogle Scholar
DiSalvo, Charles R. 1997. Gandhi: The spirituality and politics of suffering. Law Faculty Scholarship. https://heinonline.org/HOL/LandingPage?handle=hein.journals/okcu22&div=10&id=&page= [Accessed on 10 March 2022].Google Scholar
Emilsen, William W. 1987. Gandhi and Mayo's “Mother India.” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 10 (1): 6981. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00856408708723094CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Freire, Paulo. 1970. Pedagogy of the oppressed. New Delhi: Penguin.Google Scholar
Gandhi, M. K. 1942. Women and social injustice. Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing House.Google Scholar
Gandhi, M. K. 1999. The complete works of Mahatma Gandhi. New Delhi: Publications Division Government of India. https://www.gandhiashramsevagram.org/gandhi-literature/collected-works-of-mahatma-gandhi-volume-1-to-98.php [Accessed on 20 December 2021].Google Scholar
Gandhi, M. K. 2011. The story of my experiments with truth: An autobiography. Mumbai: Jaico.Google Scholar
George, T. J. S. 2016. M. S. Subbulakshmi: The definitive biography. New Delhi: Aleph.Google Scholar
Harlan, Lindsey. 1992. Religion and Rajput women: The ethic of protection in contemporary narratives. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Hawley, John Stratton. 1994. Sati, the blessing and the curse: The burning of wives in India. New York: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hawley, John Stratton. 2005. Three bhakti voices: Mirabai, Surdas and Kabir in their times and ours. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Hawley, John Stratton, and Mann, Gurinder Singh. 2008. Mirabai in the Pothi Prem Ambodh. Journal of Punjab Studies 15(1–2): 199226.Google Scholar
Kakar, Sudhir. 2004. Mira and the mahatma. New Delhi: Penguin.Google Scholar
Kakar, Sudhir. 2008. Mad and divine: Spirit and psyche in the modern world. New Delhi: Penguin.Google Scholar
Kishwar, Madhu. 1985. Gandhi on women. Economic and Political Weekly 20(4): 16911702.Google Scholar
Kumar, Akshaya. 2007. Latter-day Meeras: From nationalist icon to subaltern subject. Indian Literature 51 (2): 176–95.Google Scholar
Kupfer, Joseph. 2007. Gandhi and the virtue of care. Hypatia 22 (3): 121.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Martin, Nancy. 2000. Mirabai in the academy and the politics of identity. In Faces of the feminine in ancient, medieval and modern India, ed. Bose, Mandakranta. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Martinez, Chloe. 2018. The autobiographical pose: Life narrative and religious transformation in the Mirabai tradition. South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 41 (2): 418–34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mukta, Parita. 1994. Upholding the common life: The community of Mirabai. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Nabhadas. 1914. Bhaktamal. Bombay: Hariprasad Bhagirath.Google Scholar
Nandy, Ashis. 2005. Final encounter: The politics of the assassination of Gandhi. In Exiled at home: Comprising, at the edge of psychology, the intimate enemy, creating a nationality. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Priyadas. 1914. Bhaktirasabodhini. Bombay: Hariprasad Bhagirath.Google Scholar
Rath, Akshaya K. 2018. Bhakti. Encyclopedia of women in world religions: Faith and culture across history, ed. de Gaia, Susan. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 316–20.Google Scholar
Ray, Mohit K. 2012. The religion of the forest. Selected essays: Rabindranath Tagore. New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers.Google Scholar
Ray, Raka, and Korteweg, A. C.. 1999. Women's movements in the third world: Identity, mobilization, and autonomy. Annual Review of Sociology 25: 4771.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sangari, Kumkum. 1990. Mirabai and the spiritual economy of bhakti. Economic and Political Weekly 25 (27): 1464–75.Google Scholar
Shekhawat, Kalyan Singh. 2019. Meera ki pramanik jivani. Jodhpur: Navbharat Prakashan.Google Scholar
Shetty, Sandhya, and Bellamy, Elizabeth Jane. 2000. Postcolonialism's archive fever. Diacritics 30 (1): 2548.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sinha, Mrinalini. 2000. Refashioning Mother India: Feminism and nationalism in late-colonial India. Feminist Studies 26 (3): 623–44.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Taft, Frances. 2002. The elusive historical Mirabai: A note. In Multiple histories: Culture and society in the study of Rajasthan, ed. Babb, Lawrence A., Joshi, Varsha, and Meister, Michael W.. Jaipur: Rawat Publications.Google Scholar
Tambe, Ashwini. 2009. Gandhi's “fallen” sisters: Difference and the national body politic. Social Scientist 37 (1–2): 2138.Google Scholar
Varghese, Ritu, and Rath, Akshaya K.. 2022. Mirabai and the ethic of universal suffering: Reading bhajans in Indian pedagogy. The Explicator 80 (1–2): 2428. https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2022.2048780CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Varghese, Ritu, and Rath, Akshaya K.. 2023. Mirabai in public spheres. Women's History Review 32 (5): 611–31. https://doi.org/10.1080/09612025.2023.2165775CrossRefGoogle Scholar