On “Mira’s Colors”

Mirabai (or Mira) was a woman who lived in Rajasthan, in modern-day North India, in the late fifteenth to early sixteenth centuries. A poet and devotee of the Hindu god Krishna, she is one of the most important of India’s bhakti poet-saints: charismatic figures who expressed devotion and critiqued religious hypocrisy in poems that were sung, passed around orally, and sometimes written down. These poets used vernacular languages (Braj Bhasha, in this case, a predecessor of modern Hindi) rather than classical languages such as Sanskrit, and spoke to ordinary people.

Mira’s life was one of rebellion against social norms, making her the subject of harsh critiques during her lifetime. She claimed Krishna as her only lover, rejecting her status both as a Rajput noblewoman and as a wife to wander with other devotees. When her relatives, horrified, tried to kill her, Krishna miraculously protected Mira from poison and a venomous snake.

We don’t have any manuscripts that can be traced back to Mira’s lifetime, but this poem is one of many that bear her chaap (“seal, stamp, imprint”)—her name, incorporated into the final couplet (“Mira says”). The first line of the poem is a refrain when sung; for the page, I’ve treated it more like an echo, threading different translations of the line though the poem in italics. The color with which Mira is “dyed dark” refers to Krishna, who is known as dark-skinned or blue-skinned. Color is also, of course, metaphorical here: it represents being immersed in, and suffused with, god.