Mīrā's "Earliest" Song and Her Images in History and Hagiography

This essay revisits the scholarly consensus about the "earliest" song and early images of Mīrā-the sixteenth-century Rajput noblewoman who is a leading female voice in north Indian devotional (bhakti) movements. I show that what scholars have considered as Mīrā's oldest extant poem-recorded in the Kartarpur manuscript of 1604, which culminated in the making of the Sikh Guru Granth Sāhib-has a different history of recension in the devotional sects of Rajasthan. In the early seventeenth-century manuscripts of the Dādūpanth, the same poem is not attributed to Mīrā but to Sukhānand, one of the twelve disciples of Rāmānand- the first Guru of the major Rām devotional sect of north India. Various possible explanations for this double attribution will be explored, and the question asked: What do the varied attributions of Mīrā's "earliest" song tell us about the growth of a Mīrā corpus and the multiple Mīrās as represented in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century hagiographies that emerged from her own region

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