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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2024

Ritu Varghese Open the ORCID record for Ritu Varghese [Opens in a new window]  and
Akshaya K. Rath
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; [email protected]
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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
Information
Hypatia , Volume 39 , Issue 2 , Spring 2024 , pp. 385 - 401
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Hypatia, a Nonprofit Corporation

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