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

This essay revisits the scholarly consensus about the "earliest" song and early images of Mira-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 Mira's oldest extant poem-recorded in the Kartarpur manuscript of 1604, which culminated in the making of the Sikh Guru Granth Sahib-has a different history of recension in the devotional sects of Rajasthan. In the early seventeenth-century manuscripts of the Dadupanth, the same poem is not attributed to Mira but to Sukhanand, one of the twelve disciples of Ramanand- the first Guru of the major Ram 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 Mira's "earliest" song tell us about the growth of a Mira corpus and the multiple Miras as represented in the seventeenth-and eighteenth-century hagiographies that emerged from her own region?