Becoming in the Company of the Bhaktas: Expanding Gender and Self with Mirabai

The power of exemplary women from the past in the devotional (bhakti) traditions of Hinduism operates in participatory communal practices of story and song that attend them, their identities and voices relational and labile even as those of practitioners are, particularly in the case of the immensely popular sixteenth-century Krishna devotee Mirabai. This paper will argue that people’s continuing engagement with her story and songs reveal significant ways that such women open up alternative possibilities beyond normative gendering and facilitate the development of more expansive selves for both men and women devotees (bhaktas).  Through practices of singing and importantly also composing songs in her name as well as stories about her, people find their own voices, forge community, and craft alternate selves beyond socially prescribed identities and valuations. Such an approach offers an important avenue for comparative study when the lives and words of such women themselves are irretrievable.