Résultats de "Mirabai" dans Littérature et fiction

Poetry has always provided comfort, inspiration, and connection, especially during socially precarious and politically divisive times. That has never been truer than it is today. The Wild Edge of the Heart: Women Poets Raise Their Voices presents the work of some of our leading contemporary female poets who are lauded for their ferocity, sensitivity and eloquence.

Whilst the notion of the Mystic East and Oriental wisdom was greatly romanticised by the Victorians and others, the shadow of Colonialism has smudged the view. These great cultures are some of humanity’s earliest, their works, their art some of its most daring and most accomplished. In these 50 poems across 50 poets we hope, at least in part, to rebalance our view of this subject. We begin in the 6th century BC and travel with a poet’s words and eyes across India, China, Persia and many other places in between.

Mirabai was a Rajput princess born to the Rathore clan in 1498 in Kudaki, Rajasthan, in northern India. Despite being one of the most significant saints in the Bhakti tradition and an immensely popular Hindu mystic and religious poet, very few facts are actually known about her life including her date of birth. It is clear that her mother died when she was very young and she was greatly influenced by her father, also a worshipper of Krishna. From a young age, Mirabai’s devotion to Krishna was absolute surrender and complete devotion.

Whilst Europe endured the Dark Ages in the 6th & 7th Centuries, devotees of Shiva and Vishnu in Southern India were creating the Bhakti Movement. Some of these exponents, as in our volume, were bestowed with the title of saint but some had the additional title of sant, swami or goswami. Broadly speaking, Bhakti poetry, as in Hinduism itself, is divided into ‘Nirguna’, the idea that the divine is formless as exampled by Kabir and ‘Saguna’, which interprets the divine as having physical form as captured by Mirabai.