- Lived:
- 1628, Devgaon Rangari, near Verul (Ellora) in northern Maharashtra → a childhood on the road → Kolhapur → Dehu, Tukārām's village → Shiur (Sheur), where she died in 1700
- Field:
- Bhakti saint-poet of the Varkari tradition of Maharashtra; disciple of Tukārām; the first known autobiographer among Indian women
- The Big Idea:
- A brahmin girl took a śūdra grocer as her guru and refused to give him up — through her husband's beatings and her community's threats of outcasting — and then did something no Indian woman had done before: she wrote her own life down, in verse, unsparingly, and called it testimony.
- In their words:
- "The Vedas cry aloud, and the Purāns shout that no good comes of a woman." (her own verse, in Justin Abbott's 1929 translation)
- If you remember one thing:
- Mīrā walked out of her marriage and became a legend; Bahiṇā stayed inside hers and became a witness — the woman who documented, from the inside, exactly what the institutions of caste and marriage did to a woman who wanted God and scripture, and whose written life is the first we have from any Indian woman's own hand.