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Ustād Ahmad Lāhaurī

A figure from the books

#UstadAhmadLahauri

Ustād Ahmad Lāhaurī · c. 1580–1649

In the books · 1 chapter

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Who this is

Bhakti saint-poet of the Varkari tradition of Maharashtra; disciple of Tukārām; the first known autobiographer among Indian women.

“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.”
— The Great Indians, Ch. 148

The big idea, in the book's words:

“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.”
— The Great Indians, Ch. 148

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