Love has coloured me mad: The wild devotion of Mirabai

Poetic Disobedience Part 7

For part 6 of Poetic Disobedience, we sat with Rabia al-Basri, a woman who burned with love for the divine and refused to shape her life around the world’s expectations.

This week, we follow that thread eastward, to 16th-century India, where another woman born into nobility broke with convention to live and love on her own terms. Like Rabia, the Rajasthani mystic and poet Mirabai refused to serve the social roles assigned to her.

But where Rabia retreated into divine stillness, Mirabai danced. She sang her defiance, turning poetry into a wild, embodied devotion.

What unites these two mystics across time, geography and religious tradition is their unwavering love for the divine, and their refusal to separate that love from the business of living. Both were exiled. Both were relentless. And both remind us that the most dangerous thing a woman can do is love God directly, without waiting for an outer authority’s permission.