Mirabai
Mirabai was a poet who lived in 16th-century north India and wrote in Braj Bhasa, a premodern literary dialect of Hindi. She is considered a saint by many Hindus. Her poems express intense, often eroticized, devotion to the god Krishna, as well as complaints about god’s absence or inaccessibility. She voices fierce resistance to social conventions that might limit her, such as those of gender and caste. Originally sung and shared orally, these poems were eventually gathered into anthologies and remain popular in India today, where Mira has been the subject of films, plays, books, music, and visual art.