Breaking the Spell: Quest for Enlightenment of Mirabai and Tulsidas

This book is about the world of Bhakti created by Mirabai and Tulsidas who loved God more than life itself. True, our culture owes its shape to plenty of other forces, but nothing matches the impact of great saints whose verses created several centuries ago are recited even today in the beginning of the twenty-first century! No Indian woman of her period in any medium was greater than Mirabai. That she was a widow who matter. That she was a widow who refused to commit sati-self immolation on the funeral-pyre of her husband-did not matter. That she threw her royal attire and clad in cotton danced in the streets, princess and daughter-in-law of the great Rana Sanga-none of this mattered then. What matters today, as centuries back, is that she left behind a body of lyrics and bhajans that teach us in a methods, subtle, flexible and unique, her immortal message of love. Writing, poetry in vernacular and rewriting in a local dialect the celebrated Valmiki’s sacred and Sanskrit Ramayana were not only unnatural acts but also regarded sacreligious by orthodox elements. This was blasphemy, both cultural and literary, to the contemporaries. The enormous courage, patience, skill and meticulous mental and emotional processes that allowed Tulsidas to hold the torch of his Ramcharitmanas through the centuries, have inspired Vincent Smith to say that Tulsidas was “the greatest man of his age in India and greater even that Akbar himself, in as much as the conquest of the hearts and minds of millions of men and women affected by the poet was an achievement infinitely more lasting and important that any or all the victories gained in war by the monarch.” Breaking the Spell: quest for enlightenement of Mirabai and Tulsidas is an important study on the Bhakti Movement, carefully researched and written with verve to be understood even by a general readership. This book vividly portrays two ‘impossible saints’ and shows that emergence of Mirabai and Tulsidas was not just a significant event in the Bhakti Movement of medieval India but rather part of the continuing assimilation and alteration in the scale of Indian life.