SOURCE: Bahadur, Krishna P. “Mira's Poetical Art.” In Mīrā Bāī and Her Padas, pp. 30-2. New Delhi, India: Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers, 1998.

In the following essay, Bahadur considers Mirabai's padas as lyrical poetry.

Mīrā's poetry may be termed lyrical verse, which, Earnest Rhys says, ‘is a form of musical utterance in words governed by overmastering emotion and set free by a powerfully concordant rhythm.’¹ In fact the lyric was sung to the accompaniment of the lyre. In some recensions Mīrā's songs are classified according to specific tunes (rāgas). This does testify to their musical quality, but it is very doubtful if she herself classified them under such heads. Quite possibly the editors of later anthologies arranged them that way. That they could do so shows, however, that they were more songs (gīta) than mere poetry (kavitā). This should not be taken to...