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| Ujala (four months before Meera was born) |
I must first address a practical question, "What's in a name?". Something Shakespeare's Juliet asks too, while declaring her love for the person wearing 'Montague' name and not her love for the name itself. She says that a name is just a name, a convention with no meaning behind it. Today names are used as homage, tribute; tools to weaponize history, rewrite stories, reinvent glory, respect heritage and give meaning to an otherwise culturally-neutral act. They are now symbols of resistance, an act of decolonization, claim of identity and emotional investments in things which are close to our hearts. Had Juliet, the naïve teenager, been alive and not killed herself tragically for Romeo, she would have certainly said, "Why so serious?!" to all this!
Well, I agree, there is nothing in a name except the idea it reminds us of. Despite the aura and shadow of figures based on whom people would baptize themselves or their loved ones, the onus of exhibiting the virtue, the trait, the characteristic is on the individual being named. However, the name can act as an spiritual reminder, it can be pleasing to pronounce and thus a joy in itself, the chanting of it can send positive reverberations in universe and then it can be a way to commemorate someone's presence who no longer exists in our lives. I make my name a reminder for some selective traits that I would want my Meera to posses for eternity (and yet a blasphemous dissection of her life awaits as the next post). I choose the more aesthetic spelling, the Hindi vowel sound of her name (मीराबाई and not मिरा बाई ), which is the language closest to her compositions. The name is also easy and carries familiarity (Indian, Hindi, Hindu (Nirgun Dhara, Kabirpanthi), Kshatriya) with the identity I acquired at the blind lottery of birth. Not that I see that identity above others, in fact, alien, eccentric but coherent and established cultures fascinate me more than my own identity. However, out of all the identities I can create for myself I can best represent the one Ujala is well acquainted with.
Mira Bai was never my first choice but always a last recourse and thus I feel I owe an explanation to myself as well as to people who are going to call me 'Meera' hereafter. As a child I wanted to be Ram (not Sita, she was unimpressive to me), the powerful, upright, brave King who was loved and respected by all. Even as a grown up I could forgive him, after a short phase of anger and resentment, for the injustices he meted out to his pregnant wife. After all the Ramayana and his adventures, can there be an iota of doubt about his love for Sita? I now respect his sacrifice and the effective leadership he had always shown. I find his sacrifice at par if not greater than that of Sita. He wanted to uphold the dignity and respect of a principled king which is at peril when the subjects start questioning his character. This is something that leaders today can learn from him.
However, Ram as a name is too religiously colored. There is also an excessive amount of simplicity and responsibility attached to it. Something I know I would keep failing at in the 21st century. It is this thought that made me look up to another King who was not too much into leadership and propriety and yet came out as the wisest and coolest leader, Buddha! The rich, handsome, curly haired guy who wanted to be smart. Geez! He too was mean to Yashodhara but I am sure he would have realized and regretted that after enlightenment. After all, he did not know any better before it.
Buddha was perfect for me (as well as for this blog to be honest)! A Kshatriya prince giving up on his 29 years of privilege and comfort for so many questions whose answers he eventually found within himself. He spent the rest of his life sharing them with the world and has all the fundamental answers to any existential question I may ever ask. However, Buddha is too cool to match up with. His answers are simple but not easy. Although the world revers him as an spiritual intellect who humbled Kings and gave shelter, meaning and purpose to so many oppressed and outcastes, he did not have lived experience of anybody whom he helped. He was not imitable, a being who was all questions and answers, all philosophy. His aura was wisdom, calmness and meditation, his shadow was his ignorance before his self realization. It is him who made me realize that I must embrace my gender in my name and the struggles it entails to create an authentic identity.
This severely narrowed my choices. I did not have many role models to look up to but at the same time I realized that the figures I could name had even lesser imitable sheroes to even fangirl! Most of them had to garner tremendous courage and sacrifice respect, approval and sometimes even life to just find visibility, let alone glory! And then I found Meera, someone who outrightly rejected the glory and literally preferred being lunatic over it. Meera could have died as Sati, gained respect in her community by doing so and thus joined the league of those innumerable invisible women of history I can never learn or write about. She said, "Sati na hosya" (I won't be Sati). Yes guys! That's what she said! and that changed everything, for #me too!
It is often believed that when women achieve a remarkable success or find glory in something which was previously considered an 'only men' domain, they do so by masculinizing themselves for the society. We all know "Khoob ladi 'Mardani'"( She fought quite man-like) for Queen Laxmi Bai and Razia who won't do Parda and wear man's cloth. Even today, we hear women players getting mastectomies to improve performances or women in other fields desexualizing themselves by various means to excel in their fields. Kiran Bedi, the first IPS officer of India (who was being offered IAS on account of her being female, a patronage she refused) was once asked in an interview about her masculinization, like short hairs and gender neutral dressing and its role in her career. It is pathetic that even in 21st century, we expect to see people in feminine or masculine binaries playing into some hybrid gender roles and do not strive for wholesomeness in our persona, irrespective of our biology. Dr. Kiran gave a similar reply. She pointed out that although she was indeed better than her many male counterparts in physical stamina and competence, the femininity she bought in the police services is often undermined and less talked about, for eg. Prison reforms in India brought about by her for which she received the Raman Magsaysay award, changed the way prisoners were treated and looked at in India. She added sensitivity, emotions and motherly care in policing not seen anywhere in the world before.
I find this same wholesomeness in Meera. She has the obduracy, resilience and audacity of a man and at the same time she leverages her femininity to reach higher dimensions in spirituality, bhakti and poetry. In an age when women were chained to thousands of restrictions, she claimed her space challenging all masculinity which dared to control her conduct. She would go out, make lower caste male friends, sing and dance publicly and spend her days in the ecstasy of bhakti and poetry not caring about any censorship. It is unfortunate that the freedom she achieved could not be shared with other women of her time, even by those whose families respected Meera. She became an extraordinary woman and thus her freedom too became extraordinary and exceptional. Meera through Mira Bai's aura and shadow in her name wishes to make her and her freedom ordinary.
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