Mira Bai (born c. 1500) is lauded as the preeminent pre-modern female poet in Hindi literature and continues to be an immensely popular poet-saint of bhakti, the devotional strand of Hinduism. She is remembered as a woman who disregarded the social norms of her gender, caste, and class, instead fearlessly singing and dancing in public and keeping company with people of all levels of society, despite repeated attempts by male family members to silence and confine her, even to kill her. The poetic corpus associated with her is vast, with songs articulating her utter devotion to Krishna, her refusal to embrace the role of wife to any man, and her solidarity with all those who suffer violence in oppressive social relations. However, it is virtually impossible to separate those songs that might have been actually composed by this sixteenth-century woman from those marked by the improvisations and innovations of innumerable subsequent performers and poets. Yet in being sung in her name, these songs carry the weight of her character and legendary life experience, authorizing others also to find their own voices in hers and to speak of their own lives and hard-won wisdom and inspiring many, especially women, to craft lives of independence and devotion both within and beyond the confines of marriage.