The traditional life of Mirabai is a story of refusal. A Rajput princess, married into the ruling house of Mewar, she declares that she has only one husband and that he is Krishna, and she declines the duties of a royal wife: she will not worship the family goddess, she sings and dances in public temples with whoever is there regardless of caste, and she keeps the company of wandering devotees.
Her marital family, in the standard telling, tries to kill her. A cup of poison is sent, which she drinks as consecrated offering and survives. A basket said to contain flowers holds a snake, which is a garland when she opens it. Eventually she leaves altogether, going to Vrindavan, the country of Krishna's childhood, and then to Dwarka, where the accounts end with her disappearing into the image in the temple.
The songs attributed to her are what carried the story. They are direct, sung in the first person, and they use the vocabulary of a woman in love who does not care who knows: dark one, I am sold to you; the world says I have gone mad; let them say it. The refusal in them is double, of a marriage and of the social order that arranged it, and it is made in a register that religion permitted where nothing else would have.