Medieval bhakti poetry inverted the Dharmaśāstra discipline model, replacing the rod with maternal love

Evidence

Vraja-Mathura. The Yamuna riverbank. Sometime in the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century. A Rajput princess of Mewar — Mīrābāī, the daughter of Ratan Singh of Merta — sits on the ghat composing devotional poetry in Brajbhāṣā Hindi, Marwari, and Gujarati. Her poems — what the subsequent Hindi-Vaiṣṇava tradition will call Mīrābāī ke Pad — articulate a child-Krishna-devotional framework that turns the Dharmaśāstra model upside down. Where the Manusmṛti positions the guru as disciplinary authority over the student, the bhakti tradition positions the devotee as a mother cradling the divine child. The pedagogical direction reverses. The rod disappears. Love replaces it. — , The Rod and the Child, 3800

Categorization

• DEFINE: Names Mīrābāī and locates her turn against the Manusmṛti’s guru-as-disciplinarian framework — key to situating the bhakti counter-tradition.
• XREF: connects to: Bhakti offered colonial intellectuals a democratizing, anti-Brahminical medieval inheritance — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 1193