Meera

16th-century Hindu mystic poet and devotee of Krishna

She wrote the words of a 1979 film and died some time around 1547.

Gulzar's Meera takes her life - a princess of Medta married into Chittor, who would not pretend to belong to a household that worshipped Devi and made war, who sang to Krishna in public, who was declared a traitor for accepting a gift from Akbar, and who was sentenced to drink poison in open court - and sets her own verse to music by Ravi Shankar.

So the songs in the film are not about Meerabai. They are hers. Vani Jairam sings them, and won the Filmfare for Mere To Giridhar Gopal.

Fourteen of the recordings in this catalogue carry her name as the writer, which makes a sixteenth-century Rajput poet one of the better-represented lyricists on the site. Her padas survive in several recensions across Rajasthani, Braj and Gujarati, and what is actually hers and what accrued to her name over four centuries is a question scholars have not settled and probably cannot.

Dates and credits from Wikidata.