Mīrābāī
A figure from the books
#Mirabai
Mīrābāī · c. 1498–1547
In the books · 1 chapter
Who this is
Queen of the Chowta dynasty of Ullal — Jain rulers of a small Tulu Nadu port — and leader of some four decades of armed resistance to the Portuguese at sea.
“The earliest sustained Indian resistance to a European power was led from a port smaller than a modern suburb, by a woman, at the head of an alliance of Jains, Hindus and Muslims — and we know her through exactly two kinds of source: her enemy's ledgers and her people's songs.”
The big idea, in the book's words:
“A small trading port refused to buy the sea from the empire that claimed to own it. For most of a lifetime, a queen with fishing boats and fire-arrows made the Portuguese — masters of the Indian Ocean — pay for every attempt to collect.”
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