Bhakti as Radical Equality

Mirabai rejected the caste hierarchy and gender restrictions of her time, moving among all people and insisting that devotion transcends social status. Bhakti theology itself asserts that all hearts are equal before the divine. Applied to collective mourning, this means resisting the tendency to grieve some people more than others based on status, nationality, or proximity. Collective tragedies reveal hierarchy in our attention: we mourn celebrities more than frontline workers, locals more than distant others, wealthy nations' losses more than poor nations'. Mirabai's radical equality challenges us to examine whose deaths matter to us and why. True collective grief includes everyone: the forgotten, the marginalized, the distant. This isn't equally feeling every death—humans cannot—but consciously working against the hierarchies that make some deaths more mournable than others. Bhakti's egalitarian vision suggests grief can become a practice of recognizing equal worth.