Reimagining devotional practice as active repair of the social and material world, not escape from it—extending Mirabai's tradition beyond personal salvation.
Bhakti is often understood as personal devotion to the divine, but Mirabai's life shows bhakti as inseparable from social transformation. She defied caste through her freedom, challenged patriarchy through her autonomy, and used her poetry as testimony against hypocrisy. For anticipatory grief, bhakti becomes a framework for civilizational repair work. How do we love our civilization into transformation? Not through detached activism but through devoted attention to what is broken and what endures. Repair work—ecological restoration, community building, skill transmission, conflict resolution, art-making—becomes devotional when done with full presence and love for the whole. Bhakti-as-repair rejects the false binary between personal practice and social action. A person tending their garden with full presence, a teacher shaping young minds with integrity, an elder transmitting wisdom, an artisan creating with care—these are devotional acts of civilizational repair. Mirabai teaches that such work is not auxiliary to 'real' activism; it is the substance of civilizational continuity and the ground where authentic change becomes possible.
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