Dr. Abdul Ahad
Lal Ded, or Lalleshwari, belongs to that rare category of historical personalities whom succeeding generations have interpreted through different religious traditions without exhausting their significance. The fourteenth-century Kashmiri mystic-poet is remembered by Kashmiri Pandits as Lalleshwari and in Muslim tradition as Lalla Arifa. Yet the historical Lal Ded should not be reconstructed simply through these later identities. Her vakhs present a spiritual quest that questions the efficacy of external ritual when it is unaccompanied by inner realisation.
Her criticism could embrace alike the mullah absorbed in outward observance and the Brahman engrossed in ritual formalism. At the centre of her thought was the inward transformation of the self—through discipline of the breath, detachment, self-realisation and transcendence. Her mystical inheritance was rooted in the Shaivite spiritual world of Kashmir, although aspects of her teaching could later resonate with the Sufi vocabulary of spiritual annihilation and union.
Living Memory to Written Text
There is no single ‘discoverer’ of Lal Ded. She was not a forgotten poet whom modern scholarship suddenly brought back to history. Her vakhs continued to circulate in Kashmir for centuries through oral transmission. What modern scholarship recovered was principally the textual corpus of a poet whose words had remained alive in popular memory.
The sources, however, do not all possess the same historical value. The earliest known written reference is Baba Daud Mishkati’s Persian Asrar-ul-Abrar, composed in 1654—more than two centuries after Lal Ded. It establishes her presence in the seventeenth-century religious memory of Kashmir, but cannot be treated as contemporary evidence of her life. The later Persian and vernacular hagiographies are valuable evidence for the growth of her reputation and the ways in which different communities remembered her, but must likewise be distinguished from contemporary testimony.
The vakhs themselves present a different problem. Their long oral transmission makes questions of wording, number and sequence difficult to settle. Collections traditionally associated with Bhaskar Razdan and later with Lakshman Kak preserve portions of the corpus, but variations between collections reflect the instability inherent in an orally transmitted text.
The nineteenth century introduced a new phase with the systematic collection of Kashmir’s manuscripts by European Orientalist scholars. Georg Buhler’s manuscript-collecting tour of 1875–76 was an important stage in this development and helped open Kashmir’s literary traditions to scholars such as Aurel Stein and George Grierson.
The decisive step in the modern textual recovery came in the early twentieth century. In 1914 Grierson asked Pandit Mukund Ram Shastri to search for a reliable text of the Lalla-Vakyani. Shastri eventually found Dharam Das Darvesh of Gush, an elderly reciter who had inherited the verses through family tradition. Shastri recorded them from his dictation and supplied the material to Grierson.
Grierson, working with Lionel D. Barnett, compared this material with other available sources and published Lalla-Vakyani, or The Wise Sayings of Lal Ded in London in 1920. Sir Richard Carnac Temple followed with The Word of Lalla the Prophetess in 1924.
The modern recovery was, therefore, cumulative: an oral tradition preserved in Kashmir, collections made by Kashmiri scholars, and subsequent philological work that assembled, compared, translated and printed the material. Kashmir had not forgotten Lal Ded; modern scholarship gave a written and international form to a memory that had remained alive.
Lalla Arifa and the Limits of the Evidence
The question of Lal Ded’s alleged conversion to Islam illustrates why the hierarchy of evidence matters.
The surviving evidence does not establish a formal conversion during her lifetime. Later Muslim hagiographical traditions associate her with Muslim saints and remember her as Lalla Arifa, and some explicitly describe her as having accepted Islam. These traditions are important evidence of how Lal Ded came to be understood within Muslim Kashmir, but they are not contemporary documentation of a conversion.
The Tazkirat al-Arifin, for example, places Lal Ded within a Muslim hagiographical framework and accords her considerable spiritual stature, but does not describe a conversion. The title Arifa, signifying a woman possessing spiritual knowledge or gnosis, likewise demonstrates reverence but cannot by itself establish a change of religious affiliation.
The historical position must, therefore, remain carefully bounded: Lal Ded’s spiritual vocabulary is rooted in the Shaivite milieu of medieval Kashmir; her later veneration as Lalla Arifa is well attested in Muslim tradition; but a formal conversion cannot presently be established as a historical fact. The absence of contemporary evidence does not prove that no conversion occurred; it means only that the claim cannot be stated with historical certainty.
The same distinction applies to the traditional association between Lal Ded and Nund Rishi. Kashmiri memory accords her an important spiritual influence upon him, but the precise circumstances of their relationship belong to a later tradition and cannot be reconstructed with the same confidence as the tradition itself.
The Lal Ded of Popular Imagery
The problem of later interpretation is equally visible in the way Lal Ded is represented.
She is often portrayed in modern calendar art as a twentieth-century Kashmiri Pandit woman in a pheran, with a red belt, dejahor and Pandit kasaba. Such imagery may be culturally familiar, but it is historically anachronistic. What was not available to the fourteenth-century Lal Ded was also the specific chromatic range in which she is often depicted today—the bright, uniform, high-chroma reds, purples, magentas and electric blues of the long tunic, belt and kasaba. The problem, therefore, is not simply that the costume belongs to a later period; the entire visual language belongs to a much later imagination.
Lal Ded belonged to the fourteenth century, and traditional accounts describe her, after renouncing household life, as a wandering yogini detached from ordinary conventions of dress and social existence. Some accounts portray her in rags or without conventional clothing; another remembers her walking naked with pieces of cloth thrown over her shoulders.
Her famous vakh concerning nakedness belongs to this larger ethic of renunciation. The issue was not simply clothing but the rejection of outward appearance as a measure of spiritual identity.
To dress such a figure retrospectively in the costume of a much later Kashmiri Pandit woman, therefore, does more than introduce an error of chronology. It changes the meaning of the image. The wandering yogini who had rejected conventional social identity becomes an emblem of conventional community womanhood.
Lal Ded as a Luxury Image
An altogether different question arises from the representation of Lal Ded on an elaborately painted pashmina shawl, reportedly valued at a price beyond the means even of the wealthy.
There is nothing inherently objectionable in portraying a revered mystic through a work of fine craftsmanship, nor does the commercial value of an artwork by itself invalidate its cultural or artistic significance. The issue is rather the tension that emerges when the image of a mystic renowned for renunciation becomes part of an exceptionally valuable luxury object.
The Lal Ded depicted on the shawl is a serene, seated mystic, surrounded by waves and lotuses and presented almost as a religious icon. Her forehead mark, dress, head covering and surrounding imagery give the representation a distinctly Hindu visual character. It is, therefore, both a work of artistic interpretation and a statement about how the modern imagination chooses to see her.
The irony lies in the contrast between this material form and an important strand of Lal Ded’s teaching. Her vakhs repeatedly turn the seeker away from attachment to outward forms and possessions and towards the truth within. To place her image upon an object whose exceptional monetary value is part of its identity inevitably creates a tension between the ascetic and the luxury object.
But the tension should not be mistaken for a condemnation of the artwork. The shawl may be admired as craftsmanship, preserved as cultural heritage and valued as an expression of contemporary Kashmiri artistic tradition. What deserves scrutiny is the transformation that occurs when the representation of a renunciant acquires meanings determined as much by aesthetics, identity and the marketplace as by the philosophy of the woman represented.
Rediscovering Lal Ded
Lal Ded does not need to be rescued from oblivion so much as recovered from the layers of interpretation that have accumulated around her.
The historian’s task is to keep those layers distinct: the vakhs and the spiritual world they reveal; the oral tradition through which they survived; the later hagiographies that illuminate her reception; and the modern images that have refashioned her according to the expectations of their own age.
This distinction does not diminish Lal Ded. It restores her complexity.
She emerges as a fourteenth-century Kashmiri mystic whose words survived without the protection of court, institution or canon; whose poetry passed through generations of oral transmission before entering the written record; and whose spiritual authority was subsequently recognised in more than one religious tradition.
The paradox of her afterlife is that every age has tried to make Lal Ded recognisable in its own image. The historian’s responsibility is different: not to make her conform to a later identity, but to recover, as faithfully as the evidence permits, the woman behind the accumulated representations.
Her vakhs are the strongest surviving testimony to that woman. They have outlived the circumstances in which they were uttered, the communities that transmitted them and the images subsequently created in her name.
What survives most securely, therefore, is not a claim to possession of Lal Ded, but her voice.
And perhaps that is the most appropriate way to rediscover her: not by deciding whom she belonged to, but by returning to what she actually left behind.
Dr Ahad is a well-known author and historian, and a household name in Kashmir
