Her praxis, as her poetic corpus reveals, is rooted in the Saivate
tradition and equally influenced by Islamic mysticism.
Amir Suhail Wani
“Biography as we know it is a modern invention and the fact that we think it important to know the details of people’s personal lives tells us more about ourselves than about them”.
— William Chittick
“The biography of a poet, arguably, is insignificant, because he should be known through his poetry.”
— Sabyasachi Bhattacharya
Mystics, seers and sages are the earthly equivalents of the sun and stars in more than one way. The Gospel of John notes, “Believers are simply in the world – physically present – but not of it, not part of its values”. The universal appeal, cosmopolitan content and all-encompassing nature of their message, like the light from candles in the sky, is prior and paramount to the historicity and specifics of their lives. The very ambiguity and mystery characterizing them hinges their life accounts between history and hagiography with their lives possessing more of a mythical importance (myth as understood by philosophers and anthropologists like Lucien Bruhl, Mircea Eliade, and others) and archetypal significance (archetype as understood in Jungian psychology) than the mere sequence of mundane events characterizing their corporeal existence. They defy proprietorship and shriek at the idea of being confined to the categories of religion, geography, and time.
The mystic is neither of the East nor the West, but belongs to all the directions, dimensions and denominations of the cosmos. They are itinerates of salvation and liberation and for all times and climes, their radiance reaches everywhere, illuming the hearts and minds of all those spiritual seekers who seek enlightenment. Man’s spiritual quest is found in all cultures and geographies. Wherever there is spirit, there exists the phenomenon of spiritual enlightenment. This process of enlightenment, characterised by different nomenclatures in different cultures like Moksa, Nirvana, Fana, or Satori only bears upon the universalism of this journey and the ubiquity of seekers.
Lalla Ded/ Lalleshwari/Lalla Yogeshwari/Lalla Arifa, the Kashmiri mystic poetess of the 14th century is a paradigmatic figure amidst these explorers of spiritual geography. Sir Richard Carnac recounts her titles like Lalla Ded, Lalla Didi, Mai Lalla Diddi, Lalla Yogishwari, as if bringing the Arabic proverb to life: “In the plurality of titles is the popularity of man”. For centuries, Lalla Ded, along with her junior mystic Sheikh ul Aalam have been flag bearers of Kashmir’s syncretism, religious pluralism and mutual respect for “the other”. However, in this era of identities and ideologies, the growing ideological contestations have split Lalla Ded (The Granny Lalla) between her Hindu identity of Laleshwari and the Muslim imagery of Lalla Arifa. The truth seems to have escaped the reach of adherents of Saivism on the one hand who reject all influences of Sufism on Lalla and the Muslim enthusiasts on the other hand who want to discount all of Lalla’s Saivite heritage. This has not only resulted in historical distortion but ironic pigeon-holing of the universal spirit and spirituality of Lalla Ded who fought systematisation, compartmentalisation and codification of spirituality throughout her life.
Ranjit Hoskote laments this sectarian construal of Lalla – “It is true that Lal Ded was constructed differently by each community, but she was simultaneously Lalleśvarī or Lalla Yogini to the Hindus and Lal-arifa to the Muslims; today, unfortunately, these descriptions are increasingly being promoted at the expense of one another”. On closer look, her life emerges as a moving testimony to conquering ideological dichotomies and transcending the narrow boundaries of the “self and the other” that only impede man’s ascent to transcendence and are a product of man’s religious and spiritual chauvinism projected onto the infinite canvas of cosmic non-duality.
It is therefore a travesty to tailor Lalla Ded to our finite and shrinking ideological frames rather than trying to ascend to the loftiness of her art and thought and to bear witness to creative unity that’s not only the central import of her poetry, but also the essence of mysticism – Eastern and Western. Lalla says:
“Who sees Self as Other, Other as Self,
who sees day as night, night as day,
whose mind does not dance between opposites,
he alone has seen the Teacher
who is First among the Gods”
— translated by Ranjit Hoskote.
A search for historical Lalla
It is surprising and in some ways mysterious that Lalla’s contemporary Hindu historians like Jonaraja, Srivara and others didn’t mention Lalla in their works. Dean Accardi notes, “The first people to write about Lal Ded were not Rishı Sufıs, but members of the Suhrawardi Sufi Order” (Orientalism and the Invention of Kashmiri Religion(s)). Khawar Khan Achakzai in his article mentions three reasons for the omission of Lal Ded from early history,
Pandit ‘Historians were Chroniclers of States and Kingdoms, and their scope was limited as far as the record of common events was concerned.
Lalla wrote and spoke in Kashmiri. She appealed to the poor and downtrodden peasants in the language they could understand and relate to, a language, which was considered “Aprabhamsa”, non-literary, inferior and largely inconsequential, by the elite historians.
The last and the most plausible reason for the Pandit chroniclers’ disinclination to give Lalla a place in their books was that she had thrown all conventional respectability of a caste-based community to the winds and was considered a renegade by the high-caste Brahmans.
Lalla’s heterodoxy, her opposition to exploitative religious structures and strictures and Kashmir’s patriarchal historiography deferred her entry into historical chronicles and it is only in the 16th century that we find her mention in Mulla Ali Raina’s Tadhkiratul Arifeen followed by a mention in Baba Daud Mishkati’s Asrar-Ul-Akbar. It was three centuries later in 1736 that Khwaja Azam Diddamari’s Tarikh-I-Azmi gives her detailed account. This historical absence has led some to speculate that a figure named Lalla never existed in reality, but is just a figment of Kashmir’s collective subconscious. Given the mass of folk evidence, the pervasion and profusion with which Lalla has seeped into Kashmiri culture and acted as its chief definer and prime marker, the collective memory of the whole nation preserving her life and teachings and the ubiquity of her poetry makes such claims fall flat.
Sir Richard Carnac Temple notes, “Though much legend has clustered around the name of Lalla, little is really known about her. All that can be affirmed of her is that she certainly existed and that she lived in the 14th century of the Christian era…”. Sir George Grierson, the earliest foreign researcher on Lalla writes, beautifully, “The ancient Indian system by which literature is recorded not on paper but on the memory, and carried down from generation to generation of teachers and pupils, in still in complete survival in Kashmir. Such fleshy tables of the heart are often more trustworthy than birch-bark or paper manuscripts”.
This culture of orality where fluid spoken word was more prevalent than the fixed canonical manuscript deliberately allowed precedence over the fixity of text. This actually reflected the preference for the metaphysics of presence (enacted through the agency of the speaker) as opposed to the metaphysics of absence/remoteness as enforced by canonizing in a rigid and fixed codex. This oral culture also allowed for parallel rendering and the simultaneous construction of pluricentric images of Lalla and left an abundant space for dissenters and those who would have differed from the mainstream version of her poetry. The social and anthropological aspect of this oral recitation is that it acted like a living elan in the lives of Kashmiri people etching the throbbing message of Vaakhs to their lives and minds instead of confining it to some book decorated in an Almira with which they could have had no existential or social contact.
The homogenisation of her poetic corpus, effected by print media under the patronage of modern scholarly standards, as Accardi reminds us doesn’t seem to have been effected without a hidden political /ideological intent. Back to Lalla’s historic existence, The Great Ages of Man, a scholarly work on events of significance published in America has a volume dedicated to Historic India and there is only a single entry pertaining to the 14th century India, “A Kashmiri poetess Lalla writing on Shaivism”. Lalla’s junior contemporary and the patron saint of Kashmir Sheikh Noor Ud Din Wali, who is considered Lalla’s successor in Kashmir’s Risi tradition pays a resounding tribute to Lalla when he writes:
“The Lalla of Padmanpora
Gulped the nectar of Gnosis
Beheld Shiva with her eyes
God! Bless me with the same bounty”
— Translation by the author.
This poem, in its extended version, is incorporated into Moti Lal Saqi’s version of Kalam-I-Sheikh-Ul-Aalam. These intertextual and abundant references from scholars, near contemporaries and historians of repute are sufficient to substantiate that the mystic poetess Lalla Ded lived in Kashmir in the 14th century – notwithstanding that her construal and reception might have metamorphosed across this time scale. The details of her life have reached us via folklore and later sources summarized here with the caveat that some of the facts, as pointed out by Temple, seem to be later-day insertions and interpolations.
Her life
The precise details of Lalla’s birth and death are shrouded in uncertainty. Scholars, based on historical accounts and folklore, suggest she was born around 1301 or between 1317 and 1320, possibly in Sempore near Pampore or Pandrenthan near Srinagar. Her death is believed to have occurred in 1373, but the location remains unclear, as the grave in Bijbehara attributed to her appears to be of much later origin. The story of her early life has transformed into a familiar tale of a young woman with spiritual ambitions who was misunderstood.
Born into a Brahmin family, Lalla married at the customary age of 12, joining a family in Pampore. Though given the name Padmavati, she continued to identify as Lalla. Her marriage, however, was far from happy; her husband, suspicious of her spiritual pursuits and visits to shrines, treated her cruelly, while her mother-in-law often subjected her to starvation. This challenging period in her life gave rise to the famous Kashmiri saying, “Whether they kill a ram or a sheep, Lalla will get a stone to eat.”
At the age of 26, Lalla chose to leave her home and family behind to seek the teachings of the Saiva saint Sed Boyu (Siddha Srikantha), who accepted her as a disciple and guided her on the spiritual path. After completing her initiation, Lalla set off as a wandering ascetic, following the traditional path of the parivrajika (a female ascetic or renunciant in Indian religious traditions). It is believed that during this period, she began to compose her thought-provoking and powerful poetry in the form of four-liners now known as “Lalla Vaakhs”. The account of Lalla’s life, as it appears in various texts like that of Mishkati, Temple, Hoskote, and Jaya Lal Koul, seems to inform that she spent her life according to the strict fourfold division of life as prescribed by and described in the Bhagavadgita. This is in opposition to the common but misconceived notion that she renounced the world ab initio. These stages include:
Brahmacharya: The student stage
Grihastha: The householder stage
Vanaprastha: The forest dweller stage
Sannyasa: The renouncer
Lalla perfectly fits into this schema, living under the tutelage of her father in her childhood, getting married and thereby holding the reins of the household at the age of 12, admitting herself to the discipleship of Sed Boyu in her twenties corresponding to forest-dwelling and finally renouncing the world in her thirties. It was at this time, in her thirties that Lalla started pouring her Vaakhs or wise sayings which were like flashing bursts of gnostic visualisations emerging from the crucible of her spiritually illuminated soul. Lalla says:
My Master gave me just one rule:
Forget the outside, get to the inside of things.
I, Lalla, took that teaching to heart.
From that day, I’ve danced naked.
— Translated by Ranjit Hoskote.
Temple, in his work “The Word of Lalla” has actually traced the influence of Bhagvatism on Kashmiri religious landscape, and therefore on Lalla. It was this system of thought with its particular method of Bhakti which gave Hindus the concept of personal God, identified as Isvara with Bhakti or unconditional love as the way and means of making contact with the God. This was in line with the spiritual aspirations of the masses as opposed to the impersonal theory of Brahman preached by Brahmanical Hinduism.
In the modern literally sense of the word, Lalla started to occupy the textual space in the early 20th century. Carnac Temple writes that, “In 1914, Sir George Grierson, a scholar, ethnographer and civil servant who had become the first Superintendent of the Linguistic Survey of India on its foundation in 1898, asked his friend and former colleague, Pandit Mukunda Rama Sastri, to locate a manuscript of Lalla’s poems. Failing to find a copy, Sastri consulted Pandit Dharma-dasa Darwesh, an ageing storyteller and reciter who lived in Gush, a village situated near the shrine of Sarada-pitha, now in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir. Darwesh dictated 109 of Lalla’s poems from memory and Sastri wrote them down. Adding a commentary, composed in Hindi and Sanskrit, he sent Grierson the manuscript”. Dean Accardi, however, alerts us to this process of canonisation by noting that “the first major English translation of poetry attributed to the 14th-century saint Lal Ded, reveals strategies employed by George Grierson, Lionel Barnett, and Mukund Ram Shastri to recast Lal Ded and the cultural heritage of Kashmir as exclusively Hindu. Contradicting the earliest depictions of Lal Ded in 16th-century Persian hagiographies, the Lalla-Vakyani was instrumental to the modern invention of Kashmiri Saiva Hinduism as the true religion and culture of Kashmir completely devoid of any connection – religious, historical, or social – with Islam, simultaneously serving Orientalist agendas and politics of the Dogra court”.
It is Pertinent to mention here that Ranjit Hoskote has divided the historic relay of Lalla’s poetry into three phases: “The line of transmission by which Lalla’s poems achieved publication may be traced as a three-stage relay. It begins in the realm of the oral, with the text of the vākhs being woven by various Kashmiri village reciters, Hindu and Muslim, using Kashmiri in a space of relative freedom and play. These demotic recitations dramatise Lalla’s importance as an incarnation of compassion, commonsense knowledge and resistance to authority. The relay then passes to the realm of the scribal with the oral text being subordinated to the more annotative and hieratic approach of Kashmiri Brahmin compilers and commentators who, using Sanskrit and Hindi, emphasise Lalla’s philosophical convictions and draw traditional moral conclusions from her often unorthodox teachings. The relay culminates in the realm of print, when the scribal text is codified and formatted within the protocols of modern scholarship by compilers and editors: at first by the colonial scholar-administrator using English, followed by South Asian scholars using English, Kashmiri, Urdu and Hindi”. According to Dean Accardi, this was also the time when she was assigned a new role or identity, which might actually conflict with her “lived life,” as suggested by her rebellious and revolutionary lifestyle.
Lalla’s ideological contours
As Kashmir stood like a geographical link between the Hindu Indian landmass and the central Asian hub of Sufism in medieval times, so does Lalla stand like a hinge between Kashmir’s centuries-old but fading Hindu-Buddhist legacy and the nascent but ascending Muslim Sufi doctrine. Her poetry is an eclectic mix of the subtleties of Kashmiri Saivism with its Sanskrit lingua franca and the metaphysical monism of Islamic mysticism vouchsafed in Persianate-Arabic idiom. Her praxis, as her poetic corpus reveals, is one rooted in the Saivate tradition and equally influenced by Islamic mysticism, its ideal of a classless society and its preference for a transcendent God. She treats the body as the laboratory of spiritual experimentation and its nodes as Chakras or Lataif for channelling the energy/breath through these nodes as a means of activating the vital body. This notion of subtle body, breathing practices and vital nodes is something much talked of in new-age spirituality by masters like Gurdejeef, Baltavasky, Amit Goswami, Deepak Chopra and others. How vividly Lalla speaks of these experiments when she says:
I trapped my breath in the bellows of my throat:
a lamp blazed up inside, showed me who I really was.
I crossed the darkness holding fast to that lamp,
scattering its light-seeds around me as I went.
— Translated by Ranjit Hoskote.
Lalla’s mystical practices, like controlling breath, activating Chakras and burning the self within to transform it into light bear striking resemblance to the spiritual practices of Islam, which identifies Chakras as Lataif. This has a particular kinship to the Kubravi and Sohrawardi stream of Islamic mysticism, which were earliest to enter the valley, and therefore reveals an interaction between Lalla and Muslim mystics at a level deeper than mere verbal exchange. This interaction and influence has been dealt with in detail by Carnac Temple. Also the encounters between Shah I Hamadan, the patron saint of Muslim missionaries from central Asia and a saint of caliber from Silsila e Kubraviya and Lal Ded are well known – each recognising the spiritual sublimity of the other.
Carnac Temple writes, “It is not difficult to understand that the Yogini of fourteenth century, such as Lalla, in lifelong contact with Muhammadanism, should quickly and deeply absorb such a line of thought; for her contact was constant and close, as she was not only the contemporary, but a friend of the Persian Say’id Ali Hamadani”. The mystical practices referred to, shared by Islamic mysticism and Kashmiri Saivism in common, actually predate both Islamic mysticism and Kashmiri Saivism and are traceable to much earlier Aryan culture where ritual and spirituality formed an inseparable dyad. These Aryan habits of mind and spirit were later carried Eastward by migratory waves and were deeply embedded into the religious and cultural space inherited by Lalla.
……..to be continued
Amir Suhail Wani is a comparative studies scholar working on the intersection of literature, religion and philosophy.
First published in Scroll
