by Lal Ded
They lash me with insults, serenade me with curses.
Their barking means nothing to me.
Even if they came with soul-flowers to offer,
I couldn’t care less. Untouched, I move on.
Braving the trials and humiliations that came her way, Lalla grew in stature to become a questor and a teacher: this passage to maturity and deepening knowledge is recorded vividly in her vākhs. In poem 93, she defies her tormentors and the system of conventions they represent:
Let them hurl a thousand curses at me,
pain finds no purchase in my heart.
I belong to Shiva. Can a scatter of ashes
ruin a mirror? it gleams.
In the specific cultural context of Kashmir, I find instructive the distinguished sociologist T.N. Madan’s comments about the scepticism expressed by Kashmiri Pandit householders towards renouncers. Although his informants were mid-twentieth-century villagers, Madan notes that texts written between the ninth and the thirteenth centuries confirm a continuity of attitude.
Why is it that the Pandits distrust and ridicule self-styled renouncers? [The answer lies] in their commitment to the ideology of the householder. Apparently they are cynical about those who leave home because most such people never had families of their own . . . or their relations with their kin have been strained. At a deeper level, however, one might detect a fear of the renouncer, for he poses a threat to the ideology of the householder and plenitude . . . he not only seeks release from the web of kinship and other worldly ties but also denigrates these as a trap and an illusion. The renouncer is too powerful an adversary to be contemplated with equanimity. (1988, 41–42)
Significantly, while many Hindu ascetics had traditionally lived in the forests of Kashmir, none of Lalla’s male predecessors in the Kashmir Śaiva lineage had been renouncers. They were scholars, teachers and writers who lived as householders, even the unmarried among them. Lalla’s position was thus a peculiarly paradoxical one. In an ethos where male Śaiva questors lived within society rather than in retreat from it, she could not, as a woman, do likewise. Precisely because she was a woman, whose life was far more closely and rigidly governed by domestic duties and expectations than a man’s, she could not lead a life of spiritual aspiration at home—and so, was forced to leave it. Not until the mid-seventeenth century do we find a Kashmiri Brahmin woman saint-poet who received the approval of her family and community for her spiritual quest: Rupa Bhavani (1625–1721), who was clearly a beneficiary of the conceptual space and social legitimation that Lalla had won for her heirs in future generations.
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Lalla’s poems shimmer with their author’s experience of being a yogini, trained in the demanding spiritual disciplines and devotional practices of Kashmir Śaivite mysticism. Since this school is itself the confluential outcome of an engagement with several philosophical traditions, she was receptive to the images and ideas of those other traditions. It would be most productive to view her as a figure whose ideas straddled the domains of Kashmir Śaivism, Tantra, Yoga and Yogācāra Buddhism, and who appears to have been socially acquainted with the ideas and practices of the Sufis.
Revelation comes to Lalla like a moon flowering in dark water. Her symbols and allegories can be cryptic, and yet the candour of her poems moves us deeply, viscerally. She celebrates perseverance in the quest, contrasting physical agony with spiritual flight and dwelling on the obdurate landscapes that the questor must negotiate. Lalla’s poetry is fortified by a palpable, first-hand experience of illumination; it conveys a freedom from the mortal freight of fear and vacillation. She cherishes these, while attacking the parasitic forms of organised religion that have attached themselves to the spiritual quest and choked it: arid scholarship, soulless ritualism, fetishised austerity and animal sacrifice. Her ways of transcending these obstacles can seem subversive, even deeply transgressive—as in poem 59, where she confronts the priest with the brutal exaction demanded by his idolatry:
It covers your shame, keeps you from shivering.
Grass and water are all the food it asks.
Who taught you, priest-man,
to feed this breathing thing to your thing of stone?
Kashmir Śaivism recommends the transmutation of all outward observances into visualisations and experiments in consciousness, so that the idol is replaced by the mental image and the sacrifice of an animal by the deliberate extinction of the lower appetites. In this spirit, in poem 61, Lalla rejects the conventional physical elements of worship in favour of meditative depth:
Kusha grass, flowers, sesame seed, lamp, water:
it’s just another list for someone who’s listened,
really listened, to his teacher. Every day he sinks deeper
into Shambhu, frees himself from the trap
of action and reaction. He will not suffer birth again.
At the same time, Lalla asserts the primacy of the guru—regarded as an embodiment of the Divine—as a guide navigating the aspirant through the maze of worldly life towards the central and transfiguring experience of enlightenment. In poem 108, she sings:
Who trusts his Master’s word
and controls the mind-horse
with the reins of wisdom,
he shall not die, he shall not be killed.
In yet other poems, she transmits the teachings that are the fruit of her experience: these poems aim to renew the immediacy of everyday life by placing it in the context of eternity, to redeem the self from the cocoon of narcissism and release it towards others, the world and the Divine. In poem 105, she imagines the Divine as a net that traps the individual from within, grace moving by stealth, to be valued in this life rather than deferred as a reward on offer in the afterlife:
The Lord has spread the subtle net of Himself across
the world.
See how He gets under your skin, inside your bones.
If you can’t see Him while you’re alive,
don’t expect a special vision once you’re dead.
In consonance with Kashmir Śaiva doctrine, Lalla regards the world as an array of traps for the unwary, so long as the self remains amnesiac towards its true nature. On realising that the world is the playful expression of the Divine, and that the Divine and the self are one, anguish and alienation fall away from the consciousness, to be replaced by the joyful recognition that all dualisms are illusory. This leads her to rejoice in the collapse of such restrictive identities as ‘I’ and ‘You’ when confronted with the presence of the Divine, as in poem 15:
Wrapped up in Yourself, You hid from me.
All day i looked for You
and when i found You hiding inside me,
I ran wild, playing now me, now You.
Lalla enacts the theatre of her devotion in different registers. She yearns, she demands, she laments; she can be prickly and irritable with the Divine, yet throw herself at Its mercy and sing of unabashed passion, as in poem 47:
As the moonlight faded, I called out to the madwoman,
eased her pain with the love of God.
‘It’s Lalla, it’s Lalla,’ I cried, waking up the Loved One.
I mixed with Him and drowned in a crystal lake.
Lalla treats the body as the site of all her experiments in self refinement: she asserts the unity of the corporeal and the cosmic, as achieved through immersive meditation and the Yogic cultivation of the breath. The subtle channels and nodal points of the Yogic body form a basic reality for her, its terrain as real as the topography of lake, river and mountains that recurs in her compositions. In poem 52, she declares:
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.
For Lalla, the symbolic and the sensuously palpable are not in opposition, but rather, suffuse one another. The cultural theorist and historian Richard Lan
noy interprets this feature of Indic philosophy and spiritual practice elegantly:
Each successive school of philosophy, each mystic, sage, or saint, sought by one means or another to appropriate the external world to the mind-brain. He enhanced, expanded, intensified, and deepened his sensory awareness of colours, sounds, and textures until they were transformed into vibrations continuous with his own consciousness. In this state of enhanced consciousness induced by special techniques of concentration, the inside and the outside, the subject and the object, the self and the world, did not remain separate entities but fused in a single process. (1971, 273–74)
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For an itinerant, tangential and seemingly isolated dissident—she founded no school or movement, had no apostles, left no anointed successors, and scattered her poems among her listeners—Lalla has exerted a profound and seminal influence on Kashmir’s religious life. She was a major presence in the life and practice, not only of Rupa Bhavani, but also of a number of later Kashmiri mystics, teachers and devotional poets like Parmanand (1791–1879), Shams Faqir (1843–1904), and Krishna Joo Razdan (1851–1926). Vitally, given that Kashmir is now almost completely a Muslim region, it is instructive to recall that Lalla is regarded as a foundational figure by the Rishi order of Kashmiri Sufism, which was initiated by Nund Rishi or Sheikh Nur-ud-din Wali (1379–1442), seen by many as her spiritual son and heir. Nur-ud-din and his fellow Rishis chose to lead celibate lives, abstained from meat, avoided injuring animals or plants, secluded themselves in caves or forests, and employed an ecumenical vocabulary drawn both from the Kashmir Śaivite and Islamic systems. The Rishis instituted solitary meditative as well as collective devotional practices, and their followers convene around a network of khānaqahs or ziyārats: shrine complexes that incorporate mosques, meditation halls and the tombs of saints. This robust regional tradition of spirituality continues to remain strong in the Valley, despite the hardening of Islamic piety along Wahhabi mandates during the low-intensity warfare between insurgents and the Indian State that has raged unabated in recent decades, accompanied by cycles of civil unrest and the killing of countless innocent people, Muslim and Hindu, caught in the crossfire.
Lalla, too, lived through a time of seismic turbulence. Between 1320 and 1339, Kashmir suffered a rapid sequence of political catastrophes threaded together by intrigue, conspiracy, crippling incompetence, lust for power and thwarted ambition.The country was attacked by the Tartar chieftain Zulchu, which prompted the downfall of the last Hindu king of Kashmir, Sahadeva, and of his prime minister and legatee, Rāmachandra. Into this vacuum stepped a Tibetan prince from Ladakh, Rinchana, who had taken refuge at Sahadeva’s court some years before. He married Rāmachandra’s daughter, Kotā, and asked to be accepted as a Śaiva; short-sightedly, the Brahmin priesthood turned him down, and he soon embraced Islam under the tutelage of Sayyid Sharaf-ud-din or Bulbul Shah, a Sufi from Khorasan who had made his home in the Valley. When Rinchana died, his widow Kotā made common cause with Shah Mir, an adventurer from Swat who had also settled in the Valley; they invited Sahadeva’s brother Udyānadeva to rule. As his brother had done, Udyānadeva too fled when Kashmir was attacked by the Turki chieftain Achala; he returned after the raid to find Kotā both popular and dominant, and was never again more than her puppet. After his death, Kotā and Shah Mir attempted to outmanoeuvre one another, but the queen had run out of survivor’s luck at last. She killed herself, leaving Shah Mir as undisputed ruler of Kashmir: he ascended the throne in 1339 as Sultan Shams-ud-din, the ‘Sun of the Faith’.
Shams-ud-din’s coronation marks Kashmir’s transition from a Hindu-Buddhist past to a future that would be shaped by the gradual diffusion of Islam, although Hindus and Buddhists continued to dominate Kashmiri politics and culture for several generations longer. The dynasty that Shams-ud-din founded was to rule Kashmir for two centuries, and Lalla lived through his reign and those of his son Ala-ud-din and his grandson Shihab-ud-din. These early sultans gradually brought a measure of peace and prosperity to the region, and extended their patronage to the arts and learning. Only much later in the fourteenth century was their policy of liberalism abrogated briefly by the fanaticism of Sultan Sikandar. Spurred on by his minister Saif-ud-din, a Brahmin convert originally called Suha Bhatta, this ruler launched a programme of persecution, destroying temples and forcing many Brahmins into exile. Sikandar was an aberration, however, and his son Zain-ul-abedin restored the Sultanate’s policy of generosity and inclusiveness, inviting émigré Brahmins back to the Valley and having Sanskrit works translated into Persian (Bamzai 1994, 2:316–28).
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While surveying the wider context of religious developments in the Indian subcontinent, scholars have sometimes sought to historicise Lalla in relation to the Bhakti movements that swept across this landmass between the fourteenth and the sixteenth centuries. These were popular mobilisations that opposed the hierarchical orthodoxy of Brahminism, regional surges of protest that crystallised around charismatic reformers or renouncers who insisted on the revolutionary idea that a direct and loving communion between the worshipper and the Divine was possible without priestly intermediaries or ritual specialists. The term ‘Bhakti’ (literally meaning ‘devotion’) has been used to encompass a spectrum of formations ranging from the northern Sant tradition, including Rāmānanda, Tulsidās, Kabīr, Nānak and Dādu, to the western Vārkari lineage, with Jnāneśvara, Nāmdev and Tukārām as its leading figures. It also connotes several parallel developments, including the rise of the forms of Vaiśnava devotionalism associated with Chaitanya in Bengal and Vallabha across northern India, and the consolidation of the Śaivite Lingāyat movement in Karnataka and of the Śrivaiśnavas in Tamil Nadu.
The proponents of Bhakti turned their backs on the elaborate structure of worship that was integral to Brahminical practice. Instead, they promoted a deeply felt and richly expressed devotion focused on a chosen embodiment of the Divine. Rejecting Sanskrit, the deva-bhāśa or ‘language of the gods’, they preached and composed their poetry in the loka-bhāśa or languages of everyday life that were organic to the regions in which the movements had arisen. This confident vernacularisation of expression, in preference over the epigonic classicism that was the norm among the Brahminical elite, marks the emergence of many modern Indian languages including Kannada, Marathi, Hindi and Bengali. The Bhakti movements developed a mass base among the subaltern and labouring castes—greatly oppressed by the social hierarchies of late mediaeval India—providing them with their first major articulation in history. In many ways, therefore, these movements mark an early and revolutionary threshold of modernity in India.
Some commentators have viewed Lalla as a forerunner of Bhakti, and she certainly anticipated the women saints who were to play an important role in these movements, such as Mīrā and Bahinā, in breaking away from restrictive patriarchal structures. Other observers have sought to subsume Lalla quite completely within the historical momentum of Bhakti, with some university syllabi even enlisting her in the array of Bhakti saint-poets. In my view, this is an error of ahistorical thinking. These Procrustean procedures not only generate a monolithic and a priori notion of Bhakti, but they also allow the compelling social and political dimensions of the Bhakti mobilisations to overshadow the fact that bhakti-mārga, the way of intense and self-dissolving devotion, is only one among the three major approaches to the Divine recognised in Hindu practice. The others are karma-mārga, or adherence to the prescribed ritual forms, and jnāna-mārga, or the path of evolved awareness and world-transcending insight.
Many features of Lalla’s practice do indeed bear an affinity to Bhakti spirituality, especially her opposition to the religious hierarchy and orthodox worship integral to karma-mārga, her sense of direct communion with the Divine, her valorisation of the Name as a talisman, and her use of the language of everyday life. But Lalla’s perspective, like the Kashmir Śaiva perspective more generally, is premised far more substantially on jnāna-mārga than on bhakti-mārga. L
alla is concerned with nurturing a radical transformation of consciousness aimed at recovering the identity of the self with the Divine; she is not chiefly preoccupied with a brimming-over of devotional expression by which the self embraces the Divine. And unlike the Bhakti saint-poets, who lived and worked in communities, the evidence in her poems as well as in the legends and the chronicles suggests that Lalla, while interacting with groups of aspirants, was a figure who walked alone.
2. The Vectors of Lalla’s Voice: Single Author or Contributory Lineage?
You’ve got six and I’ve got six.
Now tell me, Blue-Throated One, what’s the difference?
Or don’t. I know. You keep your six on a leash
and my six have strung me along.
(POEM 24)
Since the late 1980s, the study of Lalla’s poetry has undergone an unfortunate sectarian polarisation between Kashmiri Pandit and Kashmiri Muslim scholars; these academic groupings hold diametrically opposed visions of Kashmiri culture, literature, religious life and identity. Some of the former claim Lalla exclusively for Kashmir Śaivism and reject any hint of Islamic influence on her beliefs or acquaintance with Sufism on her part, citing as evidence the Yogic symbolism, details of spiritual practices and hints of biography that appear in her vākhs (for example, Toshkhani 2002, 39–66). Meanwhile, some of the latter attempt to induct Lalla into Kashmir’s early Sufi ethos, arguing that her emancipatory teachings could not have sprung from a Hindu matrix, and pointing out that the earliest references to her occur in Sufi hagiographies and Persian chronicles written by Muslims (for example, Khan 2002, 70–79).