“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,
— translated by Ranjit Hoskote.
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”
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
— Translation by the author.
Gulped the nectar of Gnosis
Beheld Shiva with her eyes
God! Bless me with the same bounty”
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:
— Translated by Ranjit Hoskote.
Forget the outside, get to the inside of things.
I, Lalla, took that teaching to heart.
From that day, I’ve danced naked.
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:
— Translated by Ranjit Hoskote.
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.
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.
Lalla started her journey as a yogini belonging to Saivite tradition of Kashmiri Hinduism. Shaivism being one of the major divisions of Hinduism along with Vaisnavism. Whereas Saiva is seen as the God of snow clad mountains, Vishnu is seen as the God of the hot Indian landmass, as if mimicking the Islamic notions of divine Jamal (beauty) and Jalal (Wrath). Saivism, whose spiritual strain Lalla followed, is described by John Bowker as, “One of the major traditions of medieval Hinduism worshipping Siva or one of his forms or symbols such as the Linga…. Various Saiva sects developed, ranging from those who adhered to Smarta orthodoxy (followers of household rites preserved in the tradition ie Smriti) to those who flouted it…. Of these, the most theologically developed are the monistic Trika or Kashmir Saivism.”
Kashmiri Saivism is based on a short treatise written in the form of bursting aphorisms bearing the name Sivasutra and believed to have been revealed to Vasugupta around 9th century . The greatest sage-scholar Abhinavgupta of Kashmir later commented upon the book in the 11th century. Kashmir Shaivism is a non-dualistic philosophical and spiritual tradition that views Lord Shiva as the ultimate reality, with the Shiva Sutras serving as its central text. Within this tradition, Trika philosophy, meaning “the threefold path,” emphasises the interconnectedness of the individual soul (Atman), the supreme consciousness (Shiva), and the world (Shakti). This reverberates the Ibn Arabian schematisation, which sees Anfus (self), Aafaq (universe), and Ahad (the divine unity) joined into an inseparable triad. Trika teaches that spiritual evolution involves recognising the unity of these three aspects through practices like meditation and mantra recitation, aiming for liberation by realising one’s oneness with Shiva. Both Kashmir Shaivism and Trika share core concepts such as non-duality, the central role of Shakti as the dynamic power of creation, and the importance of spiritual practices in attaining liberation.
The reason for discussing this system of thought is that Carnac Temple suggests that “for a proper grasp of Lalla’s verse it is necessary to have as clear an understanding as possible of the theory on which Trika philosophy is based, as it was completed for all practical purposes a century before her date”. Look at this Vaakh of Lalla which is perfectly written in the context of Trika tradition of Kashmiri Saivism:
“Up, Woman! Go make your offering.
— Translated by Ranjit Hoskote.
Take wine, meat and a cake fit for the Gods.
If you know the password to the supreme place,
You can reach wisdom by breaking the rules”
Mark Dyczkowski’s comment in his book The Doctrine of Vibration will be of immense value to understand this vaakh. Dyczkowski writes, “Unlike the Siddhanta rituals, many of them (Bhairava rituals) involve the offering of meat and wine to the deity”. However, it must be noted here that in Kashmiri Saivism, and therefore in the poetry of Lalla, writes Dyczskowski, “Rituals are transformed into process of inner realisation and transformation” affecting the union with object of devotion. Thus, the references to ritual as they appear in Lalla need to be understood both in their esoteric and exoteric dimensions. This shall save the reader both from a monochromatic ritual-driven understanding of Lalla and more importantly from missing the crux and essence of her philosophy, which is primarily esoteric, articulated by way of the symbols of exoteric ritualism. Lalla is as much opposed to lifeless ritualism as much as she is opposed to spiritual charlatans, inauthentic mysticism and verbal jugglers of her age. Deconstructing the façade of sacrificial rites, she addresses the temple priest,
“It covers your shame, keeps your from shivering
— Translated by Ranjit Hoskote.
Grass and water are all the foods it asks
Who taught you Priest-Man,
To feed this breathing thing to your thing of stone”
The last line not only reflects the dislike that Lalla has for lifeless rituals, but also reveals her iconoclast character. This iconoclasm seems to have its roots in Islamic monotheism and reverence for transcendence, its opposition to idol worship as opposed to the crass idolatry of Lalla’s era. Accardi, taking note of Lalla’s kinship to Islam and its central tenets, remarks, “Grierson and Barnett dismiss earlier hagiographical accounts of Lal Ded encountering Sufıs. Although they state, ‘There is hence no inherent difficulty in accepting the tradition of her association with Sayyid Ali. (Grierson and Barnett 1920: 1), it is only as long as Muslims like Sayyid Ali Hamadanı are understood as having no real effect on Lal Ded and her Hindu religiosity.” As soon as there is a story in which a Sufi is said to have had an impact on Lal Ded, they preempt it with the following dismissal: “Numerous stories are current about Lall in the Valley, but none of them is deserving of literal credence. Lalla’s contemporary Hindus seem to have lost the symbolic meaning of idols and reduced the practice to an end in itself instead of a means to an end. This might have inspired Lalla to look to her contemporary Muslim mystics who located God beyond images in the realm of absolute transcendence, the realm of which 9th-century non-dualist mystic Sankara said “from which words fall back”.
Pertinent to mention that Sankara visited Kashmir during his lifetime, leaving behind the imprints of his Advaitic monotheism. This background, in addition to Islamic influence, might have also contributed to Lalla’s heightened sense of unity of divinity, disdain for idols and quest for the god of transcendence. To quote from Lalla:
God is stone, the temple is stone,
— Translated by Ranjit Hoskote.
head to foot, all stone.
Hey priest-man, what’s the object of your worship?
Get your act together, join mind with life-breath.
Hoskote writes under this Vaakh that “Dismissing the worship of an idol and the religious economy of the temple – ‘all stone’ – she emphasises that the Divine is to be reached through the Yogic practice of pranagnihotra, the offering of the body’s awakened vital energies”. This explicitly favours the spiritual ideal of awakening and enlightenment over the decayed religious ideals of blind acceptance and submission to authority. It must however be noted that religion in itself is of great value and forms the vase and vessel of spirituality. It is only what John Caputo says, “When religion becomes its own victim, losing touch with its symbolism” that it no longer satisfies the quest of the spirit and is reduced to soulless association and baseless proprietorship.
Hawkins, commenting upon the rise of spirituality within religion insightfully observes, “In the lifetime of the prophet, the chasm between man and divine is obliterated and man lives in a space of spiritual unity mediated by the presence of prophet who is always in touch with the divine. In the Post-prophetic era, the door to transcendence is closed and man finds himself alienated from God which pushes him to explore paths of spirituality to regain the state of primordial spiritual communion” (Quoted by Bashir Ahmad Dar in Tarikh I Tassawuf Qabl Az Islam).
This was the era in which Lalla found herself where systematisation had choked genuine quests and borrowed answers were offered against existential queries. In this aura of dogmatism, Lalla realised that Truth is to be earned not borrowed or inherited. While the Truth is objective, it is to be participated in subjectively and this subjective discovery of the objective Truth is what genuine spirituality is all about. In this quest, Lalla was no doubt inspired and influenced by her contemporary Muslim mystics as much as she was influenced by her Saivite predecessors whose flag she carried. Lalla stands at the intersection of Kashmiri Saivism and Islamic mysticism and to make proprietary claims from either side misses the entire point that Lalla tried to make. The point is that when religions, dogmas and doctrines become parochial, their myths inauthentic and their symbols meaningless, the questor has to search for a path of his/her own may that quest demand going to and fro between Saivism to Islam.
The poetry of Praxis
Shafi Shauq writes “In her (Lalla’s) poetry are found the traces and echoes of all those ideological variants which preceded here for thousands of years. Introspection, a meditation on the transcendent use of colloquial and the feminist expression”. Lalla was the mystic of ecstasy who, despite her emphasis on Bhakti Marga, participated equally in the practice of Jnana and Karma Marga. Lalla’s poetry is verb-centric and action-driven, placing the subject at the centre of the sphere of activity. It is narrated that Lalla went around naked, covered by ethereal luminosity, and uttered her spiritually pulsating couplets extempore and in a state of communion with the divine. “Despite her nudity, her nakedness is veiled from humanity with a covering unknown to mankind, just as the stars are hidden from view in the presence of the sun” (Dean Accardi). However, her poetry, like her mysticism, is one of spiritual inebriation. But it needs special attention that her poetry contains references to subtle Saivite and Sufi doctrines which would not have been possible for somebody unacquainted with these systems of thought at an intellectual level.
Her poetry is the poetry of praxis where theory drives practice and practice informs theory. Lalla’s poetry is the siren of Being (Being as understood in mysticism and Heideggerian metaphysics) which guides the initiate and illumines the accomplished in spirituality. Her poetry is a thoroughgoing anti-hierarchical slogan and decry against the ossified Brahmanical Hinduism of her era. Her poetry is structurally called Vaakh or Vac which belongs to the larger poetic form called Doha, but has a metric system of its own as explained by Barnett and Grierson in “Lal Vakyani or The Wise Sayings of Lal Ded” or as briefly mentioned by Hoskote in his much readable I, Lalla.
These four liners are informed by their specific spiritual message, unique tonality and a discernable idiom. Despite the fact that these Vaakhs may have been subjected to repeated updating and thereby carrying the traces of what Hoskote describes as “contributory lineage” ie a group of Pandit and Muslim reciters who edited these Vaakhs for changing times and linguistic sensitivities. They do carry an underlying pattern and signature of the poetess identified as Lalla who emerges as a spiritual questor and somebody despising the rigid orthodoxy and meaningless ritualism.
The symbols in Lalla’s poetry are mainly drawn from nature, away from the buzz and noise of city life. This can be explained primarily by the fact that she lived her life in the countryside and more deeply by What Lévy-Bruhl called “participation mysticism” to describe the way individuals in traditional societies often perceive themselves as being deeply interconnected with the world around them. The key idea is that, in such cultures, the distinction between the self and the external world is not clearly defined. People do not think of themselves as distinct, separate entities but rather see themselves as integrated with the natural, spiritual, and social realms. This also reminds us of the references to nature as employed in the scriptures across the linguistic and geographic divide thereby giving the nature around us a meaning deeper than illustrated by their vegetative and inanimate existence.
The point to note is that the whole of nature is one great symbol and if Wordsworth can see the spark in a blade of grass, our poetess also sees the divine in her immediacy in the forests and fields that surround her vision – notwithstanding that she’s a believer in transcendence and follows the creed of Nirguna Brahma. For the sake of systematic understanding, Jawahar Lal Bhat has divided the poems of Lalla into six major categories which are listed here along with the select examples from each group
Personal celestial experience: The personal experience is the most prized element and the most authentic mark of Lalla’s Vaakh’s. Trained in Yoga and Tantra and equally benefitting from Islamic mysticism, she explored the terrain of spirit and on the way passed on valuable information about this terrain to future travelers. She says: “I studied books and followed their spirit besides gaining lot of unread experience. I caught a fierce beast and tamed it forcefully till it became a timid jackal. I didn’t advantage myself only but made others gain too. It was a tedious crusade but I achieved my goals.” (Jawahar Lal Bhat, Lal Ded Revisited). Some of the Vaakhs pertaining to her personal spiritual quest are:
“I, Lalla, wore myself down searching for Him
— Translated by Ranjit Hoskote.
And found a strength after my strength had died.
I came to His threshold but found the door bolted.
I locked that door with my eyes and looked at Him”.
When the dirt was wiped away from my mind’s mirror,
— Translated by Ranjit Hoskote.
people knew me for a lover of God.
When I saw Him there, so close to me,
He was All, I was nothing.
The essential purpose of life: From the dawn of life, humanity has contemplated the meaning and purpose of life. This has broadly divided humankind into two categories – those of materialists and spiritualists. While the former holds that this world is an end in itself and its pleasures are all that is offered to man, the other camp advocates that man must pursue the infinite and everlasting pleasures of the soul, which might involve temporary suspension on the minimisation of bodily pleasures. This has been the guiding philosophy of the vast majority of men across the globe. Lalla belonged to this school which sought the union of Atman (individual soul) with Brahman (the universal soul whom she identified with Siva) as the ultimate aim of life. This not only liberates man from the vicissitudes of terrestrial sojourn but serves as the essential purpose of man’s existence. Lalla writes:
My mind-horse straddles the sky,
— Translated by Ranjit Hoskote.
crossing a hundred thousand miles in a blink.
It takes wisdom to bridle that horse,
He can break the wheels of breath’s chariot
Gluttony gets you the best table in the town of Nowhere,
— Translated by Ranjit Hoskote.
fasting gives your ego a boost.
Slave of extremes, learn the art of balance
and all the closed doors will open at your touch.
The concept of universal lord: Mystics and sages have repeatedly described the universe as the manifestation of God/Transcendent Principle/The divine Mind/Brahman/Allah. In Ibn Arabi’s cosmology, the universe emerges as the manifestation of divine attributes. In Bekeley’s idealism, the universe is one idea of God and in Hinduism, the whole process of the cosmos is an act of divine play or Lila. In Kashmiri Saivism, particularly its Trika variant, the universe is a vibration of energies emanating from the divine by the process called Spanda or vibration within the divine. Quantum Mechanics and String Theory, the most advanced of the theories of physics of existence posit that creation is actually a set of vibrations tuned to proper frequencies by a seemingly master musician. In this regard, Brain Greene’s books The Elegant Universe and The Fabric of Cosmos are worth pursuing. Now see how Lalla describes the phenomenon of creation and its relation to the cosmic mind:
“The lord has spread the net of himself across everything
— Translated by JL Bhat.
Pierced into the frames of all objects and creatures
If you don’t find him when you are alive
How do you expect finding Him when you are dead”
Or
A thousand times at least I asked my Guru
— Translated by Ranjit Hoskote.
to give Nothingness a name.
Then I gave up. What name can you give
to the source from which all names have sprung
One is immediately reminded of the phenomenon of Quantum Fluctuations by these lines. One who is well versed with the theory will realize from a distance they they converge towards the mysterious phenomenon of Quantum, as both Lalla and Quantum are talking about the ultimate reality in their respective ways.
On Pranayama and Kundalini yoga: Pranayama and Kundalini Yoga are integral practices in the yogic tradition aimed at cultivating spiritual awakening and physical well-being. Pranayama, which translates to "control of breath," involves various techniques to regulate the breath, thereby calming the mind, increasing life force energy (prana), and promoting mental clarity. It is often used to prepare the body and mind for deeper meditation. Together, these practices aim to balance the mind, body, and spirit, guiding individuals toward self-realisation and inner peace. Lalla writes:
I’ve bridled my mind-horse, reined him in,
— Translated by Ranjit Hoskote.
struggled to tie my ten breath-streams together.
That’s how the moon melted and rained nectar on me
and a void mingled with the Void
Or
The sun beneath the navel was made to burn.
— Translated by Ranjit Hoskote.
When the breath, rising there, flows through the throat,
it comes out long and burns.
But when it meets the moon river flowing from the crown,
It comes out short and cools
Guru Saadhna: Guru/spiritual master/Shaykh is an indispensable and eminent figure in the spiritual journey within any religious framework. Even those who propound the oxymoron “spirituality without religion” recognise the importance of a Guru – somebody who is well versed with the spiritual terrain and guides the disciple through the ups and downs thereof. Guru is the object of devotion and love who actualises the quest for the divine in Earthly form and serves as a vehicle to channel the energies of the disciple towards the ultimate spiritual goal. Lalla was deeply dedicated to her Guru Sed Boyu, but, as Jawahar Lal Bhat pertinently notes “the figure of the teacher or guide often serves as a proxy for, or manifestation of, the divine in her poetry”. Lalla writes:
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
On the syllable Om: In every religion, there exists the concept of the threefold prayer ie , canonical prayer, free personal prayer and the prayer of the heart (Schuon). The last is but perpetual remembrance of the lord by having his idea firmly rooted in the heart and one of his sacred names, specific to religion, uttered by mouth. This corresponds to the Sufi concept of Zikr and the Hindu equivalent of Japa. In the case of Lalla, Om served as the syllable to be recited during meditation on the transcendent and scholars and sages have attributed various vocal/oral and metaphysical allusions to this syllable of Om. Lalla says:
My mind boomed with the sound of Om,
— Translated by Ranjit Hoskote.
my body was a burning coal.
Six roads brought me to a seventh,
that’s how Lalla reached the Field of Light.
Contemporary times
Lalla is the epitome of Kashmiri genius and despite scholarly works by Orientalists, local scholars, post-colonialists, and neo-orientalists; she remains largely hidden from what Jurgen Habermas called “The Public Sphere”. Some recent studies have tried to find feminist trends in her poetry, but this seems to be an exercise in historical anachronism and retrospective constructionism. A more befitting comparison, if a comparison is to be made, can be had between Lalla Ded and Simone Weil, not Simone De Beauvoir. This is because, despite her rebellion against her times, Lalla worked within the contours of religion and spirituality and her entire quest was the quest of securing genuine spirituality and an earned answer to her existential questions – not the quest for women’s rights or struggle for women’s liberation. The last bit can however be disagreed with given other possible readings of her text.
What is however important is that the malaise of spiritual abyss and religious dogmatism, like the one which characterised Lalla’s era, the seekers and fellow travellers on the path of Moksa or liberation have a lot to learn from her, who preferred personal experience to the borrowed systems of life and thought. The works of Jiya Lal Kaul, Grierson, Carnac Temple, Ranjit Hoskote, Jawahar Lal Bhat, Shafi Shauq and others have indeed enriched the field of Lalla studies, but she still awaits a “devotee scholar” to make her presentable to the scholarly and the common community with equal ease – only then will we have celebrated her life and poetry.
Amir Suhail Wani is a comparative studies scholar working on the intersection of literature, religion and philosophy.
