by Lal Ded
The first position, which I shall call the Śaiva-only school, characterises Islam as an alien import imposed by West and Central Asian missionaries. It chooses to ignore the vibrant confluence between the Yogic and the Sufi traditions of spirituality that had begun to be established through the dialogues between Brahmin and Sufi sages in fourteenth-century Kashmir. Indeed, many members of the Rishi order were Brahmin ascetics who converted to Islam, bringing to it the contemplative flavour of the sanyāsin’s life of retreat and prayer. The Śaiva-only school also refuses to credit the density of accounts which suggest that Lalla was held in high esteem by her Sufi contemporaries. Even if several of the more famous of these accounts are either implausible on chronological grounds or are obviously motivated by the requirements of religious propaganda,2 there must have been some shared grounds of vision and discourse that led the Sufis to embrace Lalla’s poetry, and to recite her vākhs as invocations while opening their assemblies (see Kak 2007, 3).
The second position, which I shall call the Sufi-only school, presents pre-Islamic Kashmir as a jahiliyya or stronghold of paganism awaiting Islam’s redemptive touch. It makes formulaic attacks on Kashmir’s supposedly degenerate Brahmins—a curious degeneracy, which produced such eloquently nondualist teachers as Vasugupta, Utpaladeva and Abhinavagupta, who prized illumination above idols. The Sufi-only school also insists that the suffering Kashmiri populace, eager to be rid of the Brahmin ascendancy, accepted Islam with enthusiasm. The historical record shows that the early Sufi missionaries invited only a few key people, not the masses, to convert; mass conversion was achieved because these individuals were followed obediently into Islam by their families and clans. This change of religion did not necessarily involve a deeply realised metanoia. As a result, even as late as the sixteenth century, there were complaints about the religious laxity of Kashmir’s Muslims, whose Islam was often nominal (see Wani 2007, 13–21).
The partisans on both sides of this dispute downplay or explain away historical evidence that is inconvenient to their positions, which are rooted in the ideological compulsions of the present. Indeed, this dispute over the true nature of Lalla’s spirituality, poetry and teachings puts us in mind of the quarrel that is believed to have broken out after Kabīr’s death between his Hindu and Muslim followers, the former wishing to cremate and the latter to bury the master’s body. When the shroud was pulled away, all they found was a heap of fresh flowers.
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Authenticity and historicity are the key categories around which this dispute is staged. As we have seen, Lalla’s poems were available as an open-ended corpus that was in a state of play until stabilised (or arrested, if you prefer) by print modernity in the early twentieth century; as such, they contain Sanskritised verses on Yogic practice as well as Persianate technical terms for the soul or the Lord, robust accounts of secret Tantric rites as well as pithy words of folk wisdom. In pursuit of the authentic core of poems produced by the historical Lalla, some scholars have become preoccupied with refining away all the materials that they regard as corrupt or as interpolations. The problem with this approach is that there is no mythic Old Kashmiri original to be retrieved; as we have seen, every generation has revised the phrasing of Lalla’s poems towards contemporary usage. This leaves observers free to let their ideological preferences dictate their linguistic researches: the Śaiva-only school condemns all Persianate phrasing as insertions made by later Muslim hands; equally, the Sufi-only school could well construe Sanskritic terminology as evidence of later Brahminical imposition.
Meanwhile, even as each school defers to a vague notion of Lalla’s ‘style’, no clear explanation is provided for the enormous variety of registers, tonalities, rhythms and gradations of vocabulary that are accreted within her poetry. Even though Lalla’s poems are linked by a metrical structure—typically, each vākh has four lines, and each line has four beats—their music changes constantly. Some of the poems are festive, others melancholic, yet others combative; some spell out a pensive reflection, others open out into a passionate cry from the heart, yet others rap out a quick-step dance measure. Lalla switches style from one poem to the next, and in following her, we realise that while a Perso-Arabic expression would almost certainly have entered the corpus several centuries after Lalla’s death, the Sanskrit phraseology might equally have been inserted by a much later Brahmin scribe or reciter.
Nor can we maintain such a sharp distinction between Muslim and Pandit. Since families and clans in Kashmir have often transited from Hinduism to Islam in the space of a generation or two, it is unlikely that they would have abandoned all their inherited theological reflexes and linguistic habits instantly. During the Sultanate, an administrative language was cobbled together from Sanskrit, Persian and Arabic, and employed to frame land grants, scrips and agreements; it remained in use well into the mid-seventeenth century. Writing as late as 1900, Aurel Stein reported his discovery of Sanskrit inscriptions on Muslim gravestones during his journeys through Kashmir in 1888 and 1896 (see Kalhana 1900, 131). Therefore, it is not impossible that some of the Sanskritic interpolations in Lalla’s corpus were made by Muslims. In this connection, let us recall that Nund Rishi or Sheikh Nur-ud-din Wali’s poems, known as śruks, from the Sanskrit śloka, are replete with terms such as nirguna and avatāra.
None of this should be surprising. The linguist Braj Kachru proposed the influential model of a Kashmiri bifurcated between ‘Sanskritised Kashmiri’ and ‘Persianised Kashmiri’ (Kachru 1969a) to account for styles within the language, which may broadly be mapped onto Pandit and Muslim sociolinguistic usage. And yet it has been pointed out that these are tendencies rather than styles; that the two communities do not use their respective styles exclusively or invariably; and that style switching has historically been common between the two communities, with speakers subtly altering their choice of address, vocabulary and tonal shading in different contexts, depending on their interlocutors (O.N. Koul 1977).
Significantly, even the magisterial Jayalal Kaul insisted that he could not guarantee the authenticity of the 138 vākhs that he had chosen from the 258 circulating in Lalla’s name, while preparing his 1973 edition. He arrived at this distillate after addressing all extant Lalla editions; he also collected every Lalla poem that he could find among the reciters of the Valley, adding another seventy-five verses to his collection. At the end of this exercise, he filtered out all variants and interpolations. In addition to three quatrains written by Azizullah Khan in the early nineteenth century and attributed to Lalla, he found that thirty-five poems occurred simultaneously in recensions of Lalla’s poetry and in the Nur-namas and Rishi-namas, which record the utterances of Nund Rishi; another three poems appeared both in the Lalla recensions and the Rahasyopadeśa of Rupa Bhavani.
In light of this discussion of the probable sources and circumstances of the interpolations in Lalla’s poetry, I would propose a radical break with the established convention of treating Lal Děd as a single personality and interpreting her poetry as an account of the vicissitudes of a single life. While affirming that Lalla’s poetry is deeply anchored in the personal experiences of an individual who actually lived and suffered, gloried in theophany and crafted a remarkable life in hostile circumstances, I shall argue that the poetry that has come down to us in her name is not the work of an individual. Rather, it has been produced over many centuries by what I would term a contributory lineage, a sequence of assemblies comprising people of varied religious affiliations and of both genders, representing the experience of various age groups and social locations, including both literate and unlettered, reciters and scribes, redactors and commentators.3
These assemblies functioned as a living archive networked across the Valley, re-crafting, amplifying and adding to Lalla’s poems. Gathering in response to the auratic presence of the historical Lalla, they worked in consonance with what they saw as the core truth of her experienced revelation. In such a collective model of authorship, every contribution is a devotional
act, and is therefore offered as an attribution to the saint-poet. This would explain why the vectors of Lalla’s voice have remained largely anonymous. In picturing Lalla’s poems as the LD corpus, developed by a contributory lineage, I find myself encouraged by Vinay Dharwadker’s finely woven account of the fifteenth-century saint-poet Kabīr, whose poetry he views as a complex multi-author production spanning five centuries and mediated through multiple languages, regions and teaching lineages (Dharwadker 2003).
For these reasons, the notion of authenticity is not useful to my model. Authenticity, which demands that we demarcate a pure Ur-text and eliminate all later accretions, is a chimera—whether for literary texts, religions or cultures. This becomes evident when the only true token of Lalla’s authorship that we are offered is ‘the evidence of diction and prosody, and the quality of cast of thought, the way it is organised in the process of expression, in a word, the characteristic style of Lal Ded’ (Jayalal Kaul, in Toshkhani 2002, 121) or, in the same vein, when we are told that ‘it is the style of the verses that determines their validity as hers’ (Kak 2007, 3). Style, unfortunately, is what an adroit imitator captures best, even to the point of outdoing the original.
I find it far more fruitful to engage with the versionality of the LD corpus, which arises from the participatory nature of the contributory lineage that produced it. Correspondingly, I would identify, but not be agitated by, gestures of interpolation—which I see to be organic to the way in which the corpus has grown between the fourteenth and the twentieth centuries. While some scholars have pointed out later additions to the text in order to purge them, I would point these out for the opposite reason: to celebrate them, in Bakhtin’s terms, as evidence of the vibrant heteroglossia of the LD corpus, its gift for orchestrating a polyphony of variegated tones, registers and voices.4
In the present edition, I have included seven vākhs that contain Sufi inflections, and commented on them accordingly in the Notes: these are poems 17, 18, 29, 69, 70, 71 and 104. Of these, 17, 18 and 69 are the Azizullah Khan quatrains, and form an important test case for my theory of the contributory lineage. Poems 17 and 18 appear in Grierson and Barnett, sourced from the Pandit Dharma-dāsa Darwēsh recitation: this shows that Azizullah’s poems had been seamlessly incorporated into the LD corpus over the nineteenth century, and were presented as Lalla material even by Pandit reciters. A variant that subsumes poems 1 7 and 18 appears in Knowles, which suggests that Azizullah may have reworked pre-existing material that was available to other contributors as well, or that his contributions were in turn re-edited and recast by others. Contemporary readers familiar with the workings of open-source software would not be astonished by such a process of simultaneous, multi-user editing. Poem 69 appears only in Knowles: I have retained it while annotating it clearly as a later addition; yet, again, can we say for certain that it was not a rephrasing, by Azizullah, of an earlier poem attributed to Lalla? Poem 29 is recorded only by Knowles. The companion poems 70 and 71 appear in Grierson; 70 is also recorded by Kaul. Poem 104 appears only in Kaul.
I hope to have demonstrated the fatuity of attempting to establish a true Lalla, purely Sanskritic or purely Perso-Arabic depending upon our ideological preferences. She is a play of versions, not an absolute entity: to the ear that receives her poems, the body of the vākh is the only true Lalla there is. Ultimately, we must ask ourselves what we wish to believe. Does the saint-poet stand before and apart from the text, resident in a biographical persona that scholars construct from scanty data, the texture of rumour and the colour of fable? Or does the saint-poet breathe within the text, through the flow of the poems attributed to her, vigorously and often meticulously produced in her name, and relayed through a popular imagination that had not been overtaken by print modernity or weakened by the manipulations and blandishments of the electronic media? Lalla, to me, is not the person who composed these vākhs; rather, she is the person who emerges from these vākhs.
3. Lalla’s Poetry: Reconstructing its Religious and Philosophical Horizons
Neither You nor I, neither object nor meditation,
just the All-Creator, lost in His dreams.
Some don’t get it, but those who do
are carried away on the wave of Him.
(POEM 116)
The Lalla who emerges from the LD corpus is, without any doubt, a Śaiva yogini. Emotionally rich yet philosophically precise, sumptuously enigmatic yet crisply structured, Lalla’s poems are shaped within the horizons of Kashmir Śaivism, Yoga and Tantra. The Persianate terms that appear in the LD corpus do not mark the introduction of Islamic concepts into Lalla’s thought, but rather, indicate a rendering of her ideas in Sufi phraseology. Such acts of translation would follow naturally in an environment where philosophies were in dialogue, and given that non-dualist Śaivism and monist Sufism have certain specific points of convergence: mokṣa and fan’ā, jīvātman and naphs, are not very far apart.
Since Lalla stands at the threshold between an old Hindu-Buddhist Kashmir whose contours have been somewhat blurred in public memory, and a new Islamic Kashmir whose history is far better known, there has been a tendency to present her simply as the forerunner of the Rishi order of Sufism, founded by Sheikh Nur-ud-din Wali, the ālamdār-i Kashmir or ‘standard-bearer of Kashmir’. As against this, I would argue, as some scholars have done before me, that the historical Lalla could more productively be seen as the inheritor of a long line of brilliant Kashmir Śaivite practitioners and expositors who flourished between the eighth and the eleventh centuries CE, including Vasugupta, Bhatta Nārāyana, Utpaladeva, Lakshmanadeva and Abhinavagupta. Going further, and building here on a model proposed by Richard Lannoy (1971, 168–76) and a suggestion made by the historian Peter Heehs (2002, 293), I would hazard the suggestion that she was a member of what I would describe as a Tantric underground spread across the sacred geography of the Indian subcontinent. The evidence suggests that she innovated around the Sanskrit and Apabhramśa teachings of the Śaiva masters and explored the spiritual alchemy of the Tantras. Choosing to compose her utterances in the evolving language of the common people, she injected these powerful currents into the popular consciousness.
The liminal figure, especially if she is a woman who has made heterodox choices, is extremely vulnerable to misrepresentation: Lalla was a wanderer who had deliberately de-classed herself, used the demotic rather than the elite language, and refused to found a new movement or join an established order. Various commentators, including those otherwise well disposed towards her, have proposed the most patronising explanations for Lalla’s spiritual attainments, her poetry and her teachings. Some allow her a little acquaintance with Yoga and Tantra; some concede that she knew a little philosophy but imply that she picked it up informally and intuitively; and some doubt that a woman could have gained the sophistication of an initiate. Professor A.N. Dhar writes: ‘It is essentially through the vākhs, which she uttered as direct outpourings from her heart rather than as consciously wrought poetic compositions, that Lalla became very popular as a saint-poet in Kashmir’ (in Toshkhani 2002, 13; emphasis mine). Even Peter Heehs, who contextualises Lalla within the Siddha, Nātha and Yoga traditions, writes that she ‘undoubtedly knew something of the teachings of Kashmir Śaivism, though not through Sanskrit texts’ (2002: 293). These are baffling attitudes. Why is it so difficult to believe—especially when she says so herself in the most eloquent manner—that, at the core of the LD corpus, there really was a woman mystic who had put herself through the rigours of initiation into Kashmir Śaivism, Tantra and Yoga? As Lalla says in poem 51, recording the awakening of the subtle body through a Yogic technique:
My mind boomed with the sound of Om,
my body was a burning coal.
Six roads brought me to a seventh,
that’s how Lalla reached the Field of Light.
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Our road, as we map the religious and philosophical lifeworld in which Lalla’s poetry emerged, now brings us to Kashmir Śaivism. The f
oundations of Śaivite philosophy lie in the Śaiva-āgāmas or tantras, high among which may be ranked the Vijñānabhairava (c. 8th century CE), composed in Sanskrit and developed in northern India between the fourth and eighth centuries. These were cast as dialogues between Shiva and Shakti concerning the structure of the cosmos and of human experience, the pathways to spiritual illumination, and modes of effecting release from the cycle of birth and death. The tantras posit a framework of thirty-six cosmic principles, which culminate in Shiva and Shakti, and beyond this dyad, in the ineffable and unitive essence of the universe, which is referred to as Parama-shiva (rendered in the Notes to this translation as the ‘Shiva-principle’). The Śaivite tradition developed through three major branches: the dualist Śaiva Siddhānta system that arose in the Tamil country in the sixth century, its texts composed in Tamil; the non-dualist Kashmir Śaivism that announced itself in the eighth century, its texts composed in Sanskrit with Apabhramśa annotations; and the dualist Viraśaiva or Lingāyat movement that exploded in Karnataka in the twelfth century, its texts composed in Kannada (Heehs 2002, 243–44).
Non-dualist Kashmir Śaivism emerged as a distinctive philosophy after intensive dialogue with the thousand-year tradition of Mahāyāna Buddhism, especially the sophisticated epistemology and psychology of itsYogācāra school (also known as the Vijñānavāda), which originated in Gandhara and Kashmir. Kashmir Śaivism also benefited from a confrontation with the newly emergent Vedānta monism of the intellectually energetic Kerala monk and systematiser of modern Hinduism, Śankara. The Kashmir Śaivites concur with the Yogācārins that the phenomenal world is real only to the extent that it is perceived to exist through the medium of the consciousness. Accordingly, a refinement of consciousness leads to a refinement of the understanding of the phenomenal world. To the Yogācārins, as to the Kashmir Śaivites, no objects exist independently of perception, there is really no world outside the self; and indeed, the experiencing self and the experienced world are both products of the processes of cognition and imagination.5 With the Vedāntins, the Kashmir Śaivites agree that there is only one ultimate reality, and that there is no distinction between the Divine and the human, except through a forgetfulness of one’s true nature.
