by Lal Ded
To demonstrate that this can be done, I will take recourse to Karine Schomer’s fine paper, ‘The Dōhā as a Vehicle of Sant Teachings’. While being concerned with the use of this family of poetic forms in the religious literature of the northern Indian Sant tradition, of the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries, especially in the poetry of Dādu and Kabīr, Schomer assembles an impressive genealogy for the dōhā. Crucially, for our purposes here, she amplifies the kind of prosodic analysis that Grierson essays briefly into a detailed examination of the structure of parallelism, opposition and surprise that gives the dōhā its special flavour, ensuring that it is ‘not only brief and easy to remember, but also highly persuasive, carrying about it an aura of traditional wisdom and universal truth’. Signalling the Kashmiri vākh as an equivalent ‘folk meter’, Schomer observes that the dōhā came into being, historically, as ‘a new kind of verse form closely associated with the rise of Apabhramśa . . . an extremely flexible meter based on mātrā or moraic count alone . . . its form [suggesting] oral composition and sung performance’. Noting, in a sophisticated recursion of Grierson’s notion, that the meter may have been associated with the Ābhiras, a foreign people who entered India through the northwest during the early first millennium and who were known to have influenced the development of Apabhramśa, Schomer writes that the dōhā
became the dominant meter of Apabhramśa, just as the gāthā was the dominant meter of Prakrit and the śloka of Sanskrit . . . Indeed, the dōhā is prominent in all of the different kinds of Apabhramśa literature that have come down to us: grammars and works on metrics, Jain didactic anthologies and religious narratives, secular love narratives, the utterances of the Buddhist Siddhas, doctrinal works of the Kashmir Śaivas, the vernacular literature of the Nātha Yogis and, finally, poetry in praise of kings, including the early rāso literature of Rajasthan. (emphasis mine)
In course of time, Schomer writes, ‘the dōhā became an omnipurpose meter’ and assumed two major functions, those of ‘the compressed aphoristic statement, i.e. proverbial utterance or folk saying’ and the ‘lyrical evocation of intense feeling’ that may have ‘evolved out of women’s folksongs’ (1987, 63–66).
This, in my view, is the real linguistic and literary continuum within which Lalla’s vākhs—emerging as they originally did at the threshold between Apabhramsa and modern Kashmiri, relaying the energies of the one into the other—must be historically situated. Lalla was an exceptional poet, but I would like to show that she was not, in historical terms, the inexplicable singularity, the puzzling exception, the isolated oddity that she is often made out to be.
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I believe that this living archive of philosophical and literary resources, communicated by the Śaivas, Siddhas and Nāthas, was urgently active in the formation and orientation of the historical Lalla’s world-view and poetry. The confluence of these forces suggests, to me, that a substantial, vigorous and heterodox counterculture existed in Kashmir between the tenth and the fourteenth centuries. Accordingly, I would argue that the historical Lalla clearly drew on and, to some extent, participated in this counterculture, which I will name the ‘Tantric underground’. Aligned with its counterparts elsewhere in the Indian subcontinent, it would have served as a fertile ground for new spiritual developments. From the available information about the various groups and lineages whose texts, narratives and practices circulated within it, as well as hints that we find in ritual manuals, I would speculate that the Tantric underground embodied a trans-caste movement. Indeed, this circumstance may have done much to reduce and mitigate, in late mediaeval and early modern Kashmir, the explosive caste tensions that were prevalent elsewhere in the subcontinent during that period. The diffusion of Islam has traditionally been given the credit for this unusual disappearance of intra-caste solidarity and inter-caste antagonism in Kashmir (the old identities now survive among Kashmiri Muslims only as surnames such as Bhat, Mattoo and Katju, and kram or clan names such as Dar, Lone and Tantri, with no corresponding system of caste identification or endogamous exclusivity). But the seeds of social change may well have been sown a few centuries before the advent of the Sufis in the Valley. The conventional schema of the battle for the hearts and minds of Kashmiris in the late mediaeval period has been represented as a contest between Brahminical Hinduism and Sufi Islam; this third and potent alternative, the Tantric underground, has been lying concealed, in the form of isolated traces scattered across various disciplines of study, without a context to unify them and disclose their significance.
Significantly, in Kulācāra, the catalytic figures who induce the sādhaka to liberate his consciousness belong to the subaltern castes. The paramount chakra sacrifice involves the presence and activities of ‘nine wives’: women of ritually impure status who are about to engage in adulterous intercourse. In detailing this secret ritual, Abhinavagupta describes these women as goddesses and observes that they are to be treated as such (while they no doubt reverted to their regular status by day, these transitions of status cannot have been entirely without effect on their selfconsciousness and sense of agency). The most significant of these women is the chakrinī (Kashmiri: kröjü), the potter’s wife, who occupies the centre of the circle and acts as the yogi’s sexual partner (Dupuche 2003, 1 16–23; see, also, the note to poem 33).
The meticulously choreographed yonipujā, or ritual with a sexual partner, also involves a ‘forbidden’ woman. The adept gives her a narcotic drink and wine, and ritually anoints her with vermilion and sandalpaste; he then conducts what is described as ‘ritual coition’ with her, before retreating to ceremonially worship her yoni (Dupuche 2003, 124–35). It is clear that these esoteric rites ran the risk of lapsing into crassly self-indulgent and exploitative excess. It is also clear that they remain, from the textual evidence, dedicated to the psycho-spiritual transcendence of a male rather than a female practitioner, with little concern for the efficacy or otherwise of the ritual for the women involved (apart from what we may speculate about the sense of agency that their liminal status may have conferred on them).
Richard Lannoy contextualises the Tantric path within the model of what he terms the ‘social Antipodes’, the axial relationship of mutual opposition and attraction that conjoins the higher castes, and their orthodox world view, with the lower castes and tribal society, and their multiple heterodoxies.
There are many examples of the interplay between the repressive and libidinous elements in Hindu society For instance, on the one hand the extremely strict rules imposed on the upper caste stratum reveal a high degree of psychological repression which accompanies the advance of civilisation, while on the other hand the most characteristic feature of Indian culture is the persistent vitality, not to say obtrusiveness, of its folk cultures . . . the most striking example is undoubtedly the relation between Tantric Hinduism (a revalorisation of primitive magic and ritualised orgiasticism) and the more ascetic and puritanical Brahminical orthodoxy . . . The personal underground of the subconscious high-caste mind feeds [its] consciousness from below. Every well-documented case of a great creative Indian personality abounds in evidence of such contacts with the non-rational culture of excluded peoples and classes. (1971, 170–71)
By contrast with this perspicacious analysis, the horror of some twentieth-century Kashmiri historians at Tantra is undoubtedly conditioned by the internalised perspective of the Victorian missionary appalled by heathen proceedings. Presumably P.N.K. Bamzai had performances like the chakra sacrifice in mind when he wrote of late mediaeval Hinduism in Kashmir, mixing categories and inverting causalities somewhat: ‘Saktism, born of the love for Durga worship, had degenerated into grotesque forms of rites and ceremonies’ (1994, 2:550).
In Lalla’s case, the evidence suggests that she worked her way across the Tantric path, using it as a bridge rather than a platform. Exquisitely reminding us that the Tantras have a conceptual as well as a physical basis, and that the transgressions they demand are as spiritual in nature as they are social,
Lalla translates the details and ingredients of the expressly Tantric ceremony of poem 19 into an allegory and a cautionary tale in poem 20:
Fatten the five elements like they were rams meant for
the sacrifice.
Feed them the grain of mind-light, and cakes fit for
the gods.
Then kill them. But don’t rush.
You need the password to the Supreme Place
to reach wisdom by breaking the rules.
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With some reason, therefore, Tantric practice is popularly identified with the ritual use of sexuality, the symbolism of decay and death, and other features that seem to stand at the profane end of the spectrum of human activities, very remote from the sacred. Unfortunately inspired by this, some enthusiasts, usually of European, American or expatriate Indian location, have sensationalised Tantra as an exotic way of life that can somehow be mapped onto a bohemian lifestyle. Their approach overlooks the fact that the static binary opposition has no place in Hindu thought, which sees all opposites as being engaged in constant and dynamic interplay. Thus, the sacred and the profane, like the ascetic and the erotic or the festive and the melancholy, interpenetrate and transform one another as well as the consciousness that dwells upon their interplay.
On the other hand, many Hindus who believe themselves to be orthodox regard the Tantras with profound suspicion, and unimaginable perversions have been attributed to this more occluded aspect of Hindu religious life. Some commentators have demanded the excision of the Tantras from a Hinduism that must be read back to an imagined Vedic purity or ‘reformed’, that is to say, purified of its ambiguities and bowdlerised to eliminate its stimulating perplexities. This kind of reform—as against the struggle to rid Hinduism of the persisting asymmetries of caste and patriarchal sanction—is merely an attempt to render Hindu religious practice palatable to a modern bourgeoisie for whom religion is an insurance policy, bought to protect it from the moral consequences of its own deceits, compromises and hypocrisies.
Such a refusal to cope with the differential perspectives within the Hindu rubric stems also from the widespread misconception that all Hinduism is reducible to Vedānta. This misconception was originally perpetuated by colonial scholarship, since it conveniently justified the stereotype of the passive and otherworldly ‘Hindoo’ who saw the world as illusion, had no desire to govern himself, and whose resources could therefore be siphoned away while he dreamt of fusing self with Overself.6 It has long since been internalised by Hindus themselves, in an act of auto-Orientalism that has had debilitating consequences for the theory as well as the practice of Hinduism.
To condemn the Tantric path as an exploration of perversity is to forget that it has provided a crucial rite of passage to numerous spiritual questors through the centuries, and even to so incomparable a modern master as Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa. The transition that the priest of Kāli at Dakshineshwar made, from a spontaneous and unstructured God-intoxication to the flowering of spiritual awareness, was catalysed by his demanding two-year Tantric discipleship with the woman guru, Bhairavi Brahmani, over 1861–63. The contemporary teacher and commentator, Swami Niranjanananda Saraswati of the Bihar School of Yoga, interprets the Tantras as essaying a complex resolution of a fundamental conflict: between the raw physical energies and instinctual drives on the one hand, and the field of expanding intelligence and consciousness on the other. Instead of repressing the sexual appetites, the craving for security, the force of irrationality and the various emotional syndromes generated by repression, Tantric techniques draw these out, empty them of negativity, and harmonise them into a more integrated, fulfilling and creative pattern of being (1995, 1:95–102)
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5. Lalla’s Utterance and Her Community of Interlocutors
What the books taught me, I’ve practised.
What they didn’t teach me, I’ve taught myself.
I’ve gone into the forest and wrestled with the lion.
I didn’t get this far by teaching one thing and
doing another.
(POEM 111)
In the twenty years that I have spent studying and translating Lalla’s vākhs, I have repeatedly marvelled at how powerfully verb-driven they are. Rich as they are in visual image, cunning in their music and scintillating in the metaphorical leaps they make, these poems turn most crucially on their action words. And there is nothing reticent, passive or gentle about these: tsāṭun-wāṭun, to cut, hack or rip, and bind; rāṭun, to seize, grapple or wrestle; nērē, drāyun, to go forth, roam or wander; gwārun, to hunt or search energetically; prawād kôrun, to shout or proclaim. In poem 13, Lalla hugs the teacher whom she finds waiting for her at home; in poems 49 and 50, she roasts her heart, while in 50, she pestles it. In poem 51, she pictures her body as a burning coal; in 47, she mixes with the Divine and drowns herself; in 68, again, she throws herself into the lake of nectar.
Lalla’s signature line, too, articulates this spirited engagement of a bodied individual with the world: ‘Lal bǒh’ or a syntactical variation on it, meaning ‘I, Lalla’. It appears in sixteen of the 146 poems translated here (although, depending on my reading of the demands of the vākh as shaped newly in the target language, I have not rendered it as such in every case). Usually, this signature line acts as a prelude to action, the assertion of a particular self through performance. It does not signal a sardonic or meditative conclusion appended to a train of thought, and in this, is markedly different in its operation from the signature lines employed by some of the prominent male saint-poets who emerged between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, including Kabīr (whose signature line is ‘kahat Kabīrā or ‘says Kabīr’) and Tukārām (whose signature line, likewise, is ‘Tukā mhaṇé’ or ‘says Tukā’).
The Lalla whose presence animates these 146 vākhs, with her performative sense of self and her physicality of phrase, is no recluse or pining bride of God. The forms of address that she uses while engaging with priests, scholars, teachers, and even the Divine can be very direct and informal, shorn of decorum. In poems 58, 59 and 114, priests and scholars get short shrift as she challenges their methods and convictions: ‘hōṭa baṭā’, ‘Hey priest-man!’ And yet she can speak tenderly to the guru or the Divine, calling him ‘Māli’, ‘Father’, or ‘Siddhō’, ‘Master’, or ‘Nātha’, ‘Dear Lord’. More formally yet still lovingly, she can praise the Divine as ‘Sura-guru-nātha’, ‘the Teacher who is First among the Gods’. But even with the Divine, Lalla can sometimes be disconcertingly familiar: in poem 24, she calls Shiva ‘Shyāma-galā’, ‘Blue-throated One’. She refers to the Divine as Shiva in eighteen of the 146 poems in this edition, also using Shiva’s other names, such as Hara, Shambhu and Shankara (poems 3, 24, 49, 60, 61, 64, 78, 98–104, 134–36; I have not consistently replicated Shiva’s allonyms wherever they occur). Shiva and Shakti appear together in two poems (68 and 115). Other Hindu divinities also appear in Lalla’s hymns and allegories. Vishnu, in his aspects as Kēshěv (the Kashmiri for Keshava) and Nārān (the Kashmiri for Nārāyana) graces poems 3, 7, 16 and 78. Brahma, whom Lalla calls Kamal-aza-nāth (the Kashmiri for Kamalajanātha, the ‘lotus-born Lord’), is mentioned in 3 and 78; as is the Mother Goddess in poem 65; and the Buddha, under the designation Zin, which I explain in the Notes, in poem 3.
As noted already, the guru plays an important role in Lalla’s account of the spiritual journey, and is referred to in various guises in nineteen of the present poems: as master or guide, hermit or sage, wise man or naked ascetic. In some of the vākhs, Lalla puts questions about Yogic practice to her teacher, and receives clarifications. In other vākhs, she herself is the guru, variously composing a teaching poem to inspire an aspirant, a robust re-affirmation of purpose for an initiate, a contemplative residuum of experience to be shared with a fellow adept, or a piece of tough talk aimed by a stern instructor at a backslider along the path. As she says in poem 111, placed at the head of this section, she was both a student and an autodidact, learnin
g from her masters and their books but also enrolling herself in the university of experience. Thus Lalla’s vākhs can often, though not invariably, assume the form of the wǒpadēsh—cognate with the Sanskrit upadeśa—or lesson. This could be a note of advice, rebuke or provocation; or an ironic wake-up call for those who miss the subtle point of a master’s direction; or a message that, far from reassuring its recipients, disturbs them out of their complacency.
Indeed, the way in which Lalla’s poems mediate the conceptual space between the vākh and the wǒpadēsh should encourage us to formulate a theory of utterance that links the two theatres of the mystic-poet’s life: the inner world of solitary contemplation, prayer and visionary experience, and the outer world of the community, structured by social and political relationships. As inspired utterance, the vākh emerges from the first theatre: it attests to the transformation experience of an individual striving for an expansion of consciousness beyond language, and a dissolution of the private self in the awareness of cosmic totality. As teaching, the wǒpadēsh manifests itself in the second theatre, and is intended to communicate the energy of spiritual transformation to its auditors. It uses language to signal the contours of what is beyond language; but it also prompts its auditors to liberate themselves from the bonds of delusion, ignorance and dependence on sterile or exploitative systems of belief.
In this context, Lalla’s preferred informality of address could be seen as a strategy of democratisation. We could speculate that the historical Lalla used colloquial and demotic forms to share the wǒpadēsh with an expanding community of interlocutors who took their cue from her and became the earliest members of the contributory lineage. Consider the various milieux in which Lalla’s poetry came to be transmitted. While Lalla is recorded as having won the praise of Sufis like Baba Daud Mishkati and Baba Nasibuddin Ghazi (Khan 2002, 70–71), her poems were eventually also memorised by reciters associated with Śaivite teaching circles as part of their daily prayers and spiritual study (Kaul 1973, reprinted in Toshkhani 2002, 122), and sung by itinerant village bards (Kak 2007, 3). That there was a certain fluidity among these assemblies is evident from the symptomatic example of the overlap between the Darwēsh-Śastri-Grierson line of transmission and the Azizullah Khan poems. Gradually, as the wǒpadēsh circulated among these intersecting assemblies—priests and peasants, aspirants and adepts, Hindus and Muslims—it began to multiply across a range of registers, including the proclamation, the soliloquy, the lament, the dire prediction, the hymn and the love song for the Divine. Through the flow of these vākhs, we see how the author of the utterance and her successors produced themselves as rhetorical subjectivities, political actors. My purpose in insisting on the importance of the LD corpus is not to take away from the historical Lalla’s agency, but to suggest how the contributory lineage, acting in her name, distributed her agency—and with it, the privilege of articulation—among those who had no access to political influence, no stake in cultural hegemony. In retrieving the deep sources of the sacred from standard-issue religiosity and celebrating the individual questor’s power to determine her own destiny, the historical Lalla and the contributors to the LD corpus staked out a mobile, self-renewing, uncontainable space of resistance to authority. As the speaker in poem 128 declares:
