I, Lalla

by Lal Ded

  Master, leave these palm leaves and birch barks

  to parrots who recite the name of God in a cage.

  Good luck, I say, to those who think they’ve read

  the scriptures.

  The greatest scripture is the one that’s playing in

  my head.

  *

  There is no trace, in the vākhs, of Lalla’s pre-questor biography as it is enshrined in the hagiographies: no complaints about the suspicious husband, the cruel mother-in-law, the stone in the plate, indeed, no reference at all to her domestic sufferings, unless a hint of these appears in poem 142:

  Don’t think I did all this to get famous.

  I never cared for the good things of life.

  I always ate sensibly. I knew hunger well,

  and sorrow, and God.

  What the vākhs record, instead, is the biography of an individual actively seeking enlightenment, defying the orthodoxy, subjecting the fossil habits of religion to critique, and learning to cope in various ways with the irruption of the Divine into her life. And it is a vigorous outdoor life that Lalla leads, connected to the materiality of the everyday, which is sensuously apprehended. Her poetry moves seamlessly between the metaphysical realm of the cultivated breath, the opened lotus of consciousness and vatic ecstasy on the one hand, and the domain of objects, tools, social relationships and human emotions on the other. This is why I am surprised by the suggestions, made by several scholars, that Lalla’s poems are replete with references to women’s work or domestic details. For instance, Neerja Mattoo, having observed that Lalla ‘conversed and discussed with the most learned scholars—all men—of her time on an equal footing’, goes on to advance the claim that ‘there is no elitist, Brahminical choice of word, phrase or metaphor—these are drawn from a woman’s world of domesticity, even though she walked out of marriage and home. Her poetry is a woman’s work and in the process she gives a voice to women’ (in Toshkhani 2002, 69). As we know, Lalla’s poetry demonstrates an opulence of technical terms, even if its philosophy is imparted through stunningly visceral symbolism. And, with all due respect to feminist commentators, the domestic realm of women is conspicuously absent in these vākhs. There is barely a glimpse of the domestic interior in these 146 poems: Lalla was a wanderer across the landscapes of river, lake and snow, and no stranger to boat, anchor and tow-rope.

  In actuality—and this may reflect the likelihood that the LD corpus has had a preponderance of male contributors—the choice of recurrent imagery in the vākhs offers testimony to a criss-crossing of gender lines. Lalla’s poems draw considerably on artisanal and mercantile life: masonry and the building trades are prominent in poems 28 and 71; the shepherd plays a role in poem 10, the carpenter in 12, the blacksmith in 18, the cook in 31, and the cleaner, carder, spinner and weaver in 38, and the washerman and tailor in 39. The tools and weapons of male labour are harnessed to symbolic purpose: the bellows in poems 18 and 52, the sabre in 96, the bow and arrow in 12 and 84, the whip in 56, and the harpoon in 86; poems 40 and 56 hinge on the act of flaying or cutting and measuring a hide.

  The horse, a proud spirit barely tamed by the rider’s apparatus of saddle, bridle, rein and stirrup, dominates poems 76–79, 108 and 137. The marketplace is the site where allegories are staged in poems 12 and 26; the garland-maker and his wife occupy a crucial metaphorical position in 66 and 67. Nautical equipment—the ferry, the pier, towing, the net and the anchor—occurs in poems 4, 5, 6, 7, 105, 125. The garden, variously boasting jasmine, saffron and narcissus, forms the occasion for several poems, including 65, 68, 69 and 83, to unfold. The road, the river, the lake, the embankment and the bridge provide the setting for many of Lalla’s meditations. The traversal of the landscape is often a traversal of the transcendent states that she names the Field of Emptiness or the Field of Light, experiencing these during what are clearly shamanic transports of the spirit beyond its quotidian confines. By contrast, the world of female labour conducted in domestic interiors appears only in five poems: through the image of the grain mill in 21, 22, 90 and 99, and of the hearth in 33.

  Lalla’s poetry demonstrates close acquaintance with the raw side of life. In poem 69, Death chases the soul like a tax-collector, exacting his dues. The addressee in poem 83 is told that he cannot put up a proxy to be executed in his place; it is his own ‘neck on the block’. In poem 144, Yama, the Lord of Death, sends his warders to drag ‘delusion’s captive’ away, bleeding: the reference is to a brutal method of punishment, chōra-dārě karun, in which the prisoner is dragged along stony ground until he bleeds almost to death. In its figurative, even figural language, the LD corpus has encoded the idioms of social, political and juridical violence prevalent in Kashmir between the thirteenth and the nineteenth centuries.

  *

  6. Translation: Methods and Reasons

  Wear the robe of wisdom,

  brand Lalla’s words on your heart,

  lose yourself in the soul’s light,

  you too shall be free.

  (POEM 146)

  I, Lalla is a new translation of Lalla’s poetry for twenty-first-century readers. In preparing it, I have gone back to the original, word by word, line by line, clause by clause. My method has been geared, not to achieving a rigidly lexical and metrical counterpart of the source language, but to trawl for the play of resonance and intertextuality around and through the words. This is essential, in order to convey Lalla’s compressions, condensations, allusions, dual meanings and coded signals. She is a demanding poet, by turns illuminating and occluded, candid and dissembling, a woman who does not throw her words away. My attempt has been to bring across into English the jagged, epiphanic power of Lalla’s poetry; to restore the colloquial pulse of her voice; and to retrieve the ideas, images and tonalities of the LD corpus from the metaphysical glosses that have often usurped their place in the minds of readers.

  In the process, this translation is intended to strip away a century of ornate, Victorian-inflected renderings and paraphrases, and to disclose the grain and tenor of Lalla’s voice, the orality, vocality and spokenness of her poems. Most existing translations of the vākhs are hobbled by three major problems. First, a number of them are reworkings of Grierson and Barnett’s 1920 versions, built on the basis of phrasal variants on that English text rather than on fresh efforts to address the Kashmiri original. Secondly, most of them suffer from the desire to sound ‘poetical’, and deliver themselves in the ponderous idiom—part Edwin Arnold, part Leigh Hunt, with a dash of Tennyson—that was once thought appropriate to the rendering of ‘Oriental’ religious literature into English. Such poeticality is the enemy of poetry, and is especially tragic when employed by writers whose prose is perfectly contemporary. And thirdly, a number of these translations rush past the word to embrace the spirit, or what the translator believes to be the spirit, substituting Lalla’s palpable immediacy with philosophical abstraction. Elliptical and often laconic as they are, the vākhs cannot be translated as commentary.

  I have chosen to present the 146 vākhs that I have translated here in a sequence that suggests the journey of an evolving religious imagination, from the phase of self-doubt to those, successively, of visionary experience, the discovery of wisdom, and the sharing of that wisdom through teaching. This sequence is arranged in a fluid and associative order, however, rather than according to a strictly graduated logic: I have not divided it into sections, because I would like every vākh in this collection to relate to every other, without forcing linkages among them.

  *

  I began this translation of Lal Děd’s poems in February 1991, a month short of twenty-two; I am nearly forty-two as I come to the end of the process. For two decades, my copies of the Lal vākh, of Grierson and Barnett’s 1920 edition, Jayalal Kaul’s 1973 study and Shiban Krishna Raina’s Hindi paraphrases have accompanied me everywhere. I shared the earliest drafts of this translation, as work-in-progress, with colleagues at Daniel Weissbort’s translation workshop when I was a Fellow
of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa in 1995. I have listened to the cadence of the vākhs in Province town, Istanbul, Vienna, Tokyo, Gholvad, Cambridge, New Delhi, Munich, New York, Berlin, Pune, Brisbane, Zürich, Heidelberg, Oslo and Utrecht, and in none of these locales did Lal Děd seem a stranger. At home in Bombay, a cabinet of Lalla-related books, photocopies, notes and drafts has served me as a geniza.

  I began to translate Lalla because she provided a connection to an ancestral past, to a homeland and a language that I had lost, as the descendant of Kashmiri Saraswat Brahmins who migrated to southwestern India in several waves of diaspora between the tenth and fourteenth centuries. Translating Lalla allowed me to learn the language of my ancestors; or rather, the language I might have spoken as a matter of course, had my ancestors not emigrated from the Valley. And beyond this archaeology into my own ethnic past lay the beauty and energy of the verses: in these twenty years, I have lived with the intricacies of Lalla’s language, its familiar yet cryptic phonetics, the surprises hidden in its web of references. When I began working on this translation, I was attempting to reconcile the political and cultural perspectives of the anarchist and Marxian traditions with everything that I had assimilated in the course of a somewhat unusual upbringing whose varied elements included Kashmir Śaivite philosophy, Vaiśnava devotionalism, Buddhist reading, Sufi stories, a family connection with Theosophy and the teachings of J. Krishnamurti, an early childhood spent in Catholic South Goa and a colonialstyle Presbyterian schooling in Bombay.

  As I continued to study and translate Lalla through the 1990s and 2000s—a period overshadowed by the forces of neo-conservative organised religion and militantly politicised religiosity—I was able, gradually, to disentangle my antagonism towards these forces from the more enduring quest for the sacred, with which they have nothing in common. The project of translating Lalla has altered my perceptions of religious belief, of the nature of faith and of the questor’s journey. My long apprenticeship to Lalla has also honed my receptivity to the challenges of engaging with different realms of experience, finding an appropriate voice for them: here, the experience of a religious seeker, a social rebel, a woman. The translator is always humbled, broken and re-made in the act of translation.

  *

  The duration of my apprenticeship to Lalla has been mapped across the rise of an aggressive Hindu majoritarianism that threatened the core values of the Indian Republic; and equally, the consolidation of a global Islamism, flying under the banner of Salafism or Jihad, that is intolerant of difference. These two movements mirror one another in their desire to replace an actual diversity of cultural and philosophical expressions with an imposed singularity of belief, and are most dangerous to Hinduism and Islam, the religions whose interests they claim respectively to represent. My political purpose in undertaking this translation is to make a small intervention in the debate provoked by the contention of these rival forms of politicised religiosity in India: Hindutva and Islamism, twins in annihilatory intolerance, ranged against the pluralist and multi-perspectival tradition of the Indian subcontinent as well as against the liberal and Constitutional order of the modern Indian nation-state. In an epoch dominated by majoritarianism, sectarian intolerance and the deployment of faith as a political instrument, Lalla asserts the duty of critical intelligence, to be exercised alongside the right to belief.

  This translation is offered in the spirit of sharing, with those who have no access to it, an uncommon resource of regeneration for the embattled spirit. And yet, as I write these words, which suggest that those within Kashmir have direct access to Lalla, I find myself admitting that she is an absence in the Kashmir of today. Even as we look on, the region’s confluential and multireligious culture, the culture of Lal Děd and Nund Rishi, is being swept away. A generation of Muslim children have grown up in Kashmir, who have never known Hindus. Their counterparts, a generation of children born to the Kashmiri Pandits who escaped terrorism in the early 1990s, have grown up in refugee camps in Jammu and elsewhere in northern India. They have no first-hand acquaintance with Kashmir or Kashmiri Muslims. Kashmir’s special form of Islam is in retreat before a monolithic pan-Islamic approach, which is being promoted in the name of purity—of doctrine and practice. on the other hand, Kashmiri Hinduism has been destroyed. Pandit shrines are now run by Hindu priests from the plains, employed by the armed forces; to these outsiders, many elements of Pandit ritual practice would seem either strange or positively anathema (see the notes to poems 58 and 59).

  On a visit to Kashmir some years ago, during a lull in what many Kashmiris euphemistically call the ‘turmoil’, we found the streets bristling with sand-bagged gun emplacements. Military units were on the move everywhere; and while a traders’ strike was in force, business was being conducted elegantly from the back doors of stores. Wherever we went, once people had passed beyond the exchange of bland civilities and established a bond of trust, we were asked: ‘Why does no one tell the world our story? Why have you forgotten us?’ As we drove through the mountains, to Sheikh Balkhi’s shrine in Pakhar Pora, surrounded by pine and cypress, and to the ruined sun temple of Mārtanda, built by Lalitāditya, I found tears in my eyes. The earth was alive with sturdy walnuts, tall pines, the poplars and flowering apricots of spring; but wherever there were settlements, we found a spiky creeper. It grew along the walls that surround public buildings and private homes; it curled around schools, mosques, abandoned temples, half-asleep hotels. Concertina wire is the most widespread form of vegetation in Kashmir today. It grows everywhere, even in the mind.

  Is Kashmir isolated in this predicament? Or does it, instead, epitomise the epic turbulence that afflicts South Asia? Everywhere in the subcontinent, we find regions deeply tormented by ideological and religious schisms, suffering the legacy of terror as well as the insensitivity and repression of a State that cannot fathom the true feelings of its people. Everywhere, too, we find individuals who are uncertain of whether their journey through these troubled landscapes will be a pilgrimage towards illumination or an excursion into nightmare. In the depths of this crisis, I would like to believe that Lalla’s voice can still exert a redemptive power over those who hear her. As she says in poem 90:

  Resilience: to stand in the path of lightning.

  Resilience: to walk when darkness falls at noon.

  Resilience: to grind yourself fine in the turning mill.

  Resilience will come to you.

  Bombay, December 2009 —Utrecht, September 2010

  The Poems

  1

  One shrine to the next, the hermit can’t stop for breath.

  Soul, get this! You should have looked in the mirror.

  Going on a pilgrimage is like falling in love

  with the greenness of faraway grass.

  2

  I burnt up the landscape with footprints, looked for

  Him everywhere.

  Then it hit me: What am I thinking, He’s everywhere!

  Lalla distilled this truth from a hundred pieces of talk.

  Now hear this, people, and go mad!

  3

  Shiva or Keshava or the Enlightened One or the Lotus-born, whatever He calls Himself,

  I just wish He’d cure this poor woman of life,

  be He He or He or He or He.

  4

  I’m towing my boat across the ocean with a thread.

  Will He hear me and help me across?

  Or am I seeping away like water from a half-baked cup?

  Wander, my poor soul, you’re not going home anytime soon.

  5

  Gently, gently I weep for you, my soul.

  You’ve lost your heart to Mr Illusion.

  You’ve forgotten who you are. And this iron anchor,

  not even its shadow will remain behind when the time comes.

  6

  (This vākh has two alternative readings)

  The road I came by wasn’t the road I took to go.

  As I stood on the
embankment, breached and bridged,

  the day faded.

  I looked in my purse and couldn’t find the smallest coin to give the ferryman.