I, Lalla

by Lal Ded

  and barely born, fall back into this lake.

  131

  Three times I saw a lake overflowing a lake.

  Once I saw a lake mirrored in the sky.

  Once I saw a lake that bridged

  north and south, Mount Haramukh and Lake Kausar.

  Seven times I saw a lake shaping itself into emptiness.

  132

  So many times I’ve drunk the wine of the Sindhu river.

  So many roles I’ve played on this stage.

  So many pieces of human flesh I’ve eaten.

  But I’m still the same Lalla, nothing’s changed.

  133

  Look out for Him.

  He’s played many roles on this stage.

  Slough off envy, anger, hate.

  Learn to take what you get.

  You’ll find Him.

  134

  We’ve been here before, we’ll be here again,

  we’ve been here since the birth of time.

  The sun rises, sets, rises again.

  Shiva creates, destroys, creates the world again.

  135

  (135 & 136 are companion vākhs)

  Who’s asleep and who’s awake?

  What is that lake in the sky

  from which a rain of nectar is falling?

  What is the offering that Shiva loves most?

  What is that Supreme Word you’re looking for

  in the hermit’s coded dictionary?

  136

  The mind’s asleep. When it outgrows itself, it will awake.

  The five organs are the lake in the sky

  from which a rain of nectar is falling.

  The offering Shiva loves most is knowledge of Self.

  The Supreme Word you’re looking for

  is Shiva Yourself.

  137

  The chain of shame will break

  if you steel yourself against jibes and curses.

  The robe of shame will burn away

  if you break in the mustang of your mind.

  138

  I prayed so hard my tongue got stuck to my palate

  and still I couldn’t worship You right.

  My thumb and finger were sore from turning the rosary

  and still my mind’s phantoms wouldn’t go away.

  139

  Don’t torture this body with thirst and hunger,

  give it a hand when it stumbles and falls.

  To hell with all your vows and prayers:

  just help others through life, there’s no truer worship.

  140

  This body that you’re fussing over,

  this body that you’re dolling up,

  this body that you’re wearing to the party,

  this body will end as ash.

  141

  True mind, look inside this body,

  this body they call the Self’s own form.

  Strip off greed and lust, polish this body,

  this body as bright as the sun.

  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.

  143

  (143, 144, 145 & 146 form a group of vākhs, linked by their closing line)

  A king’s flywhisk, baldachin, chariot, throne,

  pageants, evenings at the theatre, a downy bed.

  Which of these will endure

  or blot out the fear of death?

  144

  Delusion’s captive, you threw yourself away like flotsam

  on the ocean of life.

  You broke the embankment

  and fell into the marsh of shadows.

  When Yama’s warders come to drag you away bleeding,

  who can blot out the fear of death?

  145

  You have two kinds of karma

  and this dream-world has three tainted causes.

  Destroy them all with your burning breath

  and in the other world, they’ll anoint you.

  Up, use your wings, pierce the sun-disk.

  It flies from you, the fear of death.

  146

  Wear the robe of wisdom,

  brand Lalla’s words on your heart,

  lose yourself in the soul’s light,

  you too shall be free.

  Notes

  1. As Benedict Anderson writes, directing his observations to the European situation, in Imagined Communities (1991, 44–45):

  Print-capitalism gave a new fixity to language, which in the long run helped to build that image of antiquity so central to the subjective idea of the nation. As Febvre and Martin remind us, the printed book kept a permanent form, capable of virtually infinite reproduction, temporally and spatially. It was no longer subject to the individualising and ‘unconsciously modernising’ habits of monastic scribes. Thus, while twelfth-century French differed markedly from that written by Villon in the fifteenth, the rate of change slowed decisively in the sixteenth. ‘By the seventeenth century, languages in Europe had generally assumed their modern forms.’ To put it another way, for three centuries now these stabilised print-languages have been gathering a darkening varnish; the words of our seventeenth-century forebears are accessible to us in a way that to Villon his twelfth-century ancestors were not.

  Anderson characterises this process as arising largely unselfconsciously from the interplay among capitalism, technology and linguistic diversity. He notes, however, that once such fixity or stability was attained, it could be placed at the disposal of ideological agents motivated by a politics of nationalist (or subnationalist) identity as an instrument of mobilisation and consolidation.

  2. I am thinking, especially, of the well-known and often retold miracle story about Lalla’s encounter with the Sufi saint and missionary, Sayyid Ali Hamadani or Shah-i Hamadan. In this account, Lalla is cast as a ‘mendicant devotee [who wandered] about the country singing and dancing in a half-nude condition’, rejecting all notions of bodily shame. Once, on seeing the Sufi saint approach, she cried out, ‘I have seen a man,’ and, running into a bakery to conceal herself, leaped into the oven. By divine grace, she emerged from the flames dressed in the effulgent robes of paradise, and presented herself before Shah-i Hamadan (Grierson and Barnett 1920, 2–3). The ideologically tuned implication that there were no real men in a still largely Hindu-Buddhist Kashmir is obvious, as is the advantage to be gained by presenting a leading Śaiva yogini in a state of submission before the most venerated Sufi in the Valley. The patriarchalist overtones of this story appear to have escaped those commentators who cite it as evidence of the influence of Sufism on Lalla’s spirituality, or of the dialogue between Islam and Hinduism in Kashmir.

  3. In this context, see the 1958 essay by Bernard S. Cohn and McKim Marriott, ‘Networks and Centres in the Integration of Indian Civilisation’. In the course of their research, the authors identified several chains of religious, political and commercial specialists who hold the socially and culturally diverse networks of Indian society together. Among these are

  expert managers of cultural media [who mediate] between a more refined level of learning and the demands of the less learned, local market for their services. Specialists of any type in such multilevel hierarchies must look both down and up; because they constantly turn back and forth, Redfield had called them ‘hinge’ groups. (Cohn 1988, 83)

  4. In his 1934–35 essay, ‘Discourse in the Novel’, Bakhtin distinguishes between norm and heteroglossia. While ‘norm’ refers to the centralising, unitary, ideological and centripetal legislations that aim to shape a language, ‘heteroglossia’ embodies the idiosyncratic, decentralising, unpredictable and centrifugal usage of varied groups, which actually constitutes the textures of that language and ensures its dynamic vitality and relevance. Bakhtin writes (1991, 272):

  Every concrete utterance of a speaking subject serves as a point where centrifugal as well a
s centripetal forces are brought to bear. The processes of centralisation and decentralisation, of unification and disunification, intersect in the utterance; the utterance not only answers the requirements of its own language as an individualised embodiment of a speech act, but it answers the requirements of heteroglossia as well; it is in fact an active participant in such speech diversity. And this active participation of every utterance in living heteroglossia determines the linguistic profile and style of the utterance to no less a degree than its inclusion in any normative-centralising system of a unitary language . . . Such is the fleeting language of a day, of an epoch, a social group, a genre, a school and so forth . . . The authentic environment of an utterance, the environment in which it lives and takes shape, is dialogised heteroglossia, anonymous and social as language, but simultaneously concrete, filled with specific content and accented as an individual utterance.

  5. The central doctrine of the Yogācāra or Vijñānavāda school of Mahayana Buddhism is citta-mātra, ‘mind-only’, which has often been misinterpreted to imply a solipsist or an extreme mentalist standpoint. As the Buddhist historian Andrew Skilton clarifies (1994, 123), citta-mātra does not mean that

  everything is made of mind (as though the mind were some kind of universal matter), but that the totality of our experience is dependent upon our mind. The proposition is that we can only know or experience things with our mind. Even sense experience is cognised by the mind, therefore the things that we know, every element of our cognition, is essentially part of a mental process. Nothing cognised can be radically or fundamentally different from that mind.

  This point is taken up and discussed more fully in the note to poem 86.

  6. The early Orientalist and colonial jurist, Sir William Jones (1746–94), for instance, interpreted, as the ‘fundamental tenet’ of Vedanta, the belief that matter ‘has no essence independent of mental perception, that existence and perceptibility are convertible terms, that external appearances and sensations are illusory, and would vanish into nothing, if the divine energy, which alone sustains them, were suspended but for a moment’ (Pachori 1993, 194).

  Notes to the Poems

  These notes have been cast in the form of a detailed commentary. They are intended to provide an interpretation of the 146 vākhs of Lal Děd included in this translation, and to expand the reader’s access to their content as well as their historical, philosophical and literary context. One of the specific aims of this section is to elucidate the images and conventions employed in Lalla’s poetry, and to help clarify the sometimes obscure or occult meanings of vākhs that refer to concepts and practices associated withYoga, Tantra and Kashmir Śaivism. These notes also annotate certain ideas and rituals mentioned in Lalla’s poems which may seem alien or disconcerting to the contemporary Indian religious sensibility

  I have incorporated a concordance into these notes, instead of consigning it to a separate tabulation. Each note, accordingly, includes the corresponding vākh number from two benchmark collections: those of George Grierson and Lionel D. Barnett (1920) and Professor Jayalal Kaul (1973). Grierson and Barnett’s numbering is indicated by a capital G, and Kaul’s by a capital K. Where the vākh appears only in Grierson and Barnett, it carries a ‘G’ number; likewise, where it appears only in Kaul, it bears a ‘K’ number. Wherever a vākh has been taken from J. Hinton Knowles’ Dictionary of Kashmiri Proverbs and Sayings (1885), or Knowles records a variant of that vākh, the note indicates this with a ‘K. Pr’ number.

  Every note opens with the first line of the relevant vākh, rendered in Roman script with diacritical marks.

  The proper names for the Divine, or of various deities, appear in diverse spellings throughout this text. For Shiva, to take a key example, I retain the spelling that is in common use, ‘Shiva’, in general contexts, but use the diacritically nuanced ‘Śiva’ in citing sources where it is so written; the Kashmiri original is rendered in Roman, depending on whether the usage is nominative or invocative, as ‘Shiv’ or ‘Shiwa’.

  I have varied the use of ‘yogi’ and ‘yogini’ throughout this section, to indicate that seekers belonging to both genders were engaged in the practices and the quest under review.

  *

  1. G: 36 | K: 108

  prathuy tīrthan gatshān sannyās

  2. K: 87

  latan huṅd māz lāryōm vatan

  These vākhs, 1 and 2, contain the kernel of Lal Děd’s spiritual practice. Her concern is with inward and inner-directed evolution, not with the pursuit of shrines and pilgrimages, rituals and scriptures, observances and sacrifices. She argues that there is no reason to seek the Divine in places specially designated as holy, since the Divine, or the Self, is the core of one’s own being. Parenthetically, we may note the scepticism expressed by many Indian mystic-poets towards pilgrimage sites, which often function as staging posts in an economy of faith that replaces the elusive possibilities of grace with the more tangible practicalities of commerce. The faraway grass of poem 1, the luxuriant dramun, is the durva grass used in Hindu rituals.

  In poem 2, we find Lalla in her persona as the wanderer, intimate with the landscape and a stranger to domestic settings. Since the Divine pervades the universe, Lalla teaches, an experience of realisation or enlightenment is potentially available anywhere. As Joseph Campbell observes, in The Hero with a Thousand Faces: ‘[A] great temple can be established anywhere. Because, finally, the All is everywhere, and anywhere may become the seat of power. Any blade of grass may assume, in myth, the figure of the saviour and conduct the questing wanderer into the sanctum sanctorum of his own heart’ (2008, 35).

  The ‘secret’ that lies at the heart of wisdom teachings is usually a simple yet compelling and often ignored truth: here, it is the understanding of the omnipresence of the Divine, which Lalla distils from a ‘hundred pieces of talk’, from discourses and doctrines.

  3. G: 8 | K: 73

  Shiv wā Kēshěv wā Zin wā

  Lal Děd adopts a variety of tones and attitudes towards the Divine, ranging from the offhand to the reverential, the lover’s complaint to the questor’s bemusement. Here, she fuses her longing for release from the ‘sickness of life’, bhawa-ruz, with the teaching that the particularisation of the Divine into a deity by various religious lineages has little use unless it can cure the questor of this fundamental affliction. The alternatives that Lalla offers in this poem indicate the religious landscape of Kashmir in the fourteenth century: the Divine is Shiva or Shiv, the Auspicious One, to the Śaivites; Vishnu or Kēshěv, the Killer of the Demon Keshi, to the Vaishnavites; the Buddha or Zin, the Conqueror, to the Buddhists; and Brahma or Kamal-aza-nāth, the Lotus-born Lord, to his devotees. Lalla refers to the Buddha as Zin, from the Sanskrit Jina, meaning one who has conquered the senses and desires, and overcome the cycle of rebirth: an appellation evidently used at that date to designate both the Buddha and Mahavira, although later and elsewhere applied only to Mahavira.

  4. G: 106 | K: 1

  āmi pana sǒdaras nāvi chěs lamān

  Lal Děd employs an image beloved of the saint-poets of India: the self as a boat tossed about on the ocean of life. Her image adds a layer of complication, since the boat is being towed: here, as in several other poems, Lalla uses the image of the river boat being towed by labourers or horses on a tow-path. And when the river boat goes out into the ocean, as it is shown to do here, there is no tow-path from which it can be guided: poem 4 spells out a trope of hazard and impossibility. The second image in the poem is also one popular with India’s saint-poets: the body as a leaky vessel. The closing line presents the questor as wanderer, lost and far away from home, indeed with no knowledge of where home might lie. Of interest, here, is the play of scale through which the image of water is presented as both epic/external and intimate/internal: the self, visualised as a boat on the ocean in the first two lines of the vākh, becomes water itself in the next two lines, in danger of seeping away from the half-baked cup of the body.

  5. G
: 67 | K: 2

  Ialith Ialith waday bǒ-döy

  This poem records a classic moment in the early phase of the journey towards spiritual realisation: the recognition that the soul has been held hostage by the world of appearances, variously glossed in the Sanskrit tradition as mithyā or māyā. The questor must free the self from the illusion that the world, with its objects and experiences, is permanent. To forget who you are is to forget the true path and purpose of the Self, which is enlightenment, the act of finding again the lost way home, which recurs in Lalla’s poems. The iron anchor, lǒh-langar, is an image drawn from the nautical life of Kashmir’s lakes and rivers: it signifies the things of the world, the attachments that keep us moored in the world of appearances, and which, Lalla suggests, will not accompany the self on the onward journey after death.

  6. G: 98 | K: 5 | K. Pr: 18 (variant)

  āyěs watē gayěs na watē

  This poem may be read in two different ways. It opens with the image of two roads: the first is the natural process of birth by which the bodied self is born, without choice and carrying the baggage of previous lives; and the other, the way by which it leaves the world, death transformed from an inevitable event into a willed and perfected choice to release oneself from the cycle of rebirth. The word wath means both a physical path and a spiritual way. Accordingly, the action of the poem takes place at a threshold moment charged with considerable allusive power, hinting at the possibility of a transformative experience: twilight surprises the speaker just as she is about to cross a river.