by Lal Ded
The poem itself takes two roads: we are cued to its doubleness of meaning by the difference between an oral and a scribal rendition of a key term in the second line, suman-sǒthi-manz. If read as suman, this term indicates that the speaker stands on a broken embankment partially restored by means of makeshift plank-bridges. The pronunciation of this artisanal word is identical, however, with the more cultivated sǒman, from the Sanskrit svaman: one’s own mind. An associated difference between the oral and the scribal occurs in the third line: the word hār or cowrie can be read as Har or Shiva.
Depending on which combination we prefer, suman + hār or sǒman + Har, the poem functions either as a lament on the travails of everyday life, or as an esoteric account of a spiritual crisis. The speaker may have been surprised by twilight on an embankment in disrepair, caught short of travel money; or she may stand on the precarious embankment of her own mind, aware that she has not developed the necessary reserves of meditative energy to embark on the next stage in her journey
The figure of the ferryman suggests the myth of the soul’s perilous journey across the river Vaitarni after death. As in similar myths found in ancient Egypt and Greece, Hindu mythology also equipped the soul with a coin for the ferryman, to ease the discomforts of transit: the cowrie that Lalla finds she does not possess, the talisman of Shiva’s name.
7. G: 107 | K: 15
hā manashě! kyāzi chukh wuṭhān sěki-lawar
Here, as in vākh 16, the Divine is invoked as Nārān or Nārāyana, a name of Vishnu. This may appear surprising, given Lalla’s affiliation with Kashmir Śaivism, but she uses the names of Shiva and Vishnu interchangeably. As we have seen in poem 3, she is not overly preoccupied with sectarian conceptions of the Divine.
Like many of Lalla’s poems, this one takes its images from Kashmir’s riverine economy. The speaker scoffs gently at the man who—in the spirit of the wise men of Gotham or the denizens of the Narrenschiff, the Ship of Fools so prominent in mediaeval European folklore—twists a rope from sand. Another of Lalla’s tropes of impossibility, this symbolises the belief in a worldly life, which is foredoomed in her view. The only course along which the self can navigate, sings Lalla, is the one that discloses itself when the individual self overcomes its separation from the Divine.
8. G: 19 | K: 7
atshěn āy ta gatshun gatshē
Lalla offers a bleak vision of the world’s inhabitants in this poem, as transients who are born only to die, who die only to be reborn. The piquant cadence of the closing line conveys the measure of this dance of perpetual circularity: kēh na-ta kēh na-ta kēh na-ta kyāh. This vision may appear unremittingly nihilistic if read outside the context of Lalla’s spiritual convictions: to her, these souls are trapped in the cycle of rebirth, and must redeem themselves by making the effort of self-perfection.
9. G: 41 | K: 8
āyěs kami dishi ta kami watē
This poem addresses, as poem 6 does, the theme of the two roads: birth and death; choiceless arrival in the world, and a shaped and perfected departure from it. In expressing the fear that she may waste her life without having developed, literally, a sense of direction, Lalla records yet another phase of the spiritual life: that of momentary doubt and self-doubt, and an appeal to the Divine to send help. The poems of Lal Děd, like those of many questors, are veined through with the perception that life is a precious opportunity for the achievement of perfection, which could be wasted through inattention or ignorance.
10. G: 108 | K: 23
nābȧa di-bāras aṭ a-ganḍ ḍyolu gōm
The pastoral images of this poem evoke the landscape of rural Kashmir. It describes a moment of awakening: the questor, having ignored her teacher’s advice and chosen the path of worldly life, realises that it is a wrong turn. The sack of candy that she carries suggests the pleasures of material life, suddenly devoid of attraction. Lalla’s poems compress great metaphorical energy, which is released when the utterance transfers itself from one domain of images to another: here, the self, imaged as the lost traveller in the first two lines, becomes the scattered flock of the last line, a diffused array of faculties and emotions that needs the well-guided mind to gather it into coherence.
11. G: 48 | K: 74
Lal bǒh lūtshüs tshāḍan ta gwāran
Lalla recalls the rigours of the spiritual quest, when her wanderings seemed futile and the door of grace was shut against her. At the end of this stretching of human potentiality to its utmost, she says, she found a reserve of power of whose existence she had not been aware. This is an experience that mystics as well as athletes record; and in some deep sense, as is evident from the sheer physicality of her language of spiritual effort, Lalla is an athlete of self-overcoming. She focuses her love, purified and strengthened by the tests of her endurance, on the Divine—which manifests Itself to her.
12. K: 4
hacivi horinji pětsiv-kān gom
In this enigmatic poem, which unfolds in an urban setting replete with archery meadow, palace, marketplace and waterside shrine, Lalla speaks of the self that is not yet fully prepared to set out on the quest. Skill and aim, intention and execution, dream and reality, timing and desired event, all pass one another by, leaving the self frustrated and helpless. I would go a step further and read the ill-equipped archer, the clumsy carpenter, the feckless shopkeeper and the ritually impure devotee as representing the four varnas or castes of the classical Hindu social order: the warrior, the artisan, the trader and the priest. Since none seems able to serve his svadharma, or the duty prescribed for him by his birth-caste in the Bhagavad Gita account, the self is visualised here as having passed into a space of being and self-knowledge that is beyond society: the individual who has embraced the questor’s life is no longer able to function within society’s net of norms and expectations.
13. G: 3 | K: 97
Lal bǒh drāyěs lōla rē
As in poem 11, Lalla recounts the progress of the passionate quest. Once again, the quest is presented as a returning curve: crazed by the love of God, the questor goes out into the field of experience but returns to the space of the self, finding at home what she thought to find in the world, in intimate proximity what she believed to be at a great distance. The figure sought for in this poem is not the Divine, however, but the ‘teacher’: the master or sage who appears in a number of Lalla’s vākhs, and is thought to refer to her spiritual guide, Siddha Śrīkāntha.
14. G: 60 | K: 99
tshāḍān lūtshüs pönī-pānas
This poem carries the metaphor of restless search into inner space: Lalla realises that she must look, not for One outside, but for herself. But the intellectual realisation of the identity of self and Self, by means of jñāna-mārga, must be sustained and actualised through the exercise of bhakti-mārga. She finds secret knowledge, which admits her into a zone that she describes as al-thān, the place of wine, which may be interpreted as symbolically denoting the sahasrāra chakra, the ‘thousand-petalled’ centre in the brain region, which is visualised inYoga as a moon that drips nectar. One of the aims of Yoga is the activation of this centre, which produces an experience of enlightenment and release. This nectar or wine of enlightenment is potentially available to all bodied selves, suggests Lal Děd, but very few apprentice themselves to the wisdom lineages that could prepare them to drink it.
15. G: 44 | K: 137
pānas lögith rūdukh mě tsah
16. G: 109 | K: 128
ạndariy āyěs tsạndariy gārān
In these poems, Lalla employs the metaphor of the game or līla as it is known in Sanskrit, to suggest the now-playful now-melancholy exchanges between questor and Divine. In poem 15, she presents self and Self as playing a game of hide and seek, with the twist that each is concealed in the other. When the identity of self and Self is discovered, the game of mutual concealment gives way to celebration. The questor gains the freedom to switch at will between her normal role in the world and her true identity as one who has ta
sted the nectar of enlightenment.
Poem 16 maps the metaphor of the game over a Yogic account of the activation of the kuṇḍalinī-śakti or energy, which culminates in the opening of the sahasrāra spoken of in poem 14 (Singh 1979c, 25–28). Lalla emerges from within her soul to receive the enlightenment of the nectar moon, and discovers that the world is saturated with the presence of the Divine, here invoked (as in poem 7) as Nārān, Nārāyana or Vishnu, and that all creation has been produced by his play.
17. G: 99
göphilo! haka kadam tul
18. G: 100 | K. Pr: 46 (variant incorporating elements of both 17 and 18)
daman-basti ditō dam
These companion vākhs, which have been in popular circulation in Kashmir in the remembered past, are of an appreciably late date from their use of Persianate phrases. Indeed, these two poems, as well as poem 69, are quatrains ‘that belong to one Azizullah Khan (early 19th century) [and] ascribed to Lal Děd’, as S.S. Toshkhani points out in his paper, ‘Reconstructing and Reinterpreting Lal Děd’ (2002, 60–61). Nonetheless, poems 17 and 18 were included by Grierson in his 1920 edition, which records a line of transmission that begins with the oral recitation of Pandit Dharma-dāsa Darwēsh, which was scribally rendered for Grierson by his associate Mahāmahopādhyāya Pandit Mukunda Rāma Sāstrī in 1914. Meanwhile, nearly three decades earlier, the Rev. J. Hinton Knowles had included a text incorporating elements of both 17 and 18 in his Dictionary of Kashmiri Proverbs and Sayings (1885), commenting that these were ‘[a] few lines from Lal Děd constantly quoted by the Kashmiri’ (reproduced in Grierson and Barnett 1920, 123).
It is not impossible that these widely circulated Azizullah poems, presented even by Pandit reciters as songs by Lalla, may register a comparatively recent version, or update if you will, of material from what I have called the LD corpus in my Introduction, originally circulating in an earlier form of Kashmiri. As I have argued in the Introduction, I am willing to set aside the question of judgement on material that is deemed corrupt or an interpolation, since, in my account, the LD corpus is the outcome of multiple intersections among contributors: reciters, scribes, redactors, archivists and commentators.
The speaker in poems 17 and 18 summons the lazy, aimless or reluctant soul to action, spurring it to recognise that there still remains a brief opportunity to rise beyond the limitations of the ordinary life, to embrace the spiritual path and to ‘go look for the Friend’. While the imagery of the charged bellows suggests Yoga, where it refers to the science of controlling the vital breaths that course through the body’s channels, the motif of the transmutation of iron into gold indicates the influence of rasāyan-shāstra, the Indian tradition of gnosis through alchemy; the use of the Persianate term yār or Friend to denote the Divine marks the unmistakeable impress of Sufi usage.
19. G: 10
wǒth rainyā! artsun sakhar
20. G: 77 | K: 60
mörith pönts būth tim phal-hanḍī
In these companion poems, which are in the nature of soliloquies, Lalla gathers the courage to take an irrevocable step, leaving the norm-governed world of householders behind and entering a world of secret rituals of illumination and heterodox practices of ecstasy. In poem 19, she is Shakti to Shiva, the feminine principle to the male, the female worshipper playing her role in the rituals of Kulācāra, the Kaula school, or the Tantric underground of mediaeval Kashmir, as I have termed it in my Introduction.
This Tantric underground forms part of the pan-Indian movement described, by scholars, as the vāma-mārga, the ‘left-hand path of enlightenment’, which allows the well-guided and ritually prepared questor to ‘reach wisdom by breaking the rules’. Kaula ritual variously deploys meat, wine and sexual union between initiates not bound by marriage vows, as instruments by which to overcome the inhibitions of normality, to propel the self beyond the polarities and differentiations of a social and psychic life conditioned by convention, and towards a receptiveness to illumination.
The five elements referred to in poem 20 are the five constituents of the universe or pancha-mahā-bhūtas: that is, bhū, earth or solidity; āpa, water or liquidity; agni, fire or formative energy; vayū, air or aeriality; and ākāsa, ether or emptiness. The logic of the poem proposes that these five elements must be fattened for the sacrifice, that is, meditated upon and explored through contemplation until they have lost the illusion of power and reality that they impose on the consciousness; only then can the grip of the universe fade from the mind. However, the process is a delicate one, and any false step or missed stage can condemn the failed questor to delusional arrogance, a fragmented consciousness, or worse, states of impaired consciousness. Also, without the guidance of a guru and the presence of the Divine, Kaula practices could easily degenerate into sensual gratification. Hence the caveat that one still needs the password: the personal mantra, passed on by guru to disciple in a whisper and never to be written down, alekhya, which governs and stabilises the process by which the self must break itself and its matrix of normality down, in order to renew itself.
21. G: 86 | K: 107
rāza-hams ösith sapodukh koluy
I would read this poem as combining playfulness and melancholia, in its evocation of the gains and losses attendant upon the gift of beatitude. A deep serenity wells up from within the questing self, silencing the melodious eloquence that formerly distinguished it; the life of ceaseless activity has been renounced in favour of stillness. The royal swan has been robbed of its voice and the mill has been choked, although mysteriously, since nothing impedes it, and the grain is missing: the voice-thief and the absconding miller are one, the Divine.
22. K: 56
gratu chu phērān ze ri zerē
The ‘secret’ central to all wisdom teachings, as simple in the telling as it is difficult in the doing, appears here as the shifting and unpredictable balance between labour and grace, the questor’s effort and the unprompted abundance of the Divine. The mill symbolises the slow, sustained rhythms of spiritual practice; the grain is the self, and the wheel is the Self.
23. G: 95 | K: 6
kyāh kara pöntsan dahan ta kāhan
Numeric lists of symbolic import, such as the one that underwrites the action of poem 23, recur in the poems and fables of India’s mystics, adepts and saints. These remain open to a variety of interpretations, and there are often as many interpretations as there are commentators. The most compelling reading of this poem is that the numbers that appear in it, taken together, propose an image of the human body as the sum of diverse and normally divergent energies. The ‘five’ are the pancha-mahā-bhūtas, already met with and accounted for in poem 20. The ‘ten’ are the principal and secondary vital breaths coursing within the body, in the Yogic system. The ‘eleven’ are the jñānēndriya, the five organs of sense perception, and the karmēndriya, the five organs of action, taken together with manas, the governing faculty of intelligence.
The bodied self is visualised in the first two lines of the poem as a pot that has had all its food scraped away by opportunists who have taken their chance and fled; and in the last two lines, as a cow that has escaped because its eleven masters could not cooperate to pull it in the same direction. As in other poems where Lalla shifts the relative scale and valency of images, the shift of metaphorical energy here presents the self first as presence and then as absence: first as a pot left behind by its users, and then as a cow that has escaped, leaving its fractious masters behind.
24. G: 13 | K: 129
yimạy shěh tsě timạy shěh mě
Shiva is addressed here, quite informally, as Shyāma-galā, ‘Blue-throated One’, from the Sanskrit appellation, Nīlkaṇṭha. Only the fear of an unintended echo of Deep Throat, with its associations with American pornography and internal espionage, prevented me from rendering Lalla’s address here as the more direct, ‘Now tell me, Blue-throat, what’s the difference?’ Shiva came to possess this anatomical attribute because he swallowed a deadly poison, th
e halāhala, which was thrown up when the gods and demons joined to churn the Ocean of Milk to draw up the nectar of immortality, the amrita. In saving the world from the toxicity of halāhala, Shiva placed himself at risk: forever after, he held the poison in his throat, which turned blue, a marked contrast against his pale, ash-smeared body. A symbol of Shiva’s gesture as saviour, the blue throat is also a token of his ability to control his faculties, command circumstances and withstand all negativity.
Indian mystical literature permits considerable latitude to the interpreter, at least partly because India’s spiritual traditions teach that true meaning eludes the probing intellect while it rewards meditative awareness, that it resides in the non-discursive realm of meaning at the borderlands of language. When in doubt about the exact nature of a numeric list of symbolic import, as in poem 23, pick your own. Here, extending George Grierson’s speculations (1920, 35), I would suggest that Shiva’s ‘six’ are the attributes of the Supreme Deity, namely eternity, omniscience, omnipotence, absolute tranquillity, absolute self-sufficiency and the ability to reside beyond form while manifesting Itself at will. Lalla’s ‘six’, meanwhile, may well signify the weaknesses of the unreconstructed human self, namely lust, anger, greed, arrogance, delusion and envy, some of which appear elsewhere in the LD corpus.
