I, LALLA

The Poems of Lal Dĕd

Translated from the Kashmiri with an Introduction and Notes by

RANJIT HOSKOTE

The poems of the fourteenth-century Kashmiri mystic Lal Ded, popularly

known as Lalla, strike us like brief and blinding bursts of light. Emotionally

rich yet philosophically precise, sumptuously enigmatic yet crisply

structured, these poems are as sensuously evocative as they are charged

with an ecstatic devotion. Stripping away a century of Victorian-inflected

translations and paraphrases, and restoring the jagged, colloquial power of

Lalla's voice, in Ranjit Hoskote's new translation these poems are glorious

manifestos of illumination.

Contents
About author
Praise for the book
Dedication
Introduction
1. Lal Dĕd
2. The Vectors of Lalla’s Voice
3. Lalla’s Poetry
4. The Tantric Underground
5. Lalla’s Utterance
6. Translation
The Poems
Notes
Notes
Notes to the Poems
References
Acknowledgements
Follow Penguin
Copyright

PENGUIN CLASSICS

I, LALLA

RANJIT HOSKOTE is a poet, cultural theorist and curator. His collections of

poetry include Vanishing Acts: New & Selected Poems 1985–2005

(Penguin, 2006) and Die Ankunft der Vögel (Carl Hanser Verlag, 2006). His

poems have appeared in Akzente, Boulevard Magenta, Fulcrum, Green

Integer Review, Iowa Review, Nthposition and Wespennest. Hoskote was a

Fellow of the International Writing Program, University of Iowa (1995),

writer-in-residence at Villa Waldberta, Munich (2003), and research scholar

in residence at BAK/ basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht (2010 and 2013).

Praise for the book

‘Hoskote’s success is that we get the feeling of a complex woman,

struggling with her times. It is an earthy translation, its rhythms and

cadences much more imaginative and intuitive than those which have gone

before . . . this is a book to have and to hold. it is beautiful because it is

respectful. It is a great translation because the originals have given way to

new meanings’—Hindustan Times

‘With its fine balance between scholarship and creative rigour, Hoskote’s

book is a persuasive reminder that critical intelligence is not incompatible

with the quest for the sacred. This connectedness, Lalla—as ecstatic mystic

and discerning guide—reminds us, finds ways to endure, through historical

adversity and human amnesia’—Tehelka

‘Meticulously researched and beautifully written, the book starts with a 69-

page introduction which explains the social, historical and philosophical

context of Lalla’s poems. For the uninitiated, it gives a grounding of the

poetic and spiritual legacy of Lal Děd. And for others it unearths the hidden

meanings of Lalla’s Vakhs . . . When it comes to rendering Lalla’s words in

English, he does an excellent job. No stilted language, no vague phrases and

no attempts to temper with the true spirit of the poems for making it more

accessible to the Western readers’—The Hindu

‘Hoskote’s pithy and evocative translation does more than any previous

efforts to reduce the semantic gap between Lalla’s world and ours’—Rain

Taxi Review of Books

‘Read Hoskote’s accomplished translation for the sheer power and

colloquial vibrancy with which he retrieves Lalla from the verbosity of

Victorian-inflected translations’—Mint

‘Hoskote’s translations are unadorned and distilled down to the essence . . .

Lal Děd’s poetry is as timeless and as perfect as the beauty of Kashmir. It

reflects the latent yearnings that exist in all seekers’—Times of India, Crest

edition

‘Hoskote’s translations certainly pose a challenge, inflected as they are with

deep scholarship and political awareness’—Sunday Guardian

‘Poet Ranjit Hoskote’s new translation restores the colloquial power of her

verse, refreshingly different from earlier ornate paraphrases’—Indian

Express

‘[It] beautifully presents Lalla’s writings for what they truly are, and Lalla

for what she was—or rather, the different forms that she holds’—Financial

Chronicle

For Amma and Annu, who raised me in the traditions of the Kashmiri

diaspora

INTRODUCTION

1. Lal Děd: Life, Poetry and Historical Context

I didn’t believe in it for a moment

but I gulped down the wine of my own voice.

And then I wrestled with the darkness inside me,

knocked it down, clawed at it, ripped it to shreds.

(POEM 48)

The poems of the fourteenth-century Kashmiri mystic Lal Děd strike us like

brief and blinding bursts of light: epiphanic, provocative, they shuttle

between the vulnerability of doubt and the assurance of an insight gained

through resilience and reflection. These poems are as likely to demand that

the Divine reveal Itself, as to complain of Its bewildering and protean

ubiquity. They prize clarity of self-knowledge above both the ritualist’s

mastery of observances and the ascetic’s professional athleticism. If they

scoff at the scholar who substitutes experience with scripture and the priest

who cages his God in a routine of prayers, they also reject the renouncer’s

austere mortification of the body. Across the expanse of her poetry, the

author whose signature these poems carry evolves from a wanderer,

uncertain of herself and looking for anchorage in a potentially hostile

landscape, into a questor who has found belonging beneath a sky that is

continuous with her mind.

To the outer world, Lal Děd is arguably Kashmir’s best known spiritual

and literary figure; within Kashmir, she has been venerated both by Hindus

and Muslims for nearly seven centuries. For most of that period, she has

successfully eluded the proprietorial claims of religious monopolists. Since

the late 1980s, however, Kashmir’s confluential culture has frayed thin

under the pressure of a prolonged conflict to which transnational terrorism,

state repression and local militancy have all contributed. Religious

identities in the region have become harder and more sharp-edged,

following a substantial exodus of the Hindu minority during the early

1990s, and a gradual effort to replace Kashmir’s unique and syncretically

nuanced tradition of Islam with a more Arabocentric global template. It is

true that Lal Děd was constructed differently by each community, but she

was simultaneously Lalleśvarī or Lalla Yogini to the Hindus and Lal-‘ārifa

to the Muslims; today, unfortunately, these descriptions are increasingly

being promoted at the expense of one another. In honour of the plural

sensibilities that Kashmir has long nurtured, I will refer to this mystic-poet

by her most celebrated and nonsectarian appellation, ‘Lal Děd’. In the

colloquial, this means ‘Grandmother Lal’; more literally, it means ‘Lal the

Womb’, a designation that connects her to the mother goddesses whose

cults of fecundity and abundance form the deep substratum of Indic

religious life. In writing of her in this book, I will also use the name by

which she is most popularly and affectionately known, across community

lines: Lalla.

Called vākhs, Lalla’s poems are among the earliest known manifestations

of Kashmiri literature, and record the moment when Kashmiri began to

emerge, as a modern language, from the sanskrit-descended Apabhramsa-

prakrit that had been the common language of the region through the first

millennium CE . The word vākh, applicable both as singular and plural, is

cognate with the Sanskrit vāc, ‘speech’, and vākya, ‘sentence’. This has

prompted previous translators to render it as ‘saying’, ‘verse’ and ‘verse-

teaching’; I would prefer to translate it as ‘utterance’. A total of 258 vākhs

attributed to Lalla have circulated widely and continuously in Kashmiri

popular culture between the midfourteenth century and the present,

variously assuming the form of songs, proverbs and prayers.

As we have received them, Lalla’s vākhs bear the definite imprint of an

ongoing process of linguistic and cultural change, which is recorded at the

level of form, imagery, concept and vocabulary. Some archaic words and

phrases remain embedded in these poems, clues attesting to an earlier

stratum of the Kashmiri language; some allegorical references may seem

arcane on a first reading, their frames lost to view. We find Sanskritic terms

and phrases here, drawn from a larger Hindu-Buddhist universe of meaning

that extended from Balkh in the west, across Kashmir, Ladakh and Tibet, to

China, Korea and Japan in the east, and southward through the Gangetic

regions to peninsular India, Sri Lanka and South-east Asia. These Sanskritic

elements share conceptual and linguistic space, in the vākhs, with more

Arabic or Persianate locutions, indicative of dialogue with the Islamic

ecumene that stretched, during Lalla’s lifetime, from Spain across North

Africa and West Asia to China. Accordingly, we find occasional but

unmistakeable hints of Sufi and possibly also of Sikh usage in this corpus of

poems. And yet, much of Lalla’s poetry is accessible to the contemporary

Kashmiri listener or reader, stabilised in the idiom of the late nineteenth and

early twentieth centuries: compelling evidence that this oral archive has

been updated from generation to generation. Clearly, Lalla’s poetry has

been continuously read and shared by various assemblies of reciters, scribes

and votaries during the nearly seven hundred years of its existence, and has

been reshaped and enriched by what we might describe as the informal

editorial attention of these assemblies. I shall amplify on this observation in

the course of this essay.

As a corpus, the vākhs were first committed to print early in the twentieth

century, and have since appeared in several editions, both in the original and

in English translation. The line of transmission by which Lalla’s poems

achieved publication may be traced as a three-stage relay. It begins in the

realm of the oral, with the text of the vākhs being woven by various

Kashmiri village reciters, Hindu and Muslim, using Kashmiri in a space of

relative freedom and play. These demotic recitations dramatise Lalla’s

importance as an incarnation of compassion, commonsense knowledge and

resistance to authority. The relay then passes to the realm of the scribal with

the oral text being subordinated to the more annotative and hieratic

approach of Kashmiri Brahmin compilers and commentators who, using

Sanskrit and Hindi, emphasise Lalla’s philosophical convictions and draw

traditional moral conclusions from her often unorthodox teachings. The

relay culminates in the realm of print, when the scribal text is codified and

formatted within the protocols of modern scholarship by compilers and

editors: at first by the colonial scholar-administrator using English,

followed by South Asian scholars using English, Kashmiri, Urdu and Hindi.

In this third stage, the text is stabilised by the fixity of print, and this

stability is soon reinforced by the editorial and interpretative scrutiny

brought to bear upon the printed text by such modern discursive practices as

literary taxonomy, comparative philosophy and religion, Indology and

cultural anthropology.

The advent of print generated its own politics in late-colonial societies,

where several visions of the nation, society and history were in conflict.

Where previously numerous versions of a text had been freely and

simultaneously available, printing technology eclipsed these with a single

edition consecrated by the authoritative touch of modernity, and which, by

bringing all the versions and variants together, transformed simultaneity

into competition. In the case of Lalla’s vākhs, it is significant that the

printed text has encoded many of the fluctuations and ambiguities of the

transmission line. The availability of such a contestable printed text from

late-colonial times always carries the potential for a rivalry of claims to be

exercised in the postcolonial period. With regard to Lalla’s poems, that

potential has been actualised during the political and cultural crisis that

erupted in Kashmir in 1989 and continues to the present day. To the extent

that Lalla embodies a Kashmiri identity (if not ‘the Kashmiri identity’), a

piquant battle has been fought around her by various claimants, under the

banners of authenticity and historicity.1 I will address these issues later in

this Introduction. Before we continue, it would be appropriate to offer a

brief survey of the history and sources of the text of Lalla’s poems, as we

have it today.

In 1914, Sir George Grierson, a scholar, ethnographer and civil servant who

had become the first Superintendent of the Linguistic Survey of India on its

foundation in 1898, asked his friend and former colleague, Pandit Mukunda

Rāma Śastri, to locate a manuscript of Lalla’s poems. Failing to find a copy,

Śastri consulted Pandit Dharma-dāsa Darwēsh, an ageing storyteller and

reciter who lived in Gush, a village situated near the shrine of Śāradā-pītha,

now in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir. Darwēsh dictated 109 of Lalla’s poems

from memory and Śastri wrote them down. Adding a commentary,

composed in Hindi and Sanskrit, he sent Grierson the manuscript. Grierson

compared it against two Kashmiri manuscripts, written in the Śāradā script,

which belonged to the Oxford Indian Institute and formed part of a

collection built up by the legendary Hungarian-British explorer and scholar

Sir Marc Aurel Stein. The first manuscript, or Stein A, is only a fragment of

fifteen leaves; but it is a valuable record of the text of forty-three of Lalla’s

poems, with corresponding translations into Sanskrit verse by a Brahmin

redactor, Pandit Rājānaka Bhāskara. The second manuscript, or Stein B, is

of even greater value: it contains the Kashmiri text of forty-nine of Lalla’s

poems, offering variant readings and carrying accentual markings for most

of the poems, to indicate the prosody of the vākhs. Grierson also trawled

through the Dictionary of Kashmiri Proverbs and Sayings (1885), compiled

by the Rev. J. Hinton Knowles, a missionary and folklorist working in

Kashmir, and retrieved from this publication a number of sayings popularly

attributed to Lalla.

Collating these materials—together with annotations, appendices on

language, prosody and history, and notes on Yoga and Kashmir Śaivism by

Lionel D. Barnett—Grierson published the first English translation of

Lalla’s poems, under the title Lallā-Vākyāni, or The Wise Sayings of Lal

Ded, A Mystic Poetess of Ancient Kashmir (1920). This was also the first

printed edition of Lalla’s poems in history. A number of translations have

followed Grierson and Barnett’s edition, most notably those of Pandit

Ananda Koul (1921–1933), Sir Richard Carnac Temple (1924), and

Professor Jayalal Kaul (1973). More recently, Coleman Barks (1992) has

published a rather free literary reworking of Lalla’s poems, while Jaishree

Kak (1999 and 2007) has published a translation with scholarly exegesis.

These, as well as other less widely distributed translations and studies of

Lalla’s poems, have been enumerated in the References included in this

volume.

For the present edition, I have selected 146 poems from the circulating

corpus of Lalla’s utterances and rendered them freshly into English. My

selection includes all 109 of the Grierson and Barnett poems; thirty-four

poems that appear in Jayalal Kaul, but not in Grierson and Barnett; and

three poems that appear only in Hinton Knowles’ Kashmiri Proverbs. A

concordance, which I have incorporated into my Notes, indicates the textual

source of each poem.

Paradoxically, given Lalla’s pervasive presence in Kashmiri culture, it is

difficult to construct a biography for her in the conventional sense. All that

we know of her life has been communicated orally, through the medium of

legend; the skeletal chronology that we possess is derived from Persian

chronicles written in the eighteenth century, nearly four centuries after her

death. Although Kashmiri historians produced numerous records of their

country’s recent past between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries—this

roster includes Jonarāja, Śrīvara, Prājyabhatta, Shuka, Haider Malik

Chadura, Tahir and Hasan bin Ali Kashmiri—none of them mentions Lalla.

These men concerned themselves with the documentation of dynastic

fortunes and shifting political alliances; with accounts of the economy and

the climate; with the transformation of religious life through political

change. Meanwhile, beneath the line of visibility set by the patriarchy,

Lalla’s utterances were weaving themselves into Kashmir’s popular

consciousness.

Lalla is first mentioned in the Tadhkirāt ul-Ārifīn (158 7), a hagiographic

account of saintly figures active in the Valley of Kashmir, written by Mulla

Ali Raina, the brother of Srinagar’s beloved saint, Makhdum Sahib. This

was followed, sixty-seven years later, by a reference in Baba Daud

Mishkati’s Asrār ul-Akbar (1654). Mishkati applies the name ‘Lalla’ to a

yogini who meets a Sultan’s son in a forest and offers him a cup,

symbolising initiation into the Tantric mysteries; this possibly fabular

encounter is borrowed from an episode in Jonarāja’s history, where the

yogini remains unnamed. Eight decades were to pass before a more

plausible and detailed account of Lalla’s life appeared in Khwaja Azam

Diddamari’s Tārikh-i āzami or Wāqi’āt-i Kashmir (1736).

We cannot be certain of the date and place of Lalla’s birth, or the date and

place of her death. Sifting through the evidence of the legends and the

chronicles, modern scholars have suggested that she was born in 1301 or

between 1317 and 1320, either in Sempore near Pampore, or in Pandrenthan

near Srinagar. She is believed to have died in 1373, although no one is

certain where; the grave ascribed to her in Bijbehara appears to be of much

later provenance. The details of her early life have crystallised into an

archetypal narrative of the misunderstood young woman with spiritual

aspirations. Born to a Brahmin family, she was married at the age of twelve,

as was the custom, into a family that lived in Pampore; she was given a new

name, Padmāvati, but remained Lalla in her own eyes. Her domestic life

was a troubled one. Suspicious of her meditative absorptions and visits to

shrines, her husband treated her cruelly; her mother-in-law often starved

her. From this period in Lalla’s life comes the well-known Kashmiri saying

attributed to the future mystic: ‘Whether they kill a ram or a sheep, Lalla

will get a stone to eat.’

At twenty-six, Lalla renounced home and family, and went to the Śaiva

saint Sěd Bôyu, or Siddha Śrīkāntha, asking to be accepted as a disciple. He

became her guru and instructed her in the spiritual path. On completing her

period of discipleship and being initiated, she went out into the world, in the

mould of the classical parivrājikā, as a wandering mendicant. It is assumed

that Lalla began to compose her scintillating, provocative and compelling

poems at this stage in her life. To renounce the state of marriage, to wander,

gathering spiritual experience: this was not an easy choice for a Brahmin

woman to make in the Kashmir of the fourteenth century. As a disciple, she

had been secure within her guru’s protection; her true ordeals began only

after she had left her guru’s house and set off on her own, with no armour

against the full force of social sanction. As she says in poem 92:

They lash me with insults, serenade me with curses.

Their barking means nothing to me.

Even if they came with soul-flowers to offer,

I couldn’t care less. Untouched, I move on.

Braving the trials and humiliations that came her way, Lalla grew in stature

to become a questor and a teacher: this passage to maturity and deepening

knowledge is recorded vividly in her vākhs. In poem 93, she defies her

tormentors and the system of conventions they represent:

Let them hurl a thousand curses at me,

pain finds no purchase in my heart.

I belong to Shiva. Can a scatter of ashes

ruin a mirror? it gleams.

In the specific cultural context of Kashmir, I find instructive the

distinguished sociologist T.N. Madan’s comments about the scepticism

expressed by Kashmiri Pandit householders towards renouncers. Although

his informants were mid-twentieth-century villagers, Madan notes that texts

written between the ninth and the thirteenth centuries confirm a continuity

of attitude.

Why is it that the Pandits distrust and ridicule self-styled renouncers? [The answer lies] in

their commitment to the ideology of the householder. Apparently they are cynical about

those who leave home because most such people never had families of their own . . . or

their relations with their kin have been strained. At a deeper level, however, one might

detect a fear of the renouncer, for he poses a threat to the ideology of the householder and

plenitude . . . he not only seeks release from the web of kinship and other worldly ties but

also denigrates these as a trap and an illusion. The renouncer is too powerful an adversary

to be contemplated with equanimity. (1988, 41–42)

Significantly, while many Hindu ascetics had traditionally lived in the

forests of Kashmir, none of Lalla’s male predecessors in the Kashmir Śaiva

lineage had been renouncers. They were scholars, teachers and writers who

lived as householders, even the unmarried among them. Lalla’s position

was thus a peculiarly paradoxical one. In an ethos where male Śaiva

questors lived within society rather than in retreat from it, she could not, as

a woman, do likewise. Precisely because she was a woman, whose life was

far more closely and rigidly governed by domestic duties and expectations

than a man’s, she could not lead a life of spiritual aspiration at home—and

so, was forced to leave it. Not until the mid-seventeenth century do we find

a Kashmiri Brahmin woman saint-poet who received the approval of her

family and community for her spiritual quest: Rupa Bhavani (1625–1721),

who was clearly a beneficiary of the conceptual space and social

legitimation that Lalla had won for her heirs in future generations.

Lalla’s poems shimmer with their author’s experience of being a yogini,

trained in the demanding spiritual disciplines and devotional practices of

Kashmir Śaivite mysticism. Since this school is itself the confluential

outcome of an engagement with several philosophical traditions, she was

receptive to the images and ideas of those other traditions. It would be most

productive to view her as a figure whose ideas straddled the domains of

Kashmir Śaivism, Tantra, Yoga and Yogācāra Buddhism, and who appears

to have been socially acquainted with the ideas and practices of the Sufis.

Revelation comes to Lalla like a moon flowering in dark water. Her

symbols and allegories can be cryptic, and yet the candour of her poems

moves us deeply, viscerally. She celebrates perseverance in the quest,

contrasting physical agony with spiritual flight and dwelling on the

obdurate landscapes that the questor must negotiate. Lalla’s poetry is

fortified by a palpable, first-hand experience of illumination; it conveys a

freedom from the mortal freight of fear and vacillation. She cherishes these,

while attacking the parasitic forms of organised religion that have attached

themselves to the spiritual quest and choked it: arid scholarship, soulless

ritualism, fetishised austerity and animal sacrifice. Her ways of

transcending these obstacles can seem subversive, even deeply

transgressive—as in poem 59, where she confronts the priest with the brutal

exaction demanded by his idolatry:

It covers your shame, keeps you from shivering.

Grass and water are all the food it asks.

Who taught you, priest-man,

to feed this breathing thing to your thing of stone?

Kashmir Śaivism recommends the transmutation of all outward observances

into visualisations and experiments in consciousness, so that the idol is

replaced by the mental image and the sacrifice of an animal by the

deliberate extinction of the lower appetites. In this spirit, in poem 61, Lalla

rejects the conventional physical elements of worship in favour of

meditative depth:

Kusha grass, flowers, sesame seed, lamp, water:

it’s just another list for someone who’s listened,

really listened, to his teacher. Every day he sinks deeper

into Shambhu, frees himself from the trap

of action and reaction. He will not suffer birth again.

At the same time, Lalla asserts the primacy of the guru—regarded as an

embodiment of the Divine—as a guide navigating the aspirant through the

maze of worldly life towards the central and transfiguring experience of

enlightenment. In poem 108, she sings:

Who trusts his Master’s word

and controls the mind-horse

with the reins of wisdom,

he shall not die, he shall not be killed.

In yet other poems, she transmits the teachings that are the fruit of her

experience: these poems aim to renew the immediacy of everyday life by

placing it in the context of eternity, to redeem the self from the cocoon of

narcissism and release it towards others, the world and the Divine. In poem

105, she imagines the Divine as a net that traps the individual from within,

grace moving by stealth, to be valued in this life rather than deferred as a

reward on offer in the afterlife:

The Lord has spread the subtle net of Himself across

the world.

See how He gets under your skin, inside your bones.

If you can’t see Him while you’re alive,

don’t expect a special vision once you’re dead.

In consonance with Kashmir Śaiva doctrine, Lalla regards the world as an

array of traps for the unwary, so long as the self remains amnesiac towards

its true nature. On realising that the world is the playful expression of the

Divine, and that the Divine and the self are one, anguish and alienation fall

away from the consciousness, to be replaced by the joyful recognition that

all dualisms are illusory. This leads her to rejoice in the collapse of such

restrictive identities as ‘I’ and ‘You’ when confronted with the presence of

the Divine, as in poem 15:

Wrapped up in Yourself, You hid from me.

All day i looked for You

and when i found You hiding inside me,

I ran wild, playing now me, now You.

Lalla enacts the theatre of her devotion in different registers. She yearns,

she demands, she laments; she can be prickly and irritable with the Divine,

yet throw herself at Its mercy and sing of unabashed passion, as in poem 47:

As the moonlight faded, I called out to the madwoman,

eased her pain with the love of God.

‘It’s Lalla, it’s Lalla,’ I cried, waking up the Loved One.

I mixed with Him and drowned in a crystal lake.

Lalla treats the body as the site of all her experiments in self refinement:

she asserts the unity of the corporeal and the cosmic, as achieved through

immersive meditation and the Yogic cultivation of the breath. The subtle

channels and nodal points of the Yogic body form a basic reality for her, its

terrain as real as the topography of lake, river and mountains that recurs in

her compositions. In poem 52, she declares:

I trapped my breath in the bellows of my throat:

a lamp blazed up inside, showed me who I really was.

I crossed the darkness holding fast to that lamp,

scattering its light-seeds around me as I went.

For Lalla, the symbolic and the sensuously palpable are not in opposition,

but rather, suffuse one another. The cultural theorist and historian Richard

Lannoy interprets this feature of Indic philosophy and spiritual practice

elegantly:

Each successive school of philosophy, each mystic, sage, or saint, sought by one means or

another to appropriate the external world to the mind-brain. He enhanced, expanded,

intensified, and deepened his sensory awareness of colours, sounds, and textures until

they were transformed into vibrations continuous with his own consciousness. In this

state of enhanced consciousness induced by special techniques of concentration, the

inside and the outside, the subject and the object, the self and the world, did not remain

separate entities but fused in a single process. (1971, 273–74)

For an itinerant, tangential and seemingly isolated dissident—she founded

no school or movement, had no apostles, left no anointed successors, and

scattered her poems among her listeners—Lalla has exerted a profound and

seminal influence on Kashmir’s religious life. She was a major presence in

the life and practice, not only of Rupa Bhavani, but also of a number of

later Kashmiri mystics, teachers and devotional poets like Parmanand

(1791–1879), Shams Faqir (1843–1904), and Krishna Joo Razdan (1851–

1926). Vitally, given that Kashmir is now almost completely a Muslim

region, it is instructive to recall that Lalla is regarded as a foundational

figure by the Rishi order of Kashmiri Sufism, which was initiated by Nund

Rishi or Sheikh Nur-ud-din Wali (1379–1442), seen by many as her

spiritual son and heir. Nur-ud-din and his fellow Rishis chose to lead

celibate lives, abstained from meat, avoided injuring animals or plants,

secluded themselves in caves or forests, and employed an ecumenical

vocabulary drawn both from the Kashmir Śaivite and Islamic systems. The

Rishis instituted solitary meditative as well as collective devotional

practices, and their followers convene around a network of khānaqahs or

ziyārats: shrine complexes that incorporate mosques, meditation halls and

the tombs of saints. This robust regional tradition of spirituality continues to

remain strong in the Valley, despite the hardening of Islamic piety along

Wahhabi mandates during the low-intensity warfare between insurgents and

the Indian State that has raged unabated in recent decades, accompanied by

cycles of civil unrest and the killing of countless innocent people, Muslim

and Hindu, caught in the crossfire.

Lalla, too, lived through a time of seismic turbulence. Between 1320 and

1339, Kashmir suffered a rapid sequence of political catastrophes threaded

together by intrigue, conspiracy, crippling incompetence, lust for power and

thwarted ambition.The country was attacked by the Tartar chieftain Zulchu,

which prompted the downfall of the last Hindu king of Kashmir, Sahadeva,

and of his prime minister and legatee, Rāmachandra. Into this vacuum

stepped a Tibetan prince from Ladakh, Rinchana, who had taken refuge at

Sahadeva’s court some years before. He married Rāmachandra’s daughter,

Kotā, and asked to be accepted as a Śaiva; short-sightedly, the Brahmin

priesthood turned him down, and he soon embraced Islam under the

tutelage of Sayyid Sharaf-ud-din or Bulbul Shah, a Sufi from Khorasan who

had made his home in the Valley. When Rinchana died, his widow Kotā

made common cause with Shah Mir, an adventurer from Swat who had also

settled in the Valley; they invited Sahadeva’s brother Udyānadeva to rule.

As his brother had done, Udyānadeva too fled when Kashmir was attacked

by the Turki chieftain Achala; he returned after the raid to find Kotā both

popular and dominant, and was never again more than her puppet. After his

death, Kotā and Shah Mir attempted to outmanoeuvre one another, but the

queen had run out of survivor’s luck at last. She killed herself, leaving Shah

Mir as undisputed ruler of Kashmir: he ascended the throne in 1339 as

Sultan Shams-ud-din, the ‘Sun of the Faith’.

Shams-ud-din’s coronation marks Kashmir’s transition from a Hindu-

Buddhist past to a future that would be shaped by the gradual diffusion of

Islam, although Hindus and Buddhists continued to dominate Kashmiri

politics and culture for several generations longer. The dynasty that Shams-

ud-din founded was to rule Kashmir for two centuries, and Lalla lived

through his reign and those of his son Ala-ud-din and his grandson Shihab-

ud-din. These early sultans gradually brought a measure of peace and

prosperity to the region, and extended their patronage to the arts and

learning. Only much later in the fourteenth century was their policy of

liberalism abrogated briefly by the fanaticism of Sultan Sikandar. Spurred

on by his minister Saif-ud-din, a Brahmin convert originally called Suha

Bhatta, this ruler launched a programme of persecution, destroying temples

and forcing many Brahmins into exile. Sikandar was an aberration,

however, and his son Zain-ul-abedin restored the Sultanate’s policy of

generosity and inclusiveness, inviting émigré Brahmins back to the Valley

and having Sanskrit works translated into Persian (Bamzai 1994, 2:316–28).

While surveying the wider context of religious developments in the Indian

subcontinent, scholars have sometimes sought to historicise Lalla in relation

to the Bhakti movements that swept across this landmass between the

fourteenth and the sixteenth centuries. These were popular mobilisations

that opposed the hierarchical orthodoxy of Brahminism, regional surges of

protest that crystallised around charismatic reformers or renouncers who

insisted on the revolutionary idea that a direct and loving communion

between the worshipper and the Divine was possible without priestly

intermediaries or ritual specialists. The term ‘Bhakti’ (literally meaning

‘devotion’) has been used to encompass a spectrum of formations ranging

from the northern Sant tradition, including Rāmānanda, Tulsidās, Kabīr,

Nānak and Dādu, to the western Vārkari lineage, with Jnāneśvara, Nāmdev

and Tukārām as its leading figures. It also connotes several parallel

developments, including the rise of the forms of Vaiśnava devotionalism

associated with Chaitanya in Bengal and Vallabha across northern India,

and the consolidation of the Śaivite Lingāyat movement in Karnataka and

of the Śrivaiśnavas in Tamil Nadu.

The proponents of Bhakti turned their backs on the elaborate structure of

worship that was integral to Brahminical practice. Instead, they promoted a

deeply felt and richly expressed devotion focused on a chosen embodiment

of the Divine. Rejecting Sanskrit, the deva-bhāśa or ‘language of the gods’,

they preached and composed their poetry in the loka-bhāśa or languages of

everyday life that were organic to the regions in which the movements had

arisen. This confident vernacularisation of expression, in preference over

the epigonic classicism that was the norm among the Brahminical elite,

marks the emergence of many modern Indian languages including Kannada,

Marathi, Hindi and Bengali. The Bhakti movements developed a mass base

among the subaltern and labouring castes—greatly oppressed by the social

hierarchies of late mediaeval India—providing them with their first major

articulation in history. In many ways, therefore, these movements mark an

early and revolutionary threshold of modernity in India.

Some commentators have viewed Lalla as a forerunner of Bhakti, and

she certainly anticipated the women saints who were to play an important

role in these movements, such as Mīrā and Bahinā, in breaking away from

restrictive patriarchal structures. Other observers have sought to subsume

Lalla quite completely within the historical momentum of Bhakti, with

some university syllabi even enlisting her in the array of Bhakti saint-poets.

In my view, this is an error of ahistorical thinking. These Procrustean

procedures not only generate a monolithic and a priori notion of Bhakti, but

they also allow the compelling social and political dimensions of the Bhakti

mobilisations to overshadow the fact that bhakti-mārga, the way of intense

and self-dissolving devotion, is only one among the three major approaches

to the Divine recognised in Hindu practice. The others are karma-mārga, or

adherence to the prescribed ritual forms, and jnāna-mārga, or the path of

evolved awareness and world-transcending insight.

Many features of Lalla’s practice do indeed bear an affinity to Bhakti

spirituality, especially her opposition to the religious hierarchy and

orthodox worship integral to karma-mārga, her sense of direct communion

with the Divine, her valorisation of the Name as a talisman, and her use of

the language of everyday life. But Lalla’s perspective, like the Kashmir

Śaiva perspective more generally, is premised far more substantially on

jnāna-mārga than on bhakti-mārga. Lalla is concerned with nurturing a

radical transformation of consciousness aimed at recovering the identity of

the self with the Divine; she is not chiefly preoccupied with a brimming-

over of devotional expression by which the self embraces the Divine. And

unlike the Bhakti saint-poets, who lived and worked in communities, the

evidence in her poems as well as in the legends and the chronicles suggests

that Lalla, while interacting with groups of aspirants, was a figure who

walked alone.

2. The Vectors of Lalla’s Voice: Single Author or Contributory

Lineage?

You’ve got six and I’ve got six.

Now tell me, Blue-Throated One, what’s the difference?

Or don’t. I know. You keep your six on a leash

and my six have strung me along.

(POEM 24)

Since the late 1980s, the study of Lalla’s poetry has undergone an

unfortunate sectarian polarisation between Kashmiri Pandit and Kashmiri

Muslim scholars; these academic groupings hold diametrically opposed

visions of Kashmiri culture, literature, religious life and identity. Some of

the former claim Lalla exclusively for Kashmir Śaivism and reject any hint

of Islamic influence on her beliefs or acquaintance with Sufism on her part,

citing as evidence the Yogic symbolism, details of spiritual practices and

hints of biography that appear in her vākhs (for example, Toshkhani 2002,

39–66). Meanwhile, some of the latter attempt to induct Lalla into

Kashmir’s early Sufi ethos, arguing that her emancipatory teachings could

not have sprung from a Hindu matrix, and pointing out that the earliest

references to her occur in Sufi hagiographies and Persian chronicles written

by Muslims (for example, Khan 2002, 70–79).

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.

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: mok

ṣ

a 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.

Our road, as we map the religious and philosophical lifeworld in which

Lalla’s poetry emerged, now brings us to Kashmir Śaivism. The foundations

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.

By contrast with bothYogācāra and Vedānta, though, Kashmir Śaivism

does not dismiss the world as an illusion or delusion. It treats the world as a

creative expression of the Divine, a necessary articulation through which

the Divine may unfold and fully realise itself. Shiva, through Shakti, creates

a world that is not different from Himself. This world is constantly renewed

through the cosmic vibrations or spanda—emanations of the Shiva-

principle—that, in their outward-expansive and inward-contractive rhythm,

unme

ṣ

a and nime

ṣ

a, define the universal cycle of creation and dissolution.

Further, in the Kashmir Śaivite system, the Shiva-principle has a triadic

nature, devolving through the world as the three energies of knowledge,

will and action: respectively, jñāna-śakti, icchā-śakti and krīyā-śakti.

Sustained by this triadic structure, the world is seen to replicate it at many

levels; that is why Kashmir Śaivism is also known as Trika, the ‘Path of the

Triad’. It is difficult not to hear, in these formulations, an echo of the triadic

preferences of the Yogācāra theorists, who propounded the trikāya or

‘Doctrine of the Three Bodies of the Buddha’ and the corresponding

trisvabhāva-nirdeśa or ‘Teaching of the Three Natures’.

At the other end of the scale from this vision of the cosmos is the

individual soul, which is imprisoned because it has forgotten its true nature

and become enmeshed in the net of thought, attachment and the

consequences of unreflective action. Once it recognises the continuity

between Shiva and the world, both through the appropriate rituals but far

more importantly through the insight gained from sustained meditation, the

soul can join in the festivity of being, recognising all to be the play or līla of

Shiva. That recognition, or pratyabhijñā, is the key transformative

experience in Kashmir Śaivite practice: it recurs constantly in Lalla’s

poetry. As she says in poem 25:

Lord! I’ve never known who I really am, or You.

I threw my love away on this lousy carcass

and never figured it out: You’re me, I’m You.

All I ever did was doubt: Who am I? Who are You?

The major texts of Kashmir Śaivism include the Śiva Sūtra of Vasugupta

(mid-eighth century); the Stava-cintāmani of his disciple, Bhatta Nārāyana,

who images Shiva as prakāsha or light, and Shakti as vimarśa or self-

awareness; the Spanda literature of the ninth to eleventh centuries; and the

writings of Somānanda (c. 875–925) and Utpaladeva (c. 900–950).This

textual tradition peaks in the writings of the encyclopaedic master

Abhinavagupta (c. 950–1020) and continues through texts such as

Śitsikāntha’s Mahānaya-prakāsha (c. 1250), regarded as the first complete

text written in Kashmiri.

The continuity of Lalla’s thought with this philosophical lineage is

evident, as I shall demonstrate by a few apposite comparisons of her poems

with those of her predecessors. Such comparisons reveal the high degree of

intertextuality that binds Lalla’s texts to those of her predecessors in an

active continuum knit together by allusion and the adaptation of ideas and

images already in circulation among initiates and adepts. For instance,

Utpaladeva writes, in his tenth-century Śiva-stotra (translated from the

Sanskrit by Constantina Rhodes Bailly; Heehs 2002, 246):

In that state, O Lord,

Where nothing else is to be known or done,

Neither yoga

Nor intellectual understanding

Is to be sought after,

For the only thing that remains and flourishes

Is absolute consciousness.

Recording her experience of the same condition of expanded awareness

four hundred years later, Lalla says, in poem 115:

Word or thought, normal or Absolute, they mean nothing

here.

Even the mudrās of silence won’t get you entry.

We’re beyond even Shiva and Shakti here.

This Beyond that’s beyond all we can name, that’s your lesson!

Expounding on the exemplar of the jīvan-mukta—the realised soul who is

indifferent to living and dying, and who lives in the fullness of

enlightenment—the tenth-century aesthetician, literary theorist, yogi and

Tantric adept Abhinavagupta, writes in his Parātrimśikā-vivarana (adapted

from a translation from the Sanskrit by Paul Eduardo Muller-Ortega; Heehs

2002, 248):

Through the peculiar efficacy of the ritual of adoration—by practising which he has

remembered perfectly the mantra, and so attained to a very high degree the potency of

that mantra, which is the reality known as the Heart—the tantric practitioner crosses over

completely, either by himself or as a result of the clear and pristine lotus-word of the

teacher, and in this way attains liberation in this very life.

Lalla, affirming the joyous liberation of the jīvan-mukta from the prison of

mortal birth four centuries later, says in poem 125:

Those who glow with the light of the Self

are freed from life even while they live.

But fools add knots by the hundred

to the tangled net of the world.

Abhinavagupta, the most accomplished of the Śaiva āchāryas, also

composed a beautiful and moving prayer called the Mahopadeśa-

vimśatikam, in the third verse of which he writes (translation from the

Sanskrit mine; for the original, see Deshpande 1989, 162):

Deep inside my body I searched and searched for my soul.

There was no soul there to be found but You, only You.

Compare this with Lalla’s account of her own quest, cast as a lover’s

journey in search of an elusive Beloved, in poem 11:

I, Lalla, wore myself down searching for Him

and found a strength after my strength had died.

I came to His threshold but found the door bolted.

I locked that door with my eyes and looked at Him.

4. The Tantric Underground

Up, woman! Go make your offering.

Take wine, meat and a cake fit for the gods.

If you know the password to the Supreme Place,

you can reach wisdom by breaking the rules.

(POEM 19)

Since explicit references to Tantric rites appear in a number of Lalla’s

vākhs, as in poem 19, we must attend to the probable circumstances of her

association with theTantric path. The figure of her predecessor,

Abhinavagupta, thus forms an appropriate link between the previous section

of this Introduction and the present one: he incarnated both the intellectual

rigour of Kashmir Śaivism and the seemingly heterodox practice of the

Tantras. To conventionally raised Hindus, it may appear inconceivable that

an intellectual who wrote authoritative accounts of aesthetic experience and

spiritual perfection could also write the Tantrāloka or ‘The Radiance of the

Tantras’. In the twenty-ninth chapter of this work, he elaborates on the rites

of Kulācāra, which involve the cultivation of control over psychic

processes and various forms of visualisation; these rites also include the

controlled use of substances proscribed by the orthodoxy (such as wine,

meat and fish) and taboo relationships (such as with women married to

others, or far below the aspirant’s caste status, or too intimately related to

him). This is how, in Lalla’s phrase, the aspirant may ‘reach wisdom by

breaking the rules’.

These rites were designed to incite the sādhaka or spiritual aspirant’s

consciousness into transcending the binaries governing acceptable social

behaviour and the prevailing system of cultural assumptions. This was

achieved by striking repeatedly at injunction and inhibition with

transgression; by dramatising the dissolution of all differences between the

sanctified and the unholy, the pure and the impure, the appropriate and the

inappropriate, the permitted and the forbidden, under carefully regulated

conditions presided over by an adept. Heinrich Zimmer’s explanation of the

logic of Kulācāra helps us situate Lalla’s poems 19 and 20 in their correct

context:

Just as deadly poisons administered at the right time and in proper dosages can save a

life, so too, Kulācāra prescribes things forbidden in everyday life as components of its

rite that will reveal to the initiate the path to his becoming divine [that is: recognising that

he is, in fact, Shiva]. These ingredients are called, for brevity’s sake, the ‘five M’s’ (Ma-

kāra-pancaka): alcohol (madya), meat (māmsa), fish (matsya), and illicit intercourse

(maithuna) ; the fifth is the positioning of the hand and fingers (mudrā) . . . It is not so

much their basic ability to intoxicate and liberate a person that makes them into

sacramental elements, but rather the fact that they have the power, ennobled by rite and

enshrined in ceremony, to transport the initiate beyond the moral order of his everyday

existence. (1984, 216–17)

The liberation of the sādhaka’s consciousness from the regime of duality

was paramount, not only to Tantra, but also to a variety of other spiritual

projects that had announced themselves across India between the tenth and

the fourteenth centuries CE . Among the exponents of these projects, we find

the Tantrayāna Buddhists who wove Śaivite and Tantric ideas of

redemption, together with Mahāyāna Buddhist ideas of soteriology, into a

new fabric. We find, also, the Pāśupata renouncers who deliberately

behaved in countersocial ways to invite the scorn and abuse necessary to

break down the body-centred individual ego. From this period, also, date

the investigations of the Siddha magician-poets who pursued the goal of

rasāyana or alchemy, both at a material and a spiritual level. Their

contemporaries, the Nātha ascetics, dedicated themselves to the quest for

the nectar at the heart of experience, looking not only for salvation from the

cycle of rebirth but also attempting to extend the dynamism and longevity

of the physical organism beyond their natural span. These heterodox

questors established a sacred geography of migration paths and staging

points across the Indian subcontinent, so that, even today, their presence is

memorialised, if not always recognised, in regions as diverse and seemingly

far apart as Kashmir and Karnataka, Bengal and Maharashtra, Punjab and

Madhya Pradesh, Baluchistan and Uttar Pradesh.

Distributed throughout the LD corpus lie themes that would instantly be

acknowledged as central by all these practitioners: the analogy proposed

between the interior reality of the yogini and the reality of the cosmos; the

tension between breaking down the body-centred ego while refining the

body as the vehicle of the soul; and the spiritual quest as an all-possessing

and all-transforming pursuit, which places the seeker at a tangent to society,

as an eccentric, a holy fool, an inspired lunatic.

In poem 80, for instance, Lalla offers the aspirant the following counsel,

intended to contain the body’s claims:

Wear just enough to keep the cold out,

eat just enough to keep hunger from your door.

Mind, dream yourself beyond Self and Other.

Remember, this body is just pickings for jungle crows.

But in poem 141, she proposes another and more Nātha-like way of relating

to the body:

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.

In poems 92 and 93, already quoted in this Introduction, Lalla courts the

insults and curses of her detractors. Her talisman against these assaults is an

indifference born of her conviction that she ‘belongs to Shiva’. She treats

them merely as ashes with which to clean the mirror of her consciousness

(mirrors, in the historical Lalla’s day, were made of metal and not glass).

We may usefully compare Lalla’s position in these poems with a laconic

teaching of Lakuliśa or ‘The Lord of the Mace’, the founder of the Pāśupata

cult: ‘Ill-treated, he should wander.’ His commentator, Kaundinya, offers

the following gloss on this teaching, which is described as ‘the seeking of

dishonour’:

This ill treatment should be regarded as a coronation to a poor man . . . [The aspirant]

should wander under false accusations on the principle that he who is dishonoured is on

[the path to] acquiring merit . . . Hereby he becomes cut off from the respectable castes

and conditions of men, and the power of passionless detachment is produced. (quoted in

McEvilley 2002, 226)

At the same time, Lalla was keenly aware of the charlatanry of the lower

kind of wandering renouncer: the renegade Siddha, Nātha or Yogi who,

falling away from the spiritual quest yet retaining superficial abilities of

telekinesis and bodily control, could dazzle the populace of householders

with his bag of tricks. In poem 119, she frames a sardonic critique of such

bazaar magicians:

To dam a flood,

to blow out a forest fire,

to walk on air,

to milk a wooden cow:

any con artist could do it.

The apparent tension between the householder’s way and the renouncer’s

path—and the delusion that the act of making a choice between them

automatically marks the difference between ignorance and enlightenment—

also exercised the ninth-century Siddha master Saraha, who meditated on

the ‘fair tree of the Void’ at the confluence of Tantra and Mahāyāna

Buddhism. As Saraha sang in his Dōhākośa or ‘Treasury of Rhymed

Couplets’ (the translation from the Angika, a form of protoHindi, is D.L.

Snellgrove’s; Conze 1959, 179):

Do not sit at home, do not go to the forest,

But recognise mind wherever you are.

When one abides in complete and perfect

enlightenment,

Where is Samsara and where is Nirvana?

O know this truth,

That neither at home nor in the forest does enlightenment

dwell.

Be free from prevarication

In the self-nature of immaculate thought!

The intertextuality that relates Lalla’s texts to those produced within her

background traditions, which I have underscored in the context of her

Kashmir Śaiva lineage, is dramatically visible and audible in the context of

her Siddha affiliations as well. Five centuries after Saraha, Lalla employs

the same imagery as he does, to confirm his diagnosis that illumination is

not guaranteed to a renouncer or withheld from a householder; it comes to

those who refine themselves to receive it. Lalla says:

Some run away from home, some escape the hermitage.

No orchard bears fruit for the barren mind.

Day and night, count the rosary of your breath,

and stay put wherever you are.

(POEM 122)

Hermit or householder: same difference.

If you’ve dissolved your desires in the river of time,

you will see that the Lord is everywhere and is perfect.

As you know, so shall you be.

(POEM 123)

The texts of the Pāśupata, Siddha and Nātha lineages were not fossil fuel,

but renewable resources: in Lalla’s poetry, we find a crucible in which they

were fused at a new, intense and startling level of expression. This would,

therefore, be the appropriate juncture at which to dwell on the genealogy of

Lalla’s vākh as a literary form, and to accord it what I believe to be its

rightful place in that family of more than twenty poetic forms which are

grouped under the generic title of the dōhā. We may begin with one of

Grierson’s speculations, made in an appendix to his 1920 edition. While

investigating the subject of Kashmiri prosody, he noted that, during the

eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Kashmiri writers customarily used

formal Persian metres such as the hazaj, whether they were Muslims

writing in Persian on Islamic epic subjects or Pandits writing in Sanskrit on

Hindu philosophical or devotional themes. But the metrical system used in

Kashmiri songs, under which rubric Lalla’s vākhs were classified, was quite

unique. Unlike the metrical system used in North India, which is based on

syllabic quantity, the measure of the Kashmiri song depended on a sequence

of stress-accents. In Lalla’s poems, as Grierson notes, ‘four stresses go to

each pada, or line . . . [they] will not scan according to Indian rules, but

nevertheless [their] lilt is strongly suggestive of the Indian dōhā’. Having

arrived at this potentially historic insight, Grierson settles down to analyse

the structure of the dōhā, usually developed as a rhymed couplet read as

four half-lines. He breaks the dōhā down into the instants of voiced

duration it takes up (with one instant corresponding to one short syllable,

and a long syllable counting as two instants; the standard term for

Grierson’s ‘instants’ is mātrās or morae) and shows that the dōhā may be

scanned as the following pattern of instants, or moraic count:

The same moraic count appears in many of Lalla’s vākhs, with the four

half-lines opened out into a quatrain:

Unfortunately, despite his pioneering work in the study of Indian linguistics

and literature, Grierson remained committed to the top-down model of

cultural transmission that was pervasive among intellectuals of his class,

education, citizenship and epoch. Their liberal outlook and encyclopaedic

interests were tempered by their membership of the Club of Imperial

Certitude. Convinced that only an elite could produce serious culture, and

that cultural materials always become degenerate and vulgarised when they

descend from the elite to the masses, he concluded that Lalla’s poems ‘were

originally intended to be based on some standard metre, but that in the

mouths of the rustics stress became substituted for quantity’ (1920, 144–48)

Grierson chose to round off his sketch with the dismissive suggestion that

Lalla’s prosody was merely a demotic and irregular version of that practised

by classical Prakrit poets such as the Sātavāhana ruler Hāla. Had he taken

his metrical speculations—and his notion that the vākh scansion was of

ultimately Central Asian origin—to their logical conclusion, he might have

been able to situate Lalla’s vākhs far more securely in a pan-Indian atlas of

sacred poetry.

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.

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.

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)

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:

tsā

ṭ

un-wā

ṭ

un, to cut, hack or rip, and bind; rā

ṭ

un, 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 b

h’ 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 mha

ṇ

é’ 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: ‘hō

ṭ

ā’, ‘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,

learning 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 w

padēsh—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 w

padēsh 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 w

padēsh

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 w

padēsh 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

padēsh 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:

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

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

(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.

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

As I stood on my mind’s embankment, the day faded.

I looked in my purse and couldn’t find Shiva’s name

to give the ferryman.

Brother, what’s the point of twisting a rope of sand?

You couldn’t tow a boat with that line.

The course that Nārāyana has charted for you,

no one can turn that around.

They kept coming, they kept coming, now they’ve got to go.

They’ve got to keep moving, day or night,

and where they came from, there they’ve got to go.

From nothing to nothing to nothing and why?

From what direction did I come, and by what road?

In what direction am I going, how shall I find the road?

I hope they’ll send me a map before it’s too late

or it’s all over for me, my breath all gone to waste.

I’m carrying this sack of candy, its knot gone slack on my shoulder.

I took a wrong turn and wasted my day, what’s to be done?

I’m lost, my teacher’s warning blisters me like a whiplash.

This flock has no shepherd, what’s to be done?

I, Lalla, wore myself down searching for Him

and found a strength after my strength had died.

I came to His threshold but found the door bolted.

I locked that door with my eyes and looked at Him.

My willow bow was bent to shoot, but my arrow was only grass.

A klutz of a carpenter botched the palace job I got him.

In the crowded marketplace, my shop stands unlocked.

Holy water hasn’t touched my skin. I’ve lost the plot.

Love-mad, I, Lalla, started out,

spent days and nights on the trail.

Circling back, I found the teacher in my own house.

What brilliant luck, I said, and hugged him.

I wore myself out, looking for myself.

No one could have worked harder to break the code.

I lost myself in myself and found a wine cellar. Nectar, I tell you.

There were jars and jars of the good stuff, and no one to drink it.

Wrapped up in Yourself, You hid from me.

All day I looked for You

and when I found You hiding inside me,

I ran wild, playing now me, now You.

I came out, looking for the moon,

came looking, light flying to light.

All is Nārāyana! All is Nārāyana!

All is Nārāyana! Lord, You make my head spin.

(17 & 18 are companion vākhs)

Drifter, on your feet, get moving!

You still have time, go look for the Friend.

Make yourself wings, take wing and fly.

You still have time, go look for the Friend.

Charge your bellows with breath

like the blacksmith taught you.

That’s how you turn your iron to gold.

You still have time, go look for the Friend.

(19 & 20 are companion vākhs)

Up, woman! Go make your offering.

Take wine, meat and a cake fit for the gods.

If you know the password to the Supreme Place,

you can reach wisdom by breaking the rules.

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.

Royal swan, what happened to your beautiful voice?

Someone’s robbed you and you can’t even say who or what.

The mill’s stopped grinding, its mouth looks choked

and where’s the grain? The miller’s got clean away!

The mill goes round and round in slow circles

but the millstone guards its secret.

Sometimes, the wheel grinds closer to the grain,

sometimes, the grain rolls closer to the wheel.

What should I do with the five, the ten, the eleven

who scoured out this pot and ran away?

It’s a numbers game: if all the eleven had pulled on their rope,

their cow wouldn’t have gone astray.

You’ve got six and I’ve got six.

Now tell me, Blue-Throated One, what’s the difference?

Or don’t. I know. You keep your six on a leash and

my six have strung me along.

Lord! I’ve never known who I really am, or You.

I threw my love away on this lousy carcass

and never figured it out: You’re me, I’m You.

All I ever did was doubt: Who am I? Who are You?

(This vākh has a double meaning)

Poor me, all helpless, I had to make a noise:

‘I’ve got lotus stalks! Won’t you buy some?’

I came back again and cried out loud:

‘I’ve got onion and garlic! Two for the price of one!’

Poor me, all helpless, I had to make a noise:

‘I’ve got nothing! Won’t you buy some?’

I came back again and cried out loud:

‘I’ve got breath and soul! Two for the price of one!’

(This vākh has a double meaning)

Onion and garlic are one, I’ve learnt.

Fry some onion. It’s hardly a gourmet dish.

Fried onion, I wouldn’t touch a sliver of it.

But it gave me a taste for saying ‘I am He’.

Breath and soul, that’s all I’ve learnt.

Worship your body, it tastes like nothing.

A body in worship, that’s no way to bliss.

But it gave me a taste for saying ‘I am He’.

Remove from my heart’s dovecote, Father,

the ache for too-far skies.

My arms hurt from building other people’s houses.

My body, when they come to take you from your own house,

a thousand people will follow you, waving their arms.

They’ll lay you in a field, asleep on your right side,

head pointing south.

My soul is an elephant, an elephant that trumpets for food

every hour on the hour.

Out of a thousand, out of a hundred thousand, only one survives.

Thank God, or they’d have trampled all creation, these hungry tuskers.

You dance above the abyss.

How do you manage it?

You can’t take these dishes with you when dinner’s over.

Are you sure the buffet’s tickling your palate?

I saw a sage starving to death, a leaf floating to earth

on a winter breeze. I saw a fool beating his cook.

And now I’m waiting for someone to cut

the love-cord that keeps me tied to this crazy world.

(32 & 33 are companion vākhs)

Now I see a flowing stream,

now a flood that’s drowned all bridges,

now I see a bush flaming with flowers,

now a skeleton of twigs.

Now I see a blazing hearth,

now neither smoke nor fire,

now I see the mother of five princes,

now just the aunt of the potter’s wife.

Bitter can be sweet and sweet poison.

It’s a question of what your tongue wants.

It’s hard work to tell what it wants, but keep going:

the city you’re dreaming of, it’s at the end of this road.

Master, my Master, listen to me!

Do you remember what the world was like?

Children, how will you pass your days and nights?

This is going to be one tough life.

There’s bad news, and there’s worse.

Autumn’s pears and apples will ripen

with apricots in summer rain.

Mothers and daughters will step out,

hand in hand, in broad daylight, with strange men.

When day is snuffed out, the night glows.

The earth swells to touch the sky.

The new moon swallows the demon of eclipse.

Shiva is worshipped best when thought lights up the Self.

(38 & 39 are companion vākhs)

I, Lalla, set out to bloom like a cotton flower.

The cleaner tore me, the carder shredded me on his bow.

That gossamer: that was I

the spinning woman lifted from her wheel.

At the weaver’s, they hung me out on the loom.

First the washerman pounded me on his washing stone,

scrubbed me with clay and soap.

Then the tailor measured me, piece by piece,

with his scissors. Only then could I, Lalla,

find the road to heaven.

You’ve cut yourself a hide and measured it

but what seed have you sown that will bear you fruit?

Fool! Teaching you is like throwing a ball at a gatepost

or feeding jaggery to an ox, hoping for milk.

Fool, you won’t find your way out by praying from a book.

The perfume on your carcass won’t give you a clue.

Focus on the Self.

That’s the best advice you can get.

Don’t flail about like a man wearing a blindfold.

Believe me, He’s in here.

Come in and see for yourself.

You’ll stop hunting for Him all over.

If you’ve learned how to bridle your breath,

hunger and thirst can’t touch you.

Command your breath to the end

and you’ll come back to earth, blessed.

You won’t find the Truth

by crossing your legs and holding your breath.

Daydreams won’t take you through the gateway of release.

You can stir as much salt as you like in water,

it won’t become the sea.

I burnt the dirt from my mind,

twisted a knife in my heart,

spread my skirt to kneel at His door.

Only then did Lalla’s name travel from mouth to mouth.

When the dirt was wiped away from my mind’s mirror,

people knew me for a lover of God.

When I saw Him there, so close to me,

He was All, I was nothing.

As the moonlight faded, I called out to the madwoman,

eased her pain with the love of God.

‘It’s Lalla, it’s Lalla,’ I cried, waking up the Loved One.

I mixed with Him and drowned in a crystal lake.

I didn’t believe in it for a moment

but I gulped down the wine of my own voice.

And then I wrestled with the darkness inside me,

knocked it down, clawed at it, ripped it to shreds.

I hacked my way through six forests

until the moon woke up inside me.

The sky’s breath sang through me,

dried up my body’s substance.

I roasted my heart in passion’s fire

and found Shankara!

I pestled my heart in love’s mortar,

roasted it and ate it up.

I kept my cool but you can bet I wasn’t sure

whether I’d live or die.

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.

I trapped my breath in the bellows of my throat:

a lamp blazed up inside, showed me who I really was.

I crossed the darkness holding fast to that lamp,

scattering its light-seeds around me as I went.

(53 & 54 are companion vākhs)

My Guru, Supreme Lord,

tell me the secret:

when both rise from the sun beneath the navel,

why does the short breath, coming out, cool,

and the long breath, coming out, burn?

The sun beneath the navel was made to burn.

When the breath, rising there, flows through the throat,

it comes out long and burns.

But when it meets the moon river flowing from the crown,

It comes out short and cools.

I came into this world of births and deaths

and found the true Self by mind-light.

No one will die for me, nor I for anyone.

How wonderful to die! How wonderful to live!

(This vākh has a double meaning)

I locked the doors of my body,

trapped the onion-thief and paused for breath.

Chaining him in my heart’s dark cellar,

I stripped off his skin with the whip of Om.

I locked the doors of my body,

trapped the thief of life and held my breath.

Chaining him in my heart’s dark cellar,

I stripped off his skin with the whip of Om.

A thousand times at least I asked my Guru

to give Nothingness a name.

Then I gave up. What name can you give

to the source from which all names have sprung?

God is stone, the temple is stone,

head to foot, all stone.

Hey priest-man, what’s the object of your worship?

Get your act together, join mind with life-breath.

It covers your shame, keeps you from shivering.

Grass and water are all the food it asks.

Who taught you, priest-man,

to feed this breathing thing to your thing of stone?

Whoever chants Shiva’s name as he walks the Swan’s Way,

planting trees with no thought of the fruit,

even if the world keeps him busy night and day,

he’s won the grace of the Teacher

who is First among the Gods.

Kusha grass, flowers, sesame seed, lamp, water:

it’s just another list for someone who’s listened,

really listened, to his teacher. Every day he sinks deeper

into Shambhu, frees himself from the trap

of action and reaction. He will not suffer birth again.

You are sky and earth,

day, wind-breath, night.

You are grain, sandal paste, flowers, water.

Substance of my offering, You who are All,

what shall I offer You?

He knows the crown is the temple of Self.

His breath is deepened by the Unstruck Sound.

He has freed himself from the prison of delusion.

He knows he is God, who shall He worship?

Whatever my hands did was worship,

whatever my tongue shaped was prayer.

That was Shiva’s secret teaching:

I wore it and it became my skin.

Knowledge is a garden. Hedge it with calm,

self-restraint, right effort. Let your past acts graze in it,

goats fattened for the altars of the Mother Goddess.

When the garden is bare, the goats killed, you can walk free.

(66 & 67 are companion vākhs)

Who’s the garland-maker, who’s his wife?

What flowers will they pluck to offer Him?

With what water will they sprinkle Him?

With what chant will they wake the deepest Self?

The mind’s the garland-maker, his wife the desire for bliss.

They will pluck flowers of adoration to offer Him.

They will sprinkle Him with the moon’s dripping nectar.

They will wake the deepest Self with the chant of silence.

I, Lalla, came through the gate of my soul’s jasmine garden

and found Shiva and Shakti there, locked in love!

Drunk with joy, I threw myself into the lake of nectar.

Who cares if I’m a dead woman walking!

Prune the weeds from your heart’s garden

and the narcissus will bloom for you.

When you die, they’ll want all your ledgers and journals.

Look out! Here comes Death, chasing you like a tax-collector.

(70 & 71 are companion vākhs)

I can’t believe this happened to me!

A hoopoe cut off my claws with his beak.

The truth of all my dreams hit me in one line:

I, Lalla, find myself on a lake, no shore in sight.

I can’t believe this happened to me!

I made a mess of everything, no shore in sight.

A klutz of a mason plastered my ceiling to the floor.

Serves me right: it’s time I got to know myself.

He laughs when you laugh, sneezes in your sleep,

yawns for you, coughs for you.

He bathes every day in the river of your thoughts.

He’s naked, all year round, and walks where you walk.

Just go up and introduce yourself.

When the sun melts away, the moon remains.

When the moon melts away, the mind remains.

When the mind melts away, what’s left?

Earth, ether, sky, all empty out.

(74, 75 & 76 form a group of vākhs, sharing the same or nearidentical closing line)

When the scriptures melt away, the chants remain.

When the chants melt away, the mind remains.

When the mind melts away, what’s left?

A void mingles with the Void.

Kill desire, focus on the true nature of things.

Snap out of your daydreams,

there’s rarest wisdom to be found right here.

A void has mingled with the Void.

I’ve bridled my mind-horse, reined him in,

struggled to tie my ten breath-streams together.

That’s how the moon melted and rained nectar on me

and a void mingled with the Void!

My mind-horse straddles the sky,

crossing a hundred thousand miles in a blink.

It takes wisdom to bridle that horse,

he can break the wheels of breath’s chariot.

(78 & 79 are companion vākhs)

Shiva’s the horse and Vishnu’s at the saddle,

Brahma’s cheering at the stirrup.

Only the yogi, artful in breath and posture,

can say which god shall mount and ride this horse.

He who strikes the Unstruck Sound,

calls space his body and emptiness his home,

who has neither name nor colour nor family nor form,

who, meditating on Himself, is both Source and Sound,

is the god who shall mount and ride this horse.

Wear just enough to keep the cold out,

eat just enough to keep hunger from your door.

Mind, dream yourself beyond Self and Other.

Remember, this body is just pickings for jungle crows.

Gourmet meals and elegant clothes can’t buy you peace of mind.

Only they climb higher, who have left delusion behind.

They know Death is fire behind a smiling mask

and Desire is a tough lender who talks sweet.

Gluttony gets you the best table in the town of Nowhere,

fasting gives your ego a boost.

Slave of extremes, learn the art of balance

and all the closed doors will open at your touch.

Now sir, make sure you’ve corralled your ass.

Or he’ll champ his way

through your neighbours’ saffron gardens.

No one’s going to stand proxy

when it’s your neck on the block.

Kill those killer ghouls, Lust, Anger and Greed,

before they can aim their arrows at your heart.

Armour yourself in thought, shield yourself with silence,

you’ll soon see what they’re really made of.

Kill those road pirates: Greed, Lust and Pride.

You’d be doing us all a great service.

And then you’ll figure out how to reach the True Lord

and you’ll see that the world is made of ash.

Your mind is the ocean of life.

It can throw up an angry tide

of fire-harpoons that stick in the flesh.

But weigh them, and they weigh nothing.

You’re not happy ruling a kingdom,

you’re not happy giving it away.

But if you’re free of desire, you’re free of dilemma.

Living, you’re dead already, and can never die.

Whatever I’ve started, I’ll finish.

But the accounts are someone else’s headache.

Keep the reward, whatever I do is an offering to the Self.

Wherever I go, my only burden is lightness of step.

Train your thoughts on the path of immortality.

Leave them unguided and they’ll grow

into monsters. But take heart, most of the time,

they’re like children crying for milk.

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.

Good or bad, I’m happy to welcome both.

I don’t hear with my ears, I don’t see with my eyes.

A voice speaks inside my heart,

my jewel-lamp burns bright even in a rampaging wind.

They lash me with insults, serenade me with curses.

Their barking means nothing to me.

Even if they came with soul-flowers to offer,

I couldn’t care less. Untouched, I move on.

Let them hurl a thousand curses at me,

pain finds no purchase in my heart.

I belong to Shiva. Can a scatter of ashes

ruin a mirror? It gleams.

Wisest to play the fool. Lynx-eyed, play blind.

Prick-eared, be deaf.

Polished, lie dull among the dull.

Survive.

My Master gave me just one rule:

Forget the outside, get to the inside of things.

I, Lalla, took that teaching to heart.

From that day, I’ve danced naked.

Want a kingdom? Raise a sabre.

Want heaven? Burn in penance, give to the poor.

Want knowledge of the Self? Listen to the Master.

Want your current balance of sin and virtue?

Better consult the Self.

Restless mind, don’t infect the heart with fear.

That virus is not for you.

The Infinite knows what you hunger for.

Ask Him to carry you across.

(98, 99, 100, 101 & 102 form a group of vākhs, linked by their closing line)

They sprang in beauty from their mother’s womb,

wounding it with their passage. Again and again,

they came back to wait at that door, but Shiva

can play hard to get: hold on to that message.

The stone of the temple is the stone of the paved road,

the stone that anchors the earth’s continents

is the stone of the mill that can grind you down.

But Shiva can play hard to get: hold on to that message.

100

Does the sun not warm every country he visits

or does he touch only the richest ones?

Does water not flow in every house?

But Shiva can play hard to get: hold on to that message.

101

As mother, she suckles you. As wife, she pampers you.

As temptress, she puts a noose around your neck.

That’s woman for you. But Shiva can play

hard to get: hold on to that message.

102

If only I’d trained my mind to gather my breath-streams,

played surgeon, cut and bound them, ground pain into an antidote,

I’d have known how to churn the Elixir of Life!

But Shiva can play hard to get: hold on to that message.

103

Pressed in winter’s paws, running water hardens to ice

or powders into snow. Three different states

but the sun of wisdom thaws them down to one.

The world, all hands on board, has sunk without trace in Shiva!

104

Shiva lives in many places.

He doesn’t know Hindu from Muslim.

The Self that lives in you and others:

that’s Shiva. Get the measure of Shiva.

105

The Lord has spread the subtle net of Himself across the world.

See how He gets under your skin, inside your bones.

If you can’t see Him while you’re alive,

don’t expect a special vision once you’re dead.

106

You made a promise in the womb.

Will you keep it or won’t you?

Die before death can claim you

and they will honour you when you go.

107

(107 & 108 are companion vākhs)

Who shall die, who shall be killed?

Who forgets the Name

and falls into the world’s murky business:

he shall die, he shall be killed.

108

Who trusts his Master’s word

and controls the mind-horse

with the reins of wisdom,

he shall not die, he shall not be killed.

109

Who sees Self as Other, Other as Self,

who sees day as night, night as day,

whose mind does not dance between opposites,

he alone has seen the Teacher

who is First among the Gods.

110

Alone, I crossed the Field of Emptiness,

dropping my reason and my senses.

I stumbled on my own secret there

and flowered, a lotus rising from a marsh.

111

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.

112

I gave myself to Him, body and soul,

became a bell that the clear note of Him rang through.

Thoughts fixed on Him, I flew through the sky

and unlocked the mysteries of heaven and hell.

113

You rule the earth, breathe life

into the five elements.

All creation throbs with the Unstruck Sound.

Immeasurable, who can take Your measure?

114

To the yogi, the whole wide world ripples into Nothingness:

it splashes like water on the water of Infinity.

When that Void melts, Perfection remains.

Hey priest-man, that’s the only lesson you need!

115

Word or thought, normal or Absolute, they mean nothing here.

Even the mudrās of silence won’t get you entry.

We’re beyond even Shiva and Shakti here.

This Beyond that’s beyond all we can name, that’s your lesson!

116

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.

117

New mind, new moon.

I’ve seen the great ocean made new.

Ever since I’ve scoured my body and mind,

I, Lalla, have been as new as new can be!

118

Reputation: it’s water splashing in a creel.

Find me a hero who can trap a gale

in his fist, tether an elephant

with a hair. Maybe he’d dare

to hang on to reputation.

119

To dam a flood,

to blow out a forest fire,

to walk on air,

to milk a wooden cow:

any con artist could do it.

120

Who can halt the dripping frost

or cup the wind in his palms?

He can, who has reined in his five senses.

He can pluck the sun from the midnight sky.

121

He, from whose navel the First Syllable rises,

who crafts from his breath a bridge to heaven:

he carries just one mantra in his head,

why would he need a thousand spells?

122

Some run away from home, some escape the hermitage.

No orchard bears fruit for the barren mind.

Day and night, count the rosary of your breath,

and stay put wherever you are.

123

Hermit or householder: same difference.

If you’ve dissolved your desires in the river of time,

you will see that the Lord is everywhere and is perfect.

As you know, so shall you be.

124

Some, who have closed their eyes, are wide awake.

Some, who look out at the world, are fast asleep.

Some who bathe in sacred pools remain dirty.

Some are at home in the world but keep their hands clean.

125

Those who glow with the light of the Self

are freed from life even while they live.

But fools add knots by the hundred

to the tangled net of the world.

126

Don’t waste your wisdom on a fool

or your sugar on an ass.

Don’t plant seeds in the river’s sand

or pour oil on bran cakes kept for the cow.

127

I can scatter the battalions of southern clouds,

dry the ocean, play physician

to the most lingering fever and cure it.

But I can’t knock sense into a fool.

128

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.

129

It’s so much easier to study than act,

to philosophise than go looking for the Self.

Losing the scriptures in the thick fog of my practice,

I stumbled on second sight.

130

This lake, even a mustard seed’s too large to sink in it,

but everybody comes to drink its water.

Deer, jackals, rhinos, cloud-elephants are born,

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

as 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 hu

ṅ

d 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 s

daras 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 b

-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, l

h-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.

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-s

thi-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 s

man, 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 s

man +

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 wu

ṭ

hān 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

nāb

a di-bāras a

ṭ

a-gan

ḍ

yolu 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 b

h lūtshüs tshā

ḍ

an 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 b

h 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

tshā

ḍ

ān 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

ạ

ndariy āyěs ts

ạ

ndariy 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 tasted the nectar of enlightenment.

Poem 16 maps the metaphor of the game over a Yogic account of the

activation of the ku

ṇḍ

alinī-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

th rainyā! artsun sakhar

20. G: 77 | K: 60

mörith pönts būth tim phal-han

ḍ

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

yim

ạ

y shěh tsě tim

ạ

y shěh mě

Shiva is addressed here, quite informally, as Shyāma-galā, ‘Blue-throated

One’, from the Sanskrit appellation, Nīlka

ṇṭ

ha. 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, the 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.

25. G: 7 | K: 130

nātha! nā pān nā par zônum

Lalla phrases a passionate testament, here, to the recognition of the unity

between seeker and goal, self and Self. She castigates herself for having

allowed herself to be blinded to this unity by her body-centred

consciousness, with its emphasis on the personality, on individual identity;

and also by the constant doubt concerning the true nature of the Divine,

which she previously nurtured.

26. G: 89

lācāri bicāri prawād korum

The double meaning of this vākh hinges on the alternative meanings carried

by three of the key words: nadoru, which means both ‘lotus stalk’ and ‘a

thing of no value’; prān, which means both ‘onion’ and the ‘life-breath’;

and ruhun, which means ‘garlic’ and puns on ruh or spirit, a word derived

from the Arabic. The opening line is a vivid study in the illuminating

paradox at which Lalla excels. Describing herself, somewhat disarmingly,

as a poor and helpless woman, she makes a proclamation: lācāri bicāri

prawād korum. In the first reading, she offers lotus stalks for sale—nadoru,

stewed either by itself or with meat, is a favourite Kashmiri dish—

following this up with an offer of onion and garlic at a discounted price.

The second, more esoteric understanding plays off this sales patter at a

deeper level: the ‘nothing’ that Lalla pitches at the prospective buyer in the

marketplace gains significance when she follows it up by offering ‘breath

and soul’ for the price of one. What is on offer is Yogic instruction, and

through it, the resulting insight into the Void, the true nature of reality

beyond the world of appearances.

27. G: 90

prān ta ruhun kunuy zônum

This vākh also employs the pun on onion/life-breath and garlic/ spirit.

Depending on how it is read, the poem is spoken either by a fastidious yet

idiosyncratic gourmand or an enlightened seeker. The gourmand speaks

urbanely of how he wouldn’t touch a sliver of fried onion, but that it gave

him, nonetheless, a taste for the mystical realisation, ‘sō-’ham’, ‘I am He’.

The seeker arrives at the same conclusion by means of the pun that we have

seen in play in poem 26: breath and soul form the twin subject of his

training; he disdains the worship of the body, but agrees that it gave him a

taste for saying ‘sō-’ham’, ‘I am He’. The point of the double meaning

appears to be that one may choose many, sometimes surprising and

apparently mutually exclusive, ways to reach enlightenment, and the

aesthete or epicurean may arrive at that destination just as surely as the

ascetic.

28. K. Pr: 57

diluku khura-khura mě, Māli, kāstam, manaki kōtar-marē

In a recognition of the burden of the seeker’s responsibility, Lalla implores

the Divine to rid her of the longing for transcendence, and also of the

mandate to care for the spiritual well-being of others. Contemplating her

own death, she uses the imagery of the Hindu funeral: the procession,

attended by crowds of mourning votaries; the body laid on its right side,

with its head towards the south, which is the auspicious home of gods and

angels, the quarter whose guardian or dik-pāla is Yama, the Lord of Death.

29. K. Pr: 150

naphsüy myônu chuy hostuy,

mi h

sti mongunam gari gari bai

This poem invokes a terrifying vision of the unregenerate self as an

insatiably hungry elephant: one that must be fed hourly if it is to be kept out

of mischief. The speaker builds on the belief, common to the Hindu,

Buddhist and Jaina traditions, that human birth is relatively rare; so that

there are comparatively few of these tuskers in existence, or else they would

have destroyed the universe with their rampaging desires. Significantly,

though, the word that designates ‘soul’ in this poem is the Perso-Arabic

naphs, which is also used colloquially and in the Unani medical system to

mean pulse, subtle breath or true nature: its use clearly identifies poem 29

as a contribution to the LD corpus from a source oriented towards Sufi

practice. In the Koran, the naphs is regarded as the lower or bestial nature,

which the higher nature must refine, neutralise and overcome through a

process of self-purification involving meditation, prayer, rigorous

psychological analysis and a turning away from the gratifications of the

material world. In the teachings of Kashmir’s Rishi order, as epitomised in

the śruks of Nund Rishi, naphs can mean both ‘self’ and ‘ego’: the aspirant

is constantly urged to purify his naphs, to polish it like a mirror so that it

can reflect the glory of transcendent knowledge.

30. K: 3

talu chuy zyus tay pě

ṭ

hu chuk natsān

In this poem, Lalla satirises those who have devoted themselves to sensual

pleasures, to the dance and the feast: but death will put an end to the feast,

and the dance of life unfolds above the abyss of extinction.

31. G: 83 | K: 9

gā

ṭ

ulwāh akh wuchum b

cha-sūty marān

Lalla expresses, in this poem, her exasperation in the face of the world’s

inexplicable cruelty and manifest injustice, the transience of all that was

loved and cherished: a wise man may die of hunger; a cook may be brutally

mistreated by his whimsical master; the bright leaves of spring will be

stripped off the trees in winter. And yet she both hates and loves this world,

and hopes that a miraculous surgery of wisdom may sever the umbilical

cord that keeps her attached to it.

32. G: 96 | K: 10

miy

ḍ

ṭ

hüm nad wahawüñüy

33. G: 97 | K: 11 | K. Pr: 47

(variant incorporating elements of both 32 and 33) d

miy

ḍ

ṭ

hüm güjü

dazawüñüy

These companion vākhs offer testimony to the transitory character of the

world in a manner that is visually arresting: indeed, the poems develop as

visual sequences edited at a pace that we would recognise as contemporary,

more cinematic than imagistic. In poem 32, the speaker first sees a stream,

an impression erased by the image of a deluge, then a flowering bush,

quickly replaced by the same bush denuded by winter. In poem 33, the

speaker reports a flourishing hearth, then the erasure of the hearth,

succeeded by a vision of Kunti, sometime queen of Hastinapur and mother

of the royal Pāndava brothers, replaced seamlessly by a humble figure, the

aunt of the potter’s wife. The last sequence refers to the episode in the

Mahabharata when the five Pāndavas and their mother have been exiled by

their cousins, the Kauravas, and spend part of that exile in disguise.

In the canonical version of the Mahabharata, the princes camouflage

themselves as poor Brahmins; in this version, they would appear to have

disappeared into an artisanal milieu. It should be noted, in this context, that

the reference to the potter’s wife may be a vestigial citation of the Tantric

underground, whose nocturnal practices deliberately transgressed the caste

lines of daytime society. Indeed, the potter’s wife is a key figure, acting as a

liberating sexual partner to the yogi, in one of the forms of the circle

sacrifice or chakra-yāga, which features among the secret rituals of the

Kaula adepts of Kashmir (Dupuche 2003,128).

34. K: 20

ṭ

ǒṭ

h m

dhur tay myū

ṭ

h zahr

Lalla comments on the bewilderments of experience in this poem, and the

deceptiveness of sensual impressions: one cannot even trust oneself. Only

an adherence to one’s chosen purpose can help one navigate through life,

sifting one’s true choices from the plenitude of illusions. At the end of this

challenging road lies the city of redemption.

35. G: 91

Siddha-Māli! Siddhō! sěda kathan kan thāv

36. G: 92

brō

ṭ

h-köli āsan tithiy kēran

In these two poems, Lalla predicts the shape of things to come, and it is not

encouraging. She laments the loss of more innocent and serene times, and

foresees the coming of disasters: deprivation faces the children to come;

changes in the weather pattern will play havoc with the fruiting seasons;

mothers and daughters will join each other in consorting with strangers.

Semaphoric of social unrest, Lalla’s prognostications in poems 35 and 36

find disturbing fulfilment in the continuing turbulence in contemporary

Kashmir, with its lethal combination of insurgency, low-intensity proxy

warfare, militant terror and State repression.

37. G: 22

děn tshězi ta razan āsē

Lalla, as a fully realised yogini, testifies here to the expansion of

consciousness that she experiences: the conventional distinction between

bright day and dark night collapses, and the night finds its own luminosity;

the horizon fades away, so that the earth loses its boundaries and merges

with the sky. The resplendent new moon, symbolic of the awakened mind,

swallows Rahu, the demon of eclipse, instead of being swallowed by him;

the finest way of worshipping Shiva is not through rituals and observances,

but through the knowledge-radiant mind (Singh 1979c, 103–05).

38. G: 102 | K: 105

Lal b

h drāyěs kapasi-pōshěcě sütsüy

39. G: 103 | K: 106

bi yěli chövünas d

bi-kañě-pě

ṭ

ạ

The interpretation of these exquisite and poignant companion vākhs has

varied considerably. While Grierson favours an account of ‘various stages

towards the attainment of knowledge . . . metaphorically indicated’ (1920, 1

14), Jaishree Kak treats these poems as evidence of Lalla’s ‘trials and

tribulations [as] a woman in mediaeval society’, ‘her awareness of the

social construction of gender’, ‘the shredding of [her] old identity’, and her

transcendence of ‘the socially defined ‘feminine’ self, which she

experiences as oppressive’ (2007, 5–7).

As I read it, Lalla’s hope of blooming like the cotton flower incarnates

the wish to attain the state that the mystics call sahaja in Sanskrit, or sahaz

in Kashmiri: the awareness of one’s true nature, the reality concealed by the

world of appearances. This is not, however, a wish easily granted: before

that, her body-centred consciousness, her sense of personality, must be

beaten out of her. The imagery of these poems is that of violent, even brutal

transformation: the seeker is torn and shredded, spun out into fine filaments,

hung on the loom, woven, pounded, washed and cut to measure. The bodied

self that she was is taken apart completely and subjected to remaking: it is

only by suffering this process that she can ‘find the road to heaven’.

The various artisans who are the protagonists of these poems—the

cleaner, the carder, the spinning woman, the weaver, the washerman and the

tailor—are all agents of transcendence. I would see them as guru, master or

teacher figures, or as those mysterious ‘helpers’, demigods or guardian

angels assigned by God to protect the seeker-hero or -heroine, who populate

fables and wisdom stories across the world. Instructively, given my

speculations about the trans-caste character of mediaeval Kashmir’s Tantric

underground, these pivotal catalyst figures in the process of spiritual

evolution are all drawn from the labouring castes.

40. G: 66 | K: 16

tsarmun tsa

ṭ

ith ditith p

ni pānas

Lalla derides the individual who is attached to the pleasures of the flesh,

satirising the body as a mere hide, a dead possession. By contrast, she asks

why he has not sown seeds that would bring in a harvest, the blessing of life

and prosperity. As a teacher, Lalla often demarcates the limits of

instruction, realistically defining the act of dispelling incorrigible folly as

wasted effort. Here, as images of wasted effort, she deploys the ball that

rebounds when thrown at a gatepost, and the absurd feeding of an ox with

jaggery, which is correctly fed to a cow to increase her milk.

41. K: 59

mū

ḍ

ō kriy chay na dārun ta pārun

In the same vein as poem 40, Lalla rebukes the fool who goes to extremes,

believing he can find salvation by praying formulaically or wasting his life

in the pursuit of voluptuary enjoyment. ‘Focus on the Self’ is her

recommendation.

42. K: 50

kavu chukh divān anine batsh

Lalla remonstrates, in this poem, with the individual who seeks the Divine

everywhere, without being able to see that enlightenment lurks in every

corner of the universe: such a seeker is effectively blind to illumination, but

Lalla proposes to shake him free of delusion.

43. G: 37 | K: 51

pawan pūrith yusu ani wagi

The bridling of the breath or pūraka is a Yogic technique, and an essential

element of prā

ṇ

āyāma, the discipline of the body’s vital breaths, which is

an important step in the journey towards union with the Divine. One who

has mastered this technique is liberated from hunger and thirst; he will be

born again, only to release himself from the cycle of birth and death.

44. G: 29 | K: 76

sahazas shěm ta dam nō gatshi

In this crisp, no-nonsense poem, Lalla teaches that enlightenment cannot be

achieved if the seeker merely practices asceticism as routine rather than as

inspired practice. He will accomplish nothing if the fervency of his desire

for transcendence is not matched by the strenuous effort of understanding

and modulating the body’s latencies, and the mastery of the techniques of

right mindfulness. A simulation can never substitute for the reality or

desired achievement that it simulates.

45. G: 49 | K: 86

mal w

ndi zôlum

While all of Lal Děd’s vākhs are inherently and intensely autobiographical

to a considerable degree, dwelling more on the rhythm of the spiritual

journey than on the details of personal life, some of her poems can dwell on

specific moments of experience: peak experiences during which the

distinction between the personal and the spiritual life is dissolved, and

when, so to speak, the spiritual becomes the personal for the questor, and no

longer a matter of textual learning or abstraction. In poem 45, the vibrancy

of her voice edged with violent feeling, Lalla describes how she purified her

consciousness, refined her reason, senses and emotions, cultivated patience

and humility, and so received the gift of illumination at the door of the Self.

Only after going through this transfiguring experience did she become truly

known as Lalla, and her reputation spread.

46. G: 31 | K: 100

makuras zan mal tsolum manas

Similar in spirit to poem 45, this poem celebrates the cleaning of the ‘doors

of perception’, in William Blake’s memorable phrase. With her mind’s

mirror cleansed of all dirt, Lalla became known as a votary of the Divine, a

mystic with teachings to communicate. And yet, she became more aware

than ever of how her individual personality was as nothing before the

sublime majesty of the Divine.

47. G: 105 | K: 88

polu zūni w

thith motu bōlanôwum

Lalla plays among personae in this poem: she is the madwoman, and she is

the one who brings ease to the madwoman with the love of God. She

awakens and joins with the Loved One, who is the Self: this process of

union marks the falling away of all karmic defilements and the attainment

of an indescribable clarity of being.

48. G: 104 | K: 92

sütsüsas na sātas pütsüsas na rumas

Poem 48 is characterised, as many of the vākhs are, by violent imagery.

Lalla begins by recalling her own doubts about her poetry, despite which

she ‘gulped down the wine’ of her vākhs. These manifestos of illumination

gave her the strength to face the demons and monsters haunting her own

soul, the ‘darkness inside’ that she confronts and does battle with, in the

spirit of Jacob wrestling all night with the Angel in the Old Testament, or

Gilgamesh battling Humbaba, or Greek heroes such as Perseus and Jason

fighting various dragons to liberate the imprisoned young woman or the

hidden treasure symbolising emancipatory wisdom held in reserve.

Significantly, Lalla’s choices of verb are physical, visceral, robust and

redolent of the hero’s quest: she wrestles with the darkness inside herself,

knocks it down, claws at it, rips it to shreds.

49. G: 25 | K: 93

shě wan tsa

ṭ

ith shěshi-kal wuzüm

50. K: 75

loluki v

khalu wālinj piśim

I have clustered, as poems 49–56, vākhs in which Lalla elaborates a number

of interrelated metaphors that refer closely to Yogic techniques of breath

control. In poem 49, the journey through the six forests and the waking up

of an inner moon refer to the yogini’s practice of raising her ku

ṇḍ

alinī

energy through six chakras or centres of energy within the body, charted

broadly along the spine, and then further up to the sahasrāra, the nectar

moon associated with the brain. Once the six chakras have been mastered,

the initiate masters the art of looking at and past the material universe. And

once the inner moon has been activated, the vital breaths within the body

modulated into coordination, the body’s energies brought into harmony, and

the self impelled by the love of the Divine, the yogini becomes completely

absorbed in Shiva, who is invoked here as Shěnkar or Shankara.

Poem 50 caroms off the closing images of poem 49, with Lalla

recounting, in her vigorous way, how she pestled her heart in love’s mortar,

then roasted and ate it: overflowing love for the Divine actually achieves a

productive restraint over passion, and yet Lalla is assailed by momentary

doubt. After this sacrifice of the self at the altar of the Self, will the questor

live or die: meaning, will her life continue as before or will it be radically

transformed?

51. G: 82 | K: 94

ōṁ-kār yěli layě onum

Poem 51 opens with an account of a Yogic exercise, clearly including an

element of pratyāhāra, the stopping-up of sensory inputs and the repetition

of the primal syllable Om, until the rhythms of the body’s vital breaths have

been harmonised at a pitch of radiant intensity. The six roads in poem 51

refer to the six chakras, previously visualised as six forests in poem 50,

while the seventh road is the highest of the chakras, the nectar moon. The

experience of arriving at the Field of Light, prakāshě-sthān in Kashmiri, is

identical with that of uniting with Shiva described in poem 50: the

transcendence of the self and the recognition of unity with the Self.

52. G: 4 | K: 98

damāh-dam korumas daman-hālē

This poem refers to two subtle, powerful Yogic breathing techniques known

to practitioners as ujjayi prā

ṇ

āyāma and bhastrikā prā

ṇ

āyāma. In the first,

the conventional pattern of breathing through the nasal passages is bypassed

and the breath is directed, instead, through the throat, so as to exert a slight

pressure on the carotid arteries, lower the blood pressure and stabilise the

mental processes; in the second, which literally means ‘bellows breath’, the

breath is charged until the practitioner speeds up her respiration to twice its

normal rate, purifying the nervous system and clarifying the mental

processes through oxygenation (Satyananda Saraswati 1983, 118–21). The

blazing up of the lamp symbolises the awakening of the Self that results

from the attentive pursuit of these practices, in conjunction with Lalla’s

ongoing quest, and which clears a path for her through the long night

journey of the spirit.

53. G: 56 | K: 95

yē g

rā Paramēshwarā!

54. G: 57 | K: 96

nābi-sthāna chěy prakrěth zalaw

ñī

Poems 53 and 54 are cast in the classic mode of Tantra, in which the female

disciple asks the male teacher for clarification and receives wisdom; this

archetypal situation mirrors the primal dialogic setting of Tantric teaching,

when Shakti approaches Shiva for instruction. These poems refer to the

rhythm of exhalations during the practice of prā

ṇ

āyāma, when Lalla

notices that her shorter exhalations emerge cool while her longer

exhalations emerge relatively hotter; such practices induce an extreme

awareness of the micro-climates of the body’s various organs and processes.

Her teacher’s reply must be understood in terms of the inner body/spirit

geography developed by the Yogic adepts: the main channel for subtle

energy within the body is the sushumna-nā

ḍ

i, the base of which rests in an

energy centre beneath the navel, sometimes called the sun, and whose

uppermost extremity is the sahasrāra or nectar moon, situated in the brain

region, which we have come upon several times already. During the

practice of prā

ṇ

āyāma, the vital breath passes up and down this route in the

form of currents. When the hot current rising from the sun beneath the

navel passes through the throat by itself, it is longer and retains its heat;

however, when it meets the cooler current descending from the nectar

moon, it loses its heat and comes out shorter and cooler.

55. G: 35 | K: 104

samsāras āyěs tapasiy

Having come into samsāra, the world of facades and trapdoors, the seeker

has found her way out by means of what she calls bōdha-prakāsh, the light

of the mind achieved in poem 52. For an illumined one, the distinctions

between life and death, oneself and another, the extinction of one body and

the emergence of another, are all dissolved. The logic of the dichotomy

between samsāra and mok

ṣ

a has lost its grip on her consciousness.

56. G: 101 | K: 13

dēhacě larě dārě bar tr

rim

This poem employs the pun on prān, onion/life-breath, which we have

already encountered in poems 26 and 27. The onion-thief or thief of life is

the worldly nature, which would rush out into the agora, eager for gossip,

rumour and transaction; he must be trapped inside the body by the methods

of prā

ṇ

āyāma, confined to the space of the heart that is both intimate and

cosmic, sometimes poetically described by yogis as hridaya-ākāśa, the

heart-sky, and be subjected to the discipline of the primal and formative

mantra. This last part of the treatment of the wayward nature is pungently

described by Lalla, using the language of corporal punishment: ōmaki

cōbaka tulumas bam, ‘I stripped him with the whip of Om.’

57. K: 24

ras pr’tsōm sāsi latē

The figure of the guru is crucial to Lalla’s poetry, and to the understanding

of her spiritual journey. She invokes the guru variously as ‘Māli’ or

‘Master’ (poem 128), ‘Siddha-Māli! Siddhō!’ or ‘Perfect Master! Perfected

One!’ (poem 35; translated here as ‘Master, my Master’), and ‘yē g

rā

Paramēśwarā or ‘O Guru, Supreme Lord’ (Poem 53; translated here as ‘My

Guru, Supreme Lord’). While some of Lalla’s poems may well be inquiries

or apostrophes addressed to her mentor, Siddha Śrīkāntha, the figure of the

teacher or guide often serves as a proxy for, or manifestation of, the Divine

in her poetry.

The Kulārnava Tantra, a central text of the Tantra system, is most

illuminating on the subject of the identity between the teacher and the

Divine in a Tantric teaching lineage:

Śiva, the Omnipresent One, too exquisite to be perceived, the Ecstatic One, the

Undivided, the Immortal, Like-unto-heaven, the Unborn, the Infinite—how is He to be

worshipped? It is to answer this question that Śiva has assumed the body of a teacher and

dispenses, if he is worshipped with passion, material [bhukti] and spiritual release

[mukti]. Clothed in human form, Supreme Śiva Himself walks the earth, to the delight of

all true disciples. (Arthur Avalon and Tārānātha Vidyāratna’s 1916 translation, quoted in

Zimmer 1984, 206–07)

The ‘Nothingness’ of which Lalla speaks here is the Void that is also

Wholeness, the deep and unmanifest reality that is the ground state of the

universe, and will be achieved after the yogi has emptied out all the

contents, impressions and attachments of material existence from his

consciousness: the shūña or Shunya of Hindu thought.

58. G: 17 | K: 66

dēv watā diworu watā

59. K: 65

laz kāsiy shīt něvariě

In poems 58 and 59, Lalla confronts the temple priest with pithy critiques of

idol worship and animal sacrifice. Her mode of addressing the ritual

specialist is direct and, in this context, almost insultingly familiar, coming

as it does from a woman in a feudal society governed by patriarchal norms.

In the third line of poem 58, for instance, she asks: ‘Pūz kas karakh, hō

ṭ

ā?’ Dismissing the worship of an idol and the religious economy of the

temple—‘all stone’—she emphasises that the Divine is to be reached

through the Yogic practice of prā

ṇ

āgnihōtra, the offering of the body’s

awakened vital energies.

In poem 59, she attacks the priest for offering a lamb or ram as sacrifice

to the gods, contrasting the animal’s modest and undemanding way of

being, and the usefulness of its wool, to the cruelty, wastefulness and

ingratitude involved in sacrificing it. While Hinduism has long been

associated with non-violence and vegetarianism, animal sacrifice has

traditionally been part of the worship of Shakti, the Great Mother, in the

dynamic and even warlike forms of Durga and Kali. Goats are still killed as

offerings at centres of Shakti worship such as the Kalighat temple in

Kolkata and the Kamakhya temple in Kamrup, Assam.

Meat has traditionally been used as an offering in certain ritual

elaborations of Kashmiri Hinduism. After the mass migration of Kashmiri

Hindus from the Valley in the early 1990s, however, these distinctive

practices have practically disappeared in their homeland. In a situation

veined with multiple ironies, Kashmir’s Hindu shrines are now staffed by

priests from the Gangetic plains or elsewhere in the subcontinent, hired by

the armed forces: these men enforce the vegetarian norms of mainstream

Indian Hinduism strictly, and regard animal sacrifices with horror.

60. G: 65 | K: 111

Shiwa Shiwa karān hamsa-gath s

rith

Shiva’s name is the mantra that holds the potential of deliverance. The

Swan’s Way, no echo of Proust, is hamsa-gath, the mystical designation

accorded to the famous utterance of realisation: ‘sō-’ham’, ‘I am He’.

Recited as an a-japa japa or repetition that deepens from words into silence

and awareness, the syllables of this utterance reverse and rearrange

themselves as ‘ham-sah’, which means swan. This graceful bird has

therefore been used for many centuries, in India’s wisdom traditions, to

denote the illuminated questor. When used as a title or honorific, for yogis

who are regarded as having achieved unity with the Shiva-principle

indwelling within the individual consciousness, the word is expanded into

‘Parama-amsa’ or ‘Great Swan’.

The questor is seen to have achieved that state of being which the

Bhagavad Gita refers to as ‘nishkāma karma’ or action without thought of

reward, and which the teacher J. Krishnamurti referred to as ‘choiceless

awareness’. Having passed beyond all dualities, he has focused his mind on

transcendence, and goes through the motions of ordinary life like an actor in

a play—with complete assurance and commitment, yet knowing that it is

not identical with his real life.

The somewhat unusual and highly Sanskritic designation sura-guru-

nātha, which I have rendered here as ‘Teacher who is First among the

Gods’, translates literally as ‘gods-teacher-lord’ and refers to Shiva as

Mahādeva, the Great God, and as Yogīśvara, the Lord of Yoga. This

designation also appears in poem 109.

61. G: 45 | K: 67

kush pōsh tēl zal nā gatshē

I have clustered together, as poems 61–68, vākhs in which Lalla

emphatically shifts the locus of religious life from ritual practice to spiritual

practice: she contrasts the merely formulaic nature of inherited, outward

observance against the transfiguring potentiality of firsthand, inner

experience. In poem 61, Lalla dismisses the impedimenta of ritualism and

points to the guidance of the guru and a deepening immersion in meditative

states as far more reliable ways of achieving oneness with the Divine. As

the seeker gains liberation from the causalities of everyday life and

accumulates fewer and fewer residues of karma or action and reaction, the

possibility of mok

ṣ

a or release from the cycle of rebirth grows ever more

certain.

The spiritual teacher Eknath Easwaran explains the doctrine of karma,

with eloquent brevity, in the Introduction to his translation of the Buddha’s

Dhammapada:

What we think has consequences for the world around us, for it conditions how we act.

All these consequences—for others, for the world, and for ourselves—are our personal

responsibility. Sooner or later, because of the unity of life, they will come back to us. . . .

Karma means something done, whether as cause or effect. Actions in harmony with

dharma bring good karma and add to health and happiness. Selfish actions, at odds with

the rest of life, bring unfavourable karma and pain. In this view, no divine agency is

needed to punish or reward us; we punish and reward ourselves. This was not regarded as

a tenet of religion but as a law of nature, as universal as the law of gravity. . . . Unpaid

karmic debts and unfulfilled desires do not vanish when the physical body dies. They are

forces which remain in the universe, to quicken life again at the moment of conception

when conditions are right for past karma to be fulfilled. (1987, 13–14)

62. G: 42 | K: 70

gagan tsay bhū-tal tsay

Since the Divine pervades all things, whether at the grand scale of the

universe with all its elements or the intimate scale of the tray of offerings

arranged for the pūjā or formal act of worship, what can the true devotee

offer the Divine that It does not already contain?

63. G: 33 | K: 71

dwādashānta-mandal yěs dēwas thajī

The Unstruck Sound is the anāhata nāda, the deep sound of the universe,

the silence that lies beyond understanding and is serenity and perfection.

The focused recitation of the primal syllable Om is traditionally thought to

be a key to the Unstruck Sound. As practitioners know, the syllable Om is

treated as a sequence of four sounds when recited, beginning with ‘A’,

passing through ‘U’, gliding across the hummed ‘M’ and culminating in a

threshold between sound and silence, which marks the fourth sound, the

sound not produced by any event or stimulus, the sound of the Void: the

anāhata nāda.

In Yogic practice, anāhata also refers to the fourth of the seven chakras

or centres of psychic and life-breath energy within the body; it is believed

to be located on the spine, directly behind the heart, and governs emotional

life. This chakra is closely related to the seventh and highest chakra, the

sahasrāra or nectar moon, whose physical site in the anterior fontanelle of

the brain is denoted by Lalla as dwādaśanta-mandal, known in the Sanskrit

technical literature of Yoga as the brahma-randra. This is regarded by

practitioners as the place in the body where the Shiva-principle resides,

which is why Lalla’s yogi-protagonist knows ‘the crown is the temple of

Self’. Having achieved identity with the Divine, the questor can hardly

worship himself: he has passed beyond the gestures of worship and

supplication, and grasped the secret of the paradoxical-seeming Sanskrit

mystical utterance, ‘na devo devam archayet’ or ‘None but a god may truly

worship a god.’

64. G: 58 | K: 139

yih yih karm korum suh artsun

In the condition of sahaja or sahaz, Lalla asserts, the true devotee becomes

permeated with the Shiva-principle. In that expanded state of being and

consciousness, every gesture and word expresses the presence of the

Divine.

65. G: 63 | K: 62

jñāna-mārg chěy hāka-wörü

The image of the garden recurs several times in Lalla’s poetry, as a space to

be protected and nurtured, a site of discovery, transformation or ecstasy. In

poem 68, she celebrates the soul’s jasmine garden; in poem 69, she speaks

of the heart’s narcissus garden; in poem 83, she employs saffron gardens as

her setting. The action of poem 65 takes place in a hāka-wörü or vegetable

garden, such as is found even today in the Valley of Kashmir. Unusually,

though, its cultivator has allowed goats to enter and graze. This garden of

knowledge is the scene of a purification of the self from its accumulated

karma: the vegetables are the residues of acts from previous lives that are

carried forward into the present life; the goats are embodiments of those

past acts.

When penned in by a hedge erected by weaving together spiritual and

ethical disciplines, the goats of karma must confine themselves to feeding

on what they find there. This is a metaphor for the practice of perfection of

thought, feeling and effort that gradually eliminates all karma. The

vegetables are eaten, the goats are killed, and the self gains the knowledge

of liberation and is released from its karmic obligations. Reflecting the

differences of style, stance and preoccupation within the LD corpus—the

varying emphases of various contributors in different periods, in my view—

poem 65, like poem 20, uses the metaphor of the animal sacrifice to

articulate poetic and spiritual truths, in contrast to poem 59, which decries

the ritual practice.

The term that Lalla uses to refer to the sacrificial animals is of special

interest: lāmā-chakra-poshu, beasts bound for the circle of the mother

goddesses. The Kashmiri lāmā is identical with the Sanskrit mātrikā or

‘little mother’, the personification of the female energies or śaktis of the

principal divinities. Often worshipped in a group or circle of seven, known

as the sapta-mātrikās, they were popular deities of fertility and abundance.

66. G: 39 | K: 68

kusu pushu ta k

ssa pushöñī

67. G: 40 | K: 69

Man pushu töy yitsh pushöñī

In these companion vākhs, structured as question and answer, we are taken

into the heart of Lalla’s spiritual practice, which transcends all ordinary

ritual and performance. Poem 66 is spoken in the voice of a yaja-māna, the

patron of a ritual ceremony, asking a series of questions about the

preparations for such a ceremony, from the point of view of conventional

worship. He fusses over its details and the standing of its officiants. Poem

67 responds in a manner that bypasses this level altogether, rephrasing the

act of worship at a far more spiritually advanced plane. The garland-maker

turns out to be the mind; his wife the desire for bliss; the flowers they will

offer are those of adoration; the water of the holy aspersion is nectar from

the sahasrāra; and the chant is the chant of silence, the a-japa japa, the

‘sō-’ham’ whose significance has been explained in the note to poem 60.

On the Tantric path, the seeker graduates through four stages of

sophistication: the entry level involves the use of offerings, flowers and

ritual diagrams, homa-pūjā; the next level involves the recitation of

formulae of praise, japa-stuti; the third level is based on the mental

retention of a chosen inner image, dhyāna-dhāranā; and the highest plane is

that of sahaja-avasthā, or sahai in Kashmiri, when the inborn divine nature

has been fully realised and the seeker needs no props or aids to

concentration. As the Kulārnava Tantra puts it: ‘To-act-not [a-kriyā] is the

highest form of worship [pūjā]; To-keep-silence [a-japa] is the highest

recitation; Not-to-think is the highest meditation [dhyāna]; absence of

desire is supreme fulfilment’ (Arthur Avalon and Tārānātha Vidyāratna’s

1916 translation, quoted in Zimmer 1984, 224–25).

68. G: 68 | K: 131

Lal bōh tsāyěs s

man-bāga-baras

Poem 68 is one of the most beautiful of Lalla’s vākhs, as sensuously

evocative as it is charged with an ecstatic devotionalism that does not

surrender meekly to enlightenment but embraces it with wild passion. The

word sōman could mean, as in poem 6, one’s own mind; or it could be read

as the identically pronounced Persian word for jasmine. Following

Grierson, I am delighted to retain both meanings in my rendering, so that

the poem opens with Lalla entering her ‘soul’s jasmine garden’, an image

that conveys both visuality and fragrance. What she bears witness to, within

herself, is the most exalted experience cherished by the Tantric philosophy,

the overcoming of all binaries and the ascension into a state of

transcendence: metaphorically embodied by Shiva and Shakti intertwined in

sexual union. Overwhelmed by this vision, Lalla passes beyond living and

dying, and throws herself into the lake of nectar, the reservoir of

immortality, the amrěta-saras.

This divine coupling, which is the most sacred symbolic image of Tantra,

has arguably found exquisite iconic expression in the extraordinary yab-

yum images of the esoteric Tantrayāna Buddhism of the eighth to the

twelfth centuries, a religious system profoundly influenced by Śaivite

Tantra. We think, at once, of the Bodhisattvas Mahāsukha, Vajradhara and

Akṣobhya, represented in coition with their respective śaktis or Tārās. As

Zimmer (1984, 201) writes:

The Divine Essence, which is both Being, eternally at rest, and Motion, constantly at

play, exists here, fixed in totally compelling, immobile form, beyond the oscillating

shimmer of some time-bound gesture and beyond the transitoriness of the moment; it

lives here in a pose of love, in the face of which all things bound to time and space—the

onrushing, crashing breakers of desire and the prolonged drifting, gradual ebbing of bliss

—are in our beclouded consciousness but fleeting reflections.

69. K. Pr: 56

dilakis bāgas dūrü kar gösil

As S.S. Toshkhani has observed (see the note to poems 17 and 18 above),

poem 69 is a quatrain composed or rephrased by a certain Azizullah Khan

in the early nineteenth century. In consonance with my argument

concerning the LD corpus as a multi-user domain built up by various,

largely anonymous contributors over the centuries, I would prefer to retain

the poem while indicating its provenance, with no attempt to source it back

into the fourteenth century. Certainly, the office of the tehsīldār or tax-

collector did not exist in the village economy of the historical Lalla’s time.

That said, the poem presents a moving portrait of the questor as patient

gardener, pruning away the weeds of negative feeling from the heart,

knowing that the narcissus of insight will blossom; meanwhile, Death

awaits his moment, ready to press the accounts of karma upon the spirit that

has barely shaken off the demands of the body.

70. G: 84 | K: 118

yih kyāh ösith yih kyuthu rang gōm

cang gōm tsa

ṭ

ith hudahudañěy dagay

71. G: 85

yih kyāh ösith yih kyuthu rang gōm

běrongu karith gōm laga kami shā

ṭ

hay

Companion vākhs, poems 70 and 71 open with an identical first line, which

I have rendered as ‘I can’t believe this happened to me!’ Grierson, reporting

that the meaning of some of the key words appeared to have been lost over

the passage of time, professes a surprising bafflement: ‘These are two of

Lalla’s hard sayings which are unintelligible at the present day, although

there is no dispute as to the text’ (1920, 99). One of the words that troubled

him in poem 70 is hudahudañěy, in the second line; Professor Jayalal Kaul

suggested that this was a reference to the hudhud or hoopoe. I find this

suggestion both appealing and convincing, and have based my

interpretation on it.

The hoopoe, distinguished by its brown crest and the long digger beak

with which it taps at trees or the ground, is the mystical guide and leader of

the group of birds who set out to meet the Simorgh, the King of Birds, in

the Sufi master Farid ud-din Attar’s beautiful allegorical poem, Mantiq at-

Tair (‘The Conference of the Birds’, 1177 CE ). Only thirty of the birds

survive the arduous journey, and at its end, find only their reflections in a

lake. They realise that they have themselves become the Simorgh, a Persian

word that yields up the meaning of si-morgh, ‘thirty birds’:

Their souls rose free of all they’d been before;

The past and all its actions were no more.

Their life came from that close, insistent sun

And in its vivid rays they shone as one.

There in the Simorgh’s radiant face they saw

Themselves, the Simorgh of the world—with awe

They gazed, and dared at last to comprehend

They were the Simorgh and the journey’s end.

(ATTAR 1984, 219)

This Sufi allegory of the self’s discovery of its unity with the Divine, while

heterodox from a strictly Islamic point of view, is analogous to the Kashmir

Śaivite approach, and may offer evidence of the confluences of ideas that

took place along the Silk Route and its byways, which linked present-day

China, Tibet, Kashmir, Afghanistan, Iran and Iraq, among other regions.

In poem 70, Lalla exclaims that a hoopoe has cut her claws off with his

beak, which may indicate an experience of ‘thunderclap enlightenment’

induced by sudden insight or the poetics of shock, somewhat in the nature

of a Zen satori. The truth of all her dreams strikes her in a sentence, but this

enlightenment also creates a complex sense of being isolated and cut adrift

in the cosmos, here symbolised by a lake. In poem 71, she seems to lament

a topsy-turvy life, characterised by the mismanagement of choices, which

she must set right by achieving fine-tuned insight into the true nature of the

self.

72. G: 46 | K: 84

asi p

ndi z

si zāmi

As she does in poem 1, Lalla reminds the ascetic, who attempts to store up

merit by visiting one shrine and pilgrimage centre after another, that the

Divine is neither outside nor far away, but within. She administers this

insight through a series of physical, viscerally intimate images: the Divine

is not merely a Doppelgänger to the self, but laughs, sneezes, yawns and

coughs for the self, as the self; and indeed, while performing all these

clumsy variations on the practice of Yogic exhalation, is the self/Self. The

slash between the two is eliminated when Lalla suggests the simple civility

of recognition.

73. G: 9 | K: 85

bān golu töy prakāsh āv zūnē

The human body is a microcosm of the universe, in Yogic theory.

Accordingly, as we have seen in the note to poem 54, the sun and moon

mark the base and pinnacle, respectively, of the sushumnanā

ḍ

i, the seven-

chakra channel that is mapped onto the spine, and along which the body’s

psychic and life-breath energy must be aligned in Yogic practice. The sun,

or mūlādhāra chakra, is situated in the abdominal region; and the moon, or

sahasrāra chakra, in the brain region. In states of intense contemplative

absorption, when the chakras have been fully activated and the ku

ṇḍ

alinī

energy has been awakened, the awareness of the centres vanishes and only

the faculty of thought remains. In yet deeper meditative states, from the

Kashmir Śaiva point of view, thought with all its conceptual distinctions is

also left behind, and all cognitive and affective powers are absorbed into the

energy field of the Supreme. With consciousness itself re-absorbed into the

Shiva-principle, the universe melts back into the Supreme, and the elements

become emptied of their reality.

74. G: 11 | K: 89

tanthar gali töy manthar m

tsě

75. G: 30 | K: 90

lūb mārun sahaz větsārun

76. G: 69 | K: 91

tsitta-turogu wagi hěth ro

ṭ

Poems 74, 75 and 76 form a group of vākhs, sharing the same closing line:

shüñěs shüñāh mīlith gauv, ‘A void mingles with the Void.’ To the Kashmir

Śaivite, the world of appearances is not a counterfeit reality so much as it is

the play or dream of the Divine, an expression of Shiva’s desire to create

form and motion as a counterpoint to formlessness and stillness: the aim of

true knowledge is to understand how the universe extends from its Source,

and is immersed back into it. The Void connotes, simultaneously, an

absolute emptying-out of particularities as well as an unimaginable

abundance of potentialities.

In poem 74, Lalla traces a trajectory of gradual re-absorption by which

the world-as-manifestation is drawn back into the Supreme. The locus of

knowledge shifts inexorably from the scribal to the oral to thought, and

finally, to that space of recognition in which the Divine awakes from the

dream of the universe and recognises its own transcendence. The same

drama of awakening is phrased more directly as counsel in poem 75, and

more lyrically in poem 76, where Lalla describes a Yogic experience of the

expansion of being and consciousness through a threefold practice: the

concentration of the mind, which is visualised as a high-spirited horse; a

commitment to prā

ṇ

āyāma; and the activation of the sahasrāra chakra.

77. G: 26 | K: 52

tsitta-turogu gagani brama-wônu

Lalla visualises the mind as a powerful stallion capable of enormous feats

of endurance, covering great distances at extraordinary speed, but cautions

that it is capricious and dangerous too, and cannot be trusted without the

bridle of wisdom to control it. Without that bridle, it could destroy the

‘wheels of breath’s chariot’, by which she means prā

ṇ

a and apāna, the two

principal life-breaths within the subtle body. In the Yogic system, the

coordination of these life-breaths into a steady rhythm is an essential step

towards preparing for the experience of enlightenment.

78. G: 14 | K: 122

Shiv guru töy Kēshěv palānas

79. G: 15 | K: 123

Anāhath kha-swarüph shüñālay

Poem 78 poses an indirect question as a prophecy, which poem 79 answers

or fulfils. The trinity of Shiva, Vishnu and Brahma are distributed within an

equestrian metaphor that seems, at first glance, oddly festive. Shiva, here to

be understood not as the Supreme but as a specific manifestation of the

Supreme, the Re-maker of Worlds, is the horse, symbolising the route to

enlightenment. Vishnu, as Preserver, is at the saddle, ready to take that

route. Brahma, as demiurge Creator, is jubilant at the stirrup, eager to be off

and away. But the ride will not commence until the yogi decides which god

shall mount the horse.

Poem 79 articulates the yogi’s apocalyptic vision of the Self rising within

the self. Here we have Shiva as the Supreme Being, who strikes the deep

sound of the universe (explained in the note to poem 63), whose body is

space, whose home is the transcendental Void, who is not constrained by

any conventional marker of identity. He is ‘both Source and Sound’, a

reference to the Kashmir Śaiva model of the Supreme residing within an

individual’s subtle body, as a bindu or intense dot of light, surrounded by

the coiled parā-śakti, or supreme energy. In the first stage of enlightenment,

when immersed deep in meditation, the yogi receives a blessed vision of the

bindu (in my rendition, Source). This, in turn, triggers off the parā-śakti,

which awakens with a primal cry (in my rendition, Sound).

From the perspective of the history of technology, India did not possess

the stirrup until it was introduced into the northwest during the first Turkic

raids led by Altagin and Sabuktagin in the late tenth and early eleventh

centuries, its use then diffusing gradually through the subcontinent.

80. G: 28 | K: 33

yěwa türü tsali tim ambar hětā

81. G: 27 | K: 30

khěth gan

ḍ

ith shěmi nā mānas

82. K: 27

khěna khěna karān kun no vātakh

In these three poems, with their vivid and compelling images, Lalla warns

against the excesses of sensual gratification, the enslavement of the higher

nature by the appetites. In poem 80, proposing a moderate way of life, she

reduces the body to its essential mortality, envisioning it as merely

‘pickings for jungle crows’. In poem 81, she paints Death and Desire as

twin tempters, terrible behind their winning ways. And in poem 82, she

satirises both the obsession with the pleasures of the table as well as the

self-righteous cultivation of ascetic virtuosity, underlining the importance of

balance.

83. G: 88 | K: 35

atha ma-bā trāwun khar-bā!

The ass that may ravage one’s neighbours’ saffron gardens, in poem 83, is

the mind. It must be placed under the control of spiritual and ethical

disciplines by the higher nature, Lalla teaches, before it gives in to whim or

caprice and expresses itself in destructive, self-defeating ways. Since

saffron is a prized, expensive commodity, the saffron gardens are sacrosanct

precincts, and their violation could invite severe penalties. The poem ends

with a suitably harsh image of responsibility for one’s own karma. While

many traditional societies, in Asia as in Europe, permitted men of standing

to offer proxies to receive punishment on their behalf when sentenced, Lalla

points out that the individual self cannot hope to pass on the karmic burden

of its accumulated actions to a surrogate conscripted for the task.

The cadence of poem 83, as of poem 106, is calibrated to a taut, percussive

music. In the original Kashmiri, poem 83 reads:

atha ma-bā trāwun khar-bā!

lūka-hünzü k

ng-wörü khěyiy

tati kus-bā dāriy thar-bā!

yěti nanis kartal pěyiy

84. G: 71 | K: 37

Mārukh māra-būth kām krūd lūb

85. G: 43 | K: 36

yemi lūb manmath mad tsūr môrun

In these two closely related poems, Lalla exhorts the aspirant on the

spiritual path to overcome the negative emotions that occupy the mind and

eclipse the will to perfection. Poem 84 suggests a contemplative discipline

that permits the aspirant to disarm such negative emotions by analysing

them, releasing the energy they knot up, and emptying them of their psychic

influence and karmic weight, so that they vanish like the phantoms they are.

Poem 85 carries this logic further, showing that the elimination of all

negative psychic contents eventually opens up a course leading to the True

Lord or sahaz Yīshwar in Lalla’s phrase. At the same time, the aspirant

realises that the phenomenal world, manifested by the Supreme as a

temporary reality, is predestined for negation and transcendence, ‘made of

ash’.

86. G: 23 | K: 41

manas

ạ

y mān bhawa-saras

Lalla’s conception, in this poem, of the mind as the ocean of life is both

poetically vibrant and philosophically rich. By the ‘ocean of life’, I would

understand the experiences, memories, sensations, emotional investments,

reflexes and propensities that an individual accumulates in the course of

life; or, from the Indic perspective, many lives. In my view, Lalla inherits

this conception from the philosophers of the Yogācāra school of Mahāyāna

Buddhism (second to the fifth centuries CE), who first gave it powerful

elaboration. It is no coincidence that Yogācāra was born and flourished in

Gandhara and Kashmir, and has very clearly left its impress on later

philosophical advances made by thinkers and practitioners in those regions.

The Yogācārins proposed the citta-mātra or ‘mind-only’ doctrine, widely

misunderstood to represent a crudely solipsistic view that the world is

merely the creation of mind. On the contrary, as the Buddhist scholar

Andrew Skilton (1994, 123) observes, the Yogācārins argued

not 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 on our mind. The proposition

is that we can only know or experience things with our mind. Every 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.

Thus the Yogācārins developed a sophisticated psychology, positing the

existence of the ālaya-vijñāna or storehouse consciousness, which underlay

several other strata of consciousness, associated with the senses and the

mind. The ālaya-vijñāna, which is present in every individual, plays a

pivotal role in Yogācāra spiritual practice: theYogācārin must contemplate

the turbulent contents of this storehouse, confronting and reflecting upon

them, fully grasping their influence on his conscious thoughts and actions,

and gradually but surely eliminating them.

This practice is conveyed in Lalla’s awareness that the mind as ocean of

life—or, as we may say, the ālaya-vijñāna—can deliver up ‘fire-harpoons

that stick in the flesh’, but which, when weighed, ‘weigh nothing’. In the

third line of poem 86, I meld two alternative readings of a key image, while

leaving the sense of the utterance intact: nārücü ch

kh, meaning ‘wounds

made by a fishing-spear’; or nāratsi-ch

kh, meaning ‘wounds caused by

fire’. The persistence of the Yogācāra model is also manifest in poem 65,

where Lalla proposes the metaphor of the animals grazing in the vegetable

garden, awaiting sacrifice.

87. G: 12 | K: 48

hěth karith rājy phēri nā

Lalla begins with the portrait of an individual trapped in conflicting desires;

with her empathetic insight into human nature, she notes that the desire for

fame as a renouncer is as negative a mental state as the desire for

dominance and control. Freedom from desire is the only route to

immortality: she closes with lines in praise of the jīvan-mukta, the exemplar

extolled by Abhinavagupta and other Kashmir Śaivite masters, one whose

liberation from desire has emancipated him, even as he lives, from the cycle

of rebirth. Like Shiva, he has passed beyond the binaries of subjective and

objective, transcendent and immanent, pleasure and pain: he is

simultaneously yogi and bhōgi, renouncer and enjoyer, and goes through

life with a unique and luminous lightness.

88. G: 61 | K: 49

yuhu yih karm kara pětarun pānas

Lalla is inspired, here, by the Bhagavad Gita’s key ethical teaching: that of

‘nishkāma karma’, action undertaken in the spirit of selfperfection and

without thought of reward. With no hoard of anticipation, frustration,

elation and restlessness to carry, the seeker performs his or her actions in a

condition of spiritual elegance, of beatitude.

89. G: 70 | K: 53

tsěth amara-pathi thövizi

As a wandering teacher, it is not improbable that Lalla had a small circle of

disciples or that she taught transient acolytes. In this context, poem 89 may

have served her as a teaching text—intended to guide the aspirant towards

the practice of confronting the most disquieting and disruptive contents of

the mind, which are usually the first to surface when one embarks on a

course of silent meditation. The deliberate strategy of infantilising these

monster thoughts would help neutralise them while the aspirant cultivates

the meditative energy to gather his or her psychic resources into coherence.

90. K: 28

tsālun chu vuzmal ta tra

ṭ

Most of Lalla’s vakhs are autobiographical testaments of the questor’s

journey, with its agonies and its ecstasies; but she rarely permits herself to

dwell on the personal sufferings she experienced before liberating herself

from the world of householders and crossing over to the religious life. Poem

90 is perhaps one of the few utterances in the LD corpus that are personal in

this sense, and it speaks of what she endured while making this transition:

resilience is what she needed, and received as grace from the Divine, when

she submitted herself willingly to the rigours of the quest. To ‘stand in the

path of lightning’ is to yield yourself receptive to enlightenment and the

sometimes violent and certainly irreversible transformation of

consciousness it generates. To ‘walk when darkness falls at noon’ is surely

a metaphor for the paradoxical and liminal experiences that many mystics

report during their initiation. To ‘grind yourself fine in the turning mill’ is to

refine yourself through deepening spiritual practice.

91. K: 42

rut ta krut soruy pazěm

Lalla speaks here in the voice of equanimity, embodying the Bhagavad

Gita’s exemplar of the stitha-prajña: one who is unshakeably anchored in

knowledge. This corresponds to the Buddhist ideal of upek

ṣ

a (Pali

upekkha), which is one of the four brahma-vihāras or abodes of perfection

—states of being-in-the-world and being-towards-the-world envisioned by

the Buddha as immeasurable expansions of the self into an embrace with all

sentient beings and the universe. The other three states are maitri/metta,

loving-kindness; karu

ṇ

ā, compassion; and muditā, the gift of feeling joy in

the joy of others (Skilton 1994, 35).

When Lalla sings, ‘I don’t hear with my ears, I don’t see with my eyes’,

she signals the suprasensory awareness that the yogi gains access to,

through the sustained practice of pratyāhāra, mentioned earlier in the note

to poem 51. As Swami Niranjanananda Saraswati of the Bihar School of

Yoga explains: ‘What do we do in this practice? First we become aware of

the senses. Later on, we become aware of the thought process, and finally,

we try to disconnect the senses and the thought process by observing them

and eventually stopping their activity’ (1995, 166). The ‘jewel-lamp’ or

ratnadīp that ‘burns bright even in a rampaging wind’ is the Self awakened

within the individual, the Shiva-principle that, once ignited, cannot be

extinguished. This image is analogous to that of the precious jewel held

within the lotus in Tantrayāna Buddhist usage: the Bodhi-citta or will-to-

enlightenment in the body, the Buddha-principle in the cosmos,

memorialised in the cherished Tibetan chant, Om ma

ṇ

ī padmē hum.

92. G: 21 | K: 38

gāl g

ḍ

iněm bōl p

riněm

93. G: 18 | K: 39

ösā bōl p

riněm sāsā

94. G: 20 | K: 40

mū

ḍ

zönith pashith ta kôru

‘The adept of Kulācāra is a yogi, and once he reaches his goal of suprapolar

existence, he becomes an irritation, a mockery, an enigma to a world

continuing in differentiation and forms,’ notes Heinrich Zimmer (1984,

219). Imagine how much worse the situation would be for a yogini. As a

woman who had renounced society and walked away from an oppressive

marriage, leaving behind the circumscribed role of wife, daughter and

daughter-in-law, and adopting the life of the parivrājikā, the peripatetic

spiritual seeker, Lalla attracted much derision. Many legends are current

about the daily insults she faced.

In these three poems, Lalla answers her detractors. Her greatest

protection is her self-assurance, her conviction that she has chosen the path

best suited for her temperament and orientation. Accordingly, in poem 92,

she declares herself immune to insults and curses; even if her detractors

were to see the error of their ways and come to offer her ‘soul-flowers’, she

smiles, this would mean nothing to her. A stitha-prajña and a jīvan-mukta,

she remains indifferent equally to slander and to praise, to pleasure and to

pain, for she is beyond them; as she says in poem 93, ‘I belong to Shiva.’

The realised soul is Shiva’s mirror; the reference in the last two lines of the

poem is to the highly polished metal mirrors of the fourteenth century, best

cleaned with ashes.

And in poem 94, Lalla offers the aspirant a quick guide to survival,

suggesting the strategy of maintaining an outward show of conformity, or

even the deliberate cultivation of an eccentric or harmless personality. Such

camouflage—which would assuage the suspicions or invite the scornful pity

of the orthodox—gives the aspirant the necessary respite to conduct his or

her spiritual experiments.

95. G: 94 | K: 21

ran wonunam kunuy watsun

Poem 95 is the vākh whose last line—in the original, 'taway mě hyotum

nangay natsun’—has launched an infamous flotilla of writings about Lalla’s

supposed espousal of nudity. These range from the sensational portraits of

‘Kashmir’s naked saint’ put about by well-meaning New Agers, to the

equally solemn ripostes of outraged commentators who claim purely

metaphorical significance for the nakedness that Lalla celebrates here, and

explain away the reference to dancing as merely a synonym for ‘being’ or

‘walking’. For one party, Lalla is the wild woman who defies the most basic

norms of a patriarchal society; for the other, she is the chaste Brahmin

woman, apparently mindful of the sensitivities of future generations even

while she goes about demolishing various canonical strictures.

Both parties in this contention overlook that Lalla elsewhere mentions

her skirt (poem 45) and a robe (poem 146), indicating reasonable

acquaintance with other sartorial choices. On a more serious note, the poem

is centred on the mandate of inwardness: at the heart of inwardness, for the

yogi or yogini, is Shiva. As Alain Danielou observes, ‘All the teachings of

yoga and the process of liberation are witnessed by the yogi in the cavern of

his heart as the form of Maheśvara’ (1991, 202).

To become identical with Shiva is to become indifferent to one’s outward

form, one’s skin and clothes; significantly, one of Shiva’s iconographical

attributes is that he is dig-ambara, sky-clad, naked. Poem 95 thus yields up

several levels of meaning. It could be read to mean that, in her ecstatic state

of communion with the Divine, Lalla has cast away the construct of her

identity as an individual separate from the Supreme, as exemplified by her

clothes. It could also be read to mean that the yogini who has realised Shiva

has no need of the costume of social sanction or conditional protection: she

is liberated from the codes of patriarchal authority that determine and

constrain her social behaviour. In this, Lalla’s stance is analogous to that of

the twelfth-century Vīraśaiva woman saint-poet from Karnataka,

Mahādēviyakka, who cast off her clothes and went about mantled only by

her tresses (see Ramanujan 1973, 1 12).

96. G: 62 | K: 22

rājěs böji yěmi kartal työji

Lalla sets up an array of desires here, with the necessary prerequisites that

correspond to them. She begins with political power, which can be secured

by military force, and goes on to religious merit, which can be acquired

through penance and the performance of conventional good works. But true

enlightenment, Lalla argues, can result only from the instruction of the

guru, who directs the seeker towards knowledge of his or her karmic

profile, and indeed of the Self.

97. G: 72 | K: 29

tsala-tsitta! w

ndas bhayě mō bar

In an intriguing reversal of the usual division of attributes, Lalla credits the

mind, usually the stable seat of reason, with prompting restlessness and fear

in the heart, usually the mercurial centre of emotion. In the oblique rhetoric

of poem 97, the true addressee is not the mind but the Divine, who is

reminded of the self’s hunger for transcendence, its need to be carried

across the ocean of life.

98. G: 51 | K: 77

zanañě zāyāy r

ti töy k

tiy

99. G: 52 | K: 78

say shēl pī

ṭ

his ta pa

ṭ

100. G: 53 | K: 79

rav mata thali-thali töpitan

101. G: 54 | K: 81

yihay matru-rūpi pay diyē

102. G: 80

zānahö nā

ḍ

i-dal mana ra

ṭ

ith

Poems 98, 99, 100, 101 and 102 form a group of vākhs, linked by their

closing line: Shiv chuy krū

ṭ

hu ta tsēn w

padēsh, here translated as ‘But

Shiva can play hard to get: hold on to that message.’ In each of these five

poems, Lalla invites the listener or reader to attend to a brief exposition of

this theme. Each poem serves as a caveat, it would appear, to the aspirant

who imagines that the quest will inevitably culminate in enlightenment,

oblivious to the misadventures, errors, failures and disappointments that

lurk along the route.

Poem 98 dwells on the arduousness of the journey towards

enlightenment, the series of births over which it is staged; the beauty of the

newborn is contrasted with the patience required to wait at the door of

transcendence, the compression of the poem leaving it to us to imagine the

hopes, anxieties, dreams and frustrations of the years between the two

events, recurring over many lives. Poem 99 is crafted around the ubiquity of

stone and the diverse material and symbolic valencies it can bear: in the

walls of the temple, as flagstones on the road, as the basis of earth and

territory, as the grinder in the mill. Similarly, Shiva too is everywhere and

appears in diverse manifestations, but cannot be grasped without a deep

commitment to the contemplative life.

In poem 100, Lalla speaks of the impartial manner in which the sun and

water make no distinction between one country and another, one house and

another; but Shiva, she implies, does make distinctions. At first glance, this

may seem surprising, since Shiva is universal, suprapolar and beyond all

binaries. The esoteric meaning of the vākh is that knowledge of the sahaja

or sahaz, while theoretically available to all who seek it as the ground

nature of their being, can only be attained by those who apprentice

themselves to the wisdom traditions, who apply themselves to mastering the

techniques of breath control and right mindfulness.

Poem 101 sits oddly in the mouth of a woman mystic and poet, since it

rehearses a schedule of prescribed roles for a woman as mother, wife and

temptress, collectively representing a life cycle in the course of which the

self is nurtured, flourishes, and dies. If the aspirant thinks that the same

inevitability attends the quest, he or she is mistaken: Shiva is not, if we go

along with the rhetoric of this poem, so alien to our post-feminist

sensibilities, as predictable as woman. Given the unpredictability of her

own choices, it seems bizarre that Lalla would deploy such an analogy; on

this count alone, I would speculate that this poem was added to the LD

corpus at some point by an anonymous male contributor.

Lalla uses a mixed allegory in poem 102. She passes rapidly from

expressing the wish to improve her command over prā

ṇ

ayāma by cutting

and binding her breath-streams or nā

ḍ

is, which would allow her to refine

the flow of her vital life-breaths, to wishing she could have crushed pain—

all as prelude to fulfilling the alchemist’s dream, discovering the Elixir of

Life, which is a symbol for the knowledge of the Self here.

Poem 102 draws on the resources of breath control, surgery and alchemy,

all three regarded as the most refined sciences of Lalla’s time and place,

with lineages going back a millennium into the past. These sciences had

been codified by thinkers who enjoyed the patronage of the Kushan rulers.

The Kushan empire, which endured from the first to the fourth centuries

CE, marks a most unfortunately undervalued period in Indian history.

Among its capitals and prominent regions were Purushāpāra (present-day

Peshawar, in Pakistan), Oddiyāna (once a centre of Buddhist learning, today

the vexed and Taliban-brutalised Swat Valley, in Pakistan), and Śrīnagara

(today’s Srinagar, Kashmir).

It was under the Kushans—originally West Central Asian immigrants

who choreographed a confluence of Indian, Greek, Chinese and Persian

cultural energies—that epochal advances were made across a range of fields

and disciplines. To list only a few of these: the Buddha was bodied forth as

a human image for the first time, as well as given a biography by

Aśvaghosa; Mahāyāna Buddhism emerged as a distinct system under the

patronage of the Kushan ruler Kanishka; the deities that we now regard as

definitively Hindu were rendered into iconography for the first time,

including Shiva, Vishnu and Shakti; indeed, Shakti was first introduced into

India, as a naturalised version of the West Asian war goddess Nanaia; and

medicine and surgery made the transition from oral archives to

sophisticated written treatises, in the hands of masters like Charaka and

Jīvaka. All these developments flow into the time horizon of Lal Děd and

have a significant bearing on her own work as well as that of her

contemporaries. As we have seen, Mahāyāna Buddhist philosophy and the

presence of the Mother Goddess through the medium of Tantra underpin

Lalla’s ideas, images and allegories in crucial ways.

103. G: 16 | K: 83

tūri salil kho

ṭ

u töy tūrē

As the action of the sun on ice and snow reveals, water, in all its avatars,

remains essentially water. Lalla employs this metaphor to expound a central

teaching of Kashmir Śaiva philosophy. In this account, all things are

manifestations of the Supreme Consciousness: they are created in the

playful spirit of spanda, the originary vibration by which the Supreme

Consciousness extends Itself into the universe; when the outward phase of

the vibration returns to its source, the differentiated forms of the universe

dissolve back into unity.

104. K: 57

Shiv chuy thali-thali rōzān

Often and widely cited as evidence of Lalla’s indifference to sectarian

distinctions and her embrace of Hinduism as well as Islam, poem 104 is a

manifestly late addition to the LD corpus or a comparatively recent

recasting of earlier material. It does not appear in the Darwēsh—Śāstrī—

Grierson line of transmission, but was included by Professor Jayalal Kaul in

his meticulously framed and authoritative Lal Děd collection, although

Kaul insisted that no categorical assurances could be offered as to the

‘authenticity’ of much extant LD material.

The second line of this poem, mō zān hy

nd ta musalmān, uses the

designations ‘Hindu’ and ‘Muslim’, which were not current during the

historical Lalla’s lifetime. During that period, Hindus were more likely to

be known by their caste membership, and Muslims were known throughout

the subcontinent as ‘Tūrka’ or ‘Tūrushka’, denoting Turki or Turkic, the

ethnicity to which many Muslims who settled in India between the eleventh

and fourteenth centuries belonged. And while the Arabic title of sāhib or

‘Lord’, applied to Shiva in the last line of this poem, offers pleasing

evidence of a cross-fertilisation between languages, it does not necessarily

mark a synthesis of religious ideas.

While the Śaivite questor takes, as his mandate, the establishment of the

seamless identity between seeker and Sought, it would be blasphemous for

the Muslim questor to imagine that the human individual and the Divine

could, at any level, be of the same essence. The Sufis courted the anger of

the orthodox for their suggestions in this latter direction; indeed, the Persian

mystic Mansūr al-Hallāj (c. 858–922) was executed by the Abbasid

Caliphate for daring to declare, ‘Anā l-Haqq’, translatable either as ‘I am

the Truth’ or ‘I am God’, utterances that form the basis of Vedantic spiritual

practice.

That said, the ecumenical sentiment of poem 104 resonates with the

Kashmir Śaivite conviction that the differences between self and other,

appearance and reality, are illusory, since all dualities are pervaded and

supervened by the Shiva-principle. It should also be remarked that the

originally Arabic title of sāhib has been adopted organically into the

ceremonial language of syncretic traditions in India that have drawn both on

Hinduism and Islam, such as the Nanak-panth, universally known as

Sikhism, founded by Guru Nānak Dēv (1469–1539) and codified by the

nine Gurus who succeeded him. The Sikhs had already spread widely

across the subcontinent by the seventeenth century, settling in the Valley of

Kashmir as well. It is not improbable that the language of poem 104 could

reflect the anonymous LD contributor’s acquaintance with Sikh usage. The

chief scripture or ‘Primordial Book’ of Sikhism, for instance, is described

as the Guru Granth Sāhib; this honorific is also applied to the major Sikh

shrines, such as Harmandir Sāhib and Śīśganj Sāhib.

105. K: 82

Shiv chuy zävyul zāl vaharävith

In consonance with the theory of spanda, mentioned in the note to poem

103, the Divine is seen here as a recovery net that spreads out to trap and

trawl back all the manifestations of Itself. Not only does the Divine pervade

the universe but It also permeates the individual self. This vision of

wholeness and re-integration waits to disclose itself to the prepared

consciousness. Prepare your consciousness to receive it in this life, says

Lalla, because it is in the present that such a vision matters the most. Now is

your best chance to transfigure the course of your life. There is no exalted

vision of the Divine in the afterlife, for the Kashmir Śaivite—since the

afterlife, for the unprepared or half-baked consciousness, is merely the next

birth, a return to the fate of standing and waiting for the door of

transcendence to open, as poem 98 puts it.

106. G: 87 | K: 17

niyěm karyōth garbā

This poem shares the same cadence as poem 83, a song-like beat that

quickens our perception of its teaching: the self comes into the world with a

mission from a previous birth, that of continuing the quest for

transcendence; but the memory of this mission weakens and is overwritten

by fresh experiences and new memories, the resolve made in the previous

life vanishes, and only a stern rebuke from a teacher such as Lalla herself

can recall the migrant self to its resolve. To die to the traffic of desire,

dream and sorrow while yet alive, to arrive at the serene state of the jīvan-

mukta, is the ideal to which the seeker launched on the path of Kashmir

Śaivism aspires.

107. K: 54

kus mari tay kasū māran

108. K: 55

r śabdas yus yatsh patsh barē

The sentence of execution that preoccupies these companion poems refers,

not to a physical death, but to the possibility of spiritual suicide. Lalla

makes reference here, clearly, to the backslider who gives up at an early

stage of the journey towards enlightenment and lapses again into worldly

affairs, and the intellectual, emotional and moral variability that these

demand.

In poem 107, having given up the incremental meditation on Shiva’s

name (‘hara hara’ or ‘Shiva! Shiva!’), the backslider runs around the

circuit of home and work, profit and advancement (‘gara gara’ or ‘My

house! My house!’). He thus loses the opportunity for self-overcoming, and

condemns himself to a new lease of servitude to the cycle of rebirth. In

poem 108, Lalla has better news for the backslider, a conditional ‘come

back, all is forgiven’: trust the guru, practise the perfection of mindfulness,

gain mastery over the senses, she says, and you earn your reprieve from the

cycle.

109. G: 5 | K: 133

par töy pān yěmi somu mônu

The fully realised exponent of Kashmir Śaiva philosophy has received the

vision of Shiva, described here, as in poem 60, as sura-guru-nātha, the

‘Teacher who is First among the Gods’. He has savoured the omnipresence

and omnipotence of the Shiva-principle, and understood that the

transcendent and the immanent, the unchanging and the mutable, are

expressions of the same Supreme Being. At the social level, accordingly,

such an enlightened self also renounces the distinctions between self and

other.

110. K: 103

shüñuk mä’ dān kōdum pānas

Lalla’s solitary traversal of the Field of Emptiness, an experience of the

Void in its infinite vacancy of manifestation yet plenitude of possibility,

evidently comes about after a deep immersion in the practice of pratyāhāra,

when the senses are withdrawn from their sense-objects, the reason is

gradually superseded and a range of suprasensory experiences open up.

This has already been spoken of in the notes to poems 51 and 91. The

experience of the Field of Emptiness is identical with that of Lalla’s

arriving at the Field of Light in poem 51. The transcendence of self and the

recognition of its identity with Shiva is the secret that belongs to the

questor, as to every individual, in Kashmir Śaiva theory; yet few even know

that they possess a secret of such magnitude. The awakened consciousness

—purified of karmic residues and luminously replete in its unity with the

Supreme—is the lotus that rises from the marsh of existence, sensory

attachments, and the confusions and mixed motives of an unexamined life.

The lotus rising from a marsh could also be a deeply moving self-portrait:

Lalla as she saw herself, retaining the purity of her vision in an unpromising

social environment.

111. K: 47

parum pōlum ap

ruy purum

Lalla takes a pragmatic view of learning. Having imbibed all that the

scriptures and treatises of Kashmir Śaivism and Yoga had to teach her, she

experimented beyond them, a prepared questor apprenticing herself to

direct experience. As a result of this, she is no mere scriptural expert or

ritual specialist, but an adept, a living master. There is no divergence

between what she teaches and what she practices. Always ready to grapple

robustly with life and its challenges, Lalla has entered the forest of the

spirit, where the seeker must confront her or his deepest terrors and

phantoms, and emerged victorious. She has ‘wrestled with the lion’, which

here symbolises worldly ambition, stripping it of its power to dominate the

individual’s imagination and monopolise her or his energies.

112. K: 127

tan man ga’yas b

h kunuy

113. K: 132

chuy dīvu gartas tu dartī srizakh

Poems 112 and 113 are songs of praise for the Divine.Yet, even in a hymn

of surrender such as poem 112, when Lalla describes the experience of the

clear note of the Divine ringing through her, she retains the freedom of

agency: her being and consciousness amplified far beyond the horizons of

normality, she situates herself in the totality of the expanded universe,

figuratively gaining access to the celestial as well as the infernal regions. In

poem 113, Lalla invokes the Divine as Transcendence: as the ruler of the

universe; as the inspiration behind the five great elements that sustain the

world; as the anāhata nāda, the deep sound of the universe, which is the

silence that opens at the edge of sacred words; and as infinite extension,

beyond the reach of ordinary instruments of measurement.

114. G: 1 | K: 134

abhyösi savikās layě w

thū

115. G: 2 | K: 135

wākh mānas k

l-ak

l nā atē

116. G: 59 | K: 136

tsah nā b

h nā dhyēy nā dhyān

117. G: 93 | K: 138

tsěth nowuy ts

ạ

ndarama nowuy

In the four poems that I have grouped together as 114–17, Lalla describes

and celebrates the state of transcendent awareness, achieved through intense

Yogic practice, when the known and perceptible universe reveals itself as a

subsidiary manifestation of the Supreme. In this state, all normal faculties

are transcended, along with their lexicon of names and forms, mind-

focusing devices and metaphysical concepts.

Poem 114 turns on its second line: gaganas sagun myūlu sami tsra

ṭ

ā.

Literally, this can be rendered as ‘The manifest and qualified universe

merged completely with the sky (or Ether, or the Infinite).’ I have chosen to

focus on the nuance of the seemingly simple onomatopoeic word, tsra

ṭ

ā,

which conveys the sound of water splashing on water, to demonstrate the

recognition of complete identity between the manifest universe and the

Infinite, leading the seeker to the awareness of the Void. In Kashmir Śaiva

thought, however, this recognition does not constitute final enlightenment,

but is a threshold leading to complete absorption in the Supreme. The Void

is an intermediate phase in the process by which the Supreme associates

Itself with Māyā, or cosmic illusion, to manifest Itself in the particularities

that we know as the world we experience. By passing beyond the Void, in

the final stage of Yogic absorption, the seeker reaches awareness of the

Supreme, which Lalla describes as anāmay, purified of all illusion,

illimitable consciousness.

In poem 115, Lalla makes plain that the state of transcendent awareness

is beyond the domain of the discursive and the conceptual: it cannot be

captured in words or mapped in thoughts. My rendering, ‘normal or

Absolute’, represents Lalla’s k

l-ak

l. The word k

l means ‘family’ (from

the Sanskrit kula), and refers to the constellation of the jīva or individual

soul, prak

ṛ

ti or primal matter, space and time, and the five elements of

earth, water, fire, air and ether. These form the basis of normality; that

which transcends these is ak

l, the Absolute. Taken together, the normal

and the Absolute embody all creation, both the manifest and the

Unmanifest. All this is left behind by the yogi in the state of transcendent

awareness. Even Shiva and Shakti are seen to be constructs, provisional

conceptions that are not identical with the Supreme, but only symbols and

indications of it. The Supreme is the Unnameable, the grand surplus that

exhausts all our attempts at naming and form-making, decipherment and

approximation, in Lalla’s teaching.

In poems 114 and 115, as elsewhere in the LD corpus, it is the scholar-

priest, tied to his routines of prayer, scriptural citation and observance, who

receives the brunt of Lalla’s thunderclap counsel.

Lalla continues to contour the state of transcendent awareness in poem

116. She indicates the blurring of the sharp lines separating personal

identities and their interests, and also the dissolution of the separation

between the object of contemplation and the act of contemplation itself.

What the seeker now realises is that the world is the Supreme as associated

with Māyā, ‘the All-Creator, lost in His dreams’. Some remain at this level

of understanding of the Void, but others plunge deeper into enlightenment,

and become fully absorbed into an understanding of Perfection.

The infinitive layun plays a crucial role in poems 114 and 116. It means

both the attainment of beatitude and a dissolution into the cosmos,

Nothingness or Perfection. Here, as in Indic metaphysics and Indian

classical music, the word, with its noun form laya, carries the sense of a

deeply resonant and unceasing rhythm: a structuring and patterning of time

and experience into combinations of movement and pause; a wave of

creation and dissolution from which notes and motifs arise, and into which

they drown only to be re-made. Seemingly outside oneself, laya is suddenly

recognised as resonating inside oneself and, in some sense, having always

resided and resonated inside oneself.

The sense of laya is carried forward in poem 117, which is a celebratory

hymn charged with the presence of pralaya (zalamay in Kashmiri), the

deluge that enacts a cosmic dissolution at the end of every kalpa or cycle of

time and marks the beginning of the next, in Indic cosmology. Lalla

delights in a vision of regeneration, the world enchanted once again,

suffering and delusion cleansed away: the mind, freed of its phantoms, is

new; the moon, whether as activated sahasrāra, earth’s satellite or

ornament in Shiva’s hair, is new. Lalla, evidently recounting the experience

of many past lives and periods, has seen the cosmic ocean renewed epoch

after epoch. These epic-scale regenerations are reflected in Lalla’s own

transfiguration, through the rigorous self-purification of Yogic practice.

118. G: 24 | K: 64

shīl ta mān chuy pôñu kranjě

119. G: 38 | K: 113

zal thamawun hutawah taranāwun

120. K: 63

shishiras vuth kus ra

ṭ

121. G: 34 | K: 72

okuy ō

ṁ

-kār yěs nābi darē

In the four poems sequenced here as 118–21, Lalla develops a portrait of

the true yogi or yogini. She meditates on sham and substance, contrasting

the easily acquired reputation of the showman with the genuine worth of the

contemplative. In poem 118, she lays out a series of impossible conditions

—reputation is water in a fisherwoman’s leaky basket—and asks around for

someone who can perform superhuman feats not met with outside fantasy

literature, as a possible candidate for belief in the vanitas of reputation.

In poem 119, Lalla dismisses the miracle-mongering of self-styled

spiritual adepts who remain trapped at the level of demonstrating their

vibhūtis or siddhis—the paraphysical powers that the yogi or yogini

acquires as incidental effects during the process of attaining prajñālōka, the

light of perfect knowledge—in order to attract and hold the attention of the

swelling ranks of their devotees. Lalla disposes of such performances

summarily, as sakolu kappa

ṭ

a-tsarith, blatant charlatanry.

When poem 120 begins, we suspect that Lalla is about to launch another

denunciation of mountebanks parading as saints, but her tropes of

impossibility are not satirically intended or purely rhetorical this time. She

proposes the yogi, one who has conquered his senses, as one who can also

command the elements, the seasons and the cycle of day and night,

metaphorically indicating his anchorage in the Self and his consequent

indifference to all rhythms of change. Poem 121 offers a portrait of the

realised yogi, whose breath, contained and amplified within his body

through the discipline of kumbhaka or the ‘jar exercise’, prepares him for

the demanding act of focusing, body and soul, on the Supreme. A yogi at

this stage of accomplishment no longer chants consciously: his chanting of

the supremely powerful mystic syllable Om has achieved constancy, and

emanates from the centre of the body’s life-force, which is known in Yoga

as the kanda or bulb and is situated beneath the navel. Since he is animated

by the puissance of Om, the mantra of mantras, he has no need for any other

incantations.

122. G: 55 | K: 109

kanděv gēh tězi kanděv wan-wās

123. G: 64 | K: 110

kalan kāla-zöli yidaway tsě golu

124. G: 32 | K: 112

kēh chiy nēndri-h

tiy wudiy

125. G: 6 | K: 119

tsidānandas jñāna-prakāshěs

In the four vākhs arranged here as poems 122–25, Lalla addresses herself to

the classic question of choice that many aspirants must make: Should they

take up their responsibilities in the world of householders, or should they

renounce society and retreat to the forest, the hermitage, the monastery?

Lalla suggests that we should attend, not to one option over the other, but to

the cultivation of mindfulness and steadfast dedication of purpose in

whatever path we choose to take through life. In poem 122, she notes that

the restless individual could escape from home or from the hermitage, since

it is not the external situation but the inner temperament that prompts such

impulsive, erratic action: ‘No orchard bears fruit for the barren mind.’

Similarly, in poem 123, she makes no distinction between hermit and

householder. You are as good as the accuracy and intensity of your

knowledge: what matters is whether you have ‘dissolved your desires in the

river of time’. If you have, you will be graced with transcendent awareness,

the vision of the Self as perfection.

A formal choice is no guarantee of the fulfilment of the wish implicit in

that choice, as Lalla demonstrates in poem 124, and yet redemption lurks in

the most unlikely circumstances. There are those who can be fully aware

even in their sleep, there are those who sleepwalk open-eyed through life,

captives of illusion and delusion. Then there are those who cannot wash

their sins away even by bathing in holy ponds; and those who lead busy

lives in the world of affairs and anxieties, yet their souls remain untouched

and radiantly clear. This last class of people are the jīvan-muktas, and Lalla

praises them in the first two lines of poem 125: ‘Those who glow with the

light of the Self/are freed from life even while they live.’ As the Kulārnava

Tantra expounds:

The yogi enjoys sensual pleasures in order to help mankind, not out of desire; he is at

play upon the earth, delighting all men, [that is how he conceals his true nature]. . . . the

yogi is all-scorching like the sun, all-consuming like the fire; he enjoys all pleasures and

yet he remains without blot or blemish. He touches everything as does the wind; he

permeates all things as does the air. (quoted in Zimmer 1984, 219)

In sharp contrast to the realised ones, however, are the fools—who continue

to burden themselves with ill-considered actions and their karmic residues,

trapping themselves ever more securely in the ‘tangled net of the world’.

The metaphor of the world as a jāla or net, in which all beings are caught, is

one that recurs in the poems, songs and teaching stories of India’s wisdom

traditions. Likewise, the figure of the fool appears repeatedly in the same

texts, as a cautionary tale about the necessary limits that a healing wisdom

must set for itself.

We could speculate that these poems were answers originally given by

Lalla—possibly as improvised, spontaneous replies that were later shaped

into scribal form—to questioners who came to her for advice on the shape

and direction of their lives.

126. K: 18

ḍ

ās gyānac kath nō vanizē

127. K: 19

dachinis

bras zāym zānaha

In poems 126 and 127, as in poems 40 and 41, Lalla warns against the error

of throwing wisdom away on one unprepared to receive it. Her metaphors

are drawn from everyday life: sugar for an ass, which has no taste for it; the

shifting sands of the riverbank or the riverbed; oil poured on cattle fodder;

the southwest monsoon; and the patience of the physician.

128. K: 45

avětsāri pothěn chihō māli parān

Lalla dismisses the practice of chanting from the scriptures by rote, with no

understanding of the emancipatory potential of the words of wisdom and

power contained in these texts. Here, as in poem 111, Lalla’s approach to

enlightenment is an experimental, experiential one. Bypassing the

scriptures, she regards the transmission of redemptive wisdom as taking

place through the medium of discipleship: she underscores the importance

of a guru’s direct teaching, presence and grace, and indicates that the true

teaching passes from master to disciple as a direct, often unspoken but

unmistakeably made gift. The ‘greatest scripture’, she insists, is beyond

words and beyond sound. Her approach is remarkably congruent with those

of the Siddha masters of late Tantrayāna Buddhism and the exponents of the

dhyāna or Zen schools.

129. K: 46

parun sôlab pālun dôrlab

In the same spirit as the preceding poem, this vākh points up the contrast

between the scholar’s life, devoted to the study of texts, and that of the

active seeker, whose text is the totality of experience. Practice is viewed,

with some self-irony on Lalla’s part, as a fog, which, instead of blinding the

unwary traveller caught in it, clears an occasion for profound insight.

130. G: 47 | K: 114

yěth saras s

ri-pholu nā větsiy

This poem is structured around a wonderful play of scale that connects the

infinitesimal to the cosmic. In comparison with the Infinite, Lalla says, the

world is a lake so small that not even a mustard seed could sink in it. And

yet this seemingly insignificant lake is the vast reservoir where all beings

come, metaphorically, to drink water; where all beings are born and die, and

are born again. Among the beings listed in poem 130, I have translated

zala-h

stiy, literally ‘water-elephants’, as ‘cloud-elephants’, since this is

what the word seemed to imply: a personification of the pluvial aspect of

the water cycle.

The symbolism of the mustard seed occurs both in the Buddhist and the

Christian wisdom traditions. The Buddha, in a parable concerning the

inevitability of death, asks a grieving woman who wants him to revive her

dead child, to bring him a mustard seed from a family in which no one has

ever died; naturally, she cannot. She gains an insight into the nature of

desire, sorrow, change and wisdom; and the mustard seed became a symbol

for right understanding (see Easwaran 1987, 41–42). Jesus, in a parable

concerning the nature of the Kingdom of Heaven, compares it to a mustard

seed—which, though the smallest of seeds, once planted, grows into a large

tree with many branches, and offers shelter to many birds (Luke 13: 18–19;

Mark 4: 30–32; Matthew 13: 31–32).

Such symbolisms were in active circulation, for nearly a millennium

between the first and seventh centuries CE, along the Silk Route that linked

the deep heart of Western China with the Eastern Mediterranean, and

included Kashmir in its larger ambit. Buddhist, Hindu, Zoroastrian,

Manichean and Christian ideas, practices and iconographies are known to

have been transmitted along the cities of the Silk Route and diffused further,

through the interactions of monks, merchants, scholars, storytellers and

translators. Among the many examples of this flourishing cultural

confluence is the fact that a number of stories from the Buddhist Jatakas

eventually found an afterlife as tales about Jesus or various Christian saints,

through the writings of St John of Damascus; similarly, a number of stories

from the Panchatantra, the Hitopadeśa and the Ramayana found their way

into the narrative cycles of Boccaccio and Chaucer.

131. G: 50

trayi něngi sarāh s

ri saras

As in poem 117, Lalla offers an apocalyptic yet potentially redemptive

vision of pralaya, the world-dissolving deluge. The world is again imagined

as a lake: one that has overflowed its own shores three times, perhaps

alluding to three cosmic cycles that Lalla has witnessed in previous lives.

The ‘lake mirrored in the sky’, when nothing exists except water and sky,

may refer to a mahā-pralaya or great deluge—when not only the known

universe but also the realm of the gods and even the demiurge Creator,

Brahma himself, are destroyed, to be replaced by a new Brahma, new gods,

and a new world.

The reference to a lake bridging Mount Haramukh in the north with Lake

Kausar in the south provides us with an ancient and mythic geography of

Kashmir: the extent so described is, in fact, the Valley of Kashmir, which

was said to have been a lake called Satī-saras at the beginning of our

present kalpa. In the last line of this poem, Lalla claims to have seen the

world vanishing into the Void seven times. These momentous acts of recall,

these memories stretching across vast periods of time (a kalpa is reckoned

by Hindu cosmologists as 432 million years) are intended to generate a

sense of the incalculably long journey of the continually reborn self towards

its ultimate release.

132. G: 81 | K: 116

mad pyuwum syundu-zalan yaitu

Lalla speaks here both as the individual self and as the voice of the Self,

which has passed through many births on its voyage across the ocean of

existence. The Sindhu is the Indus, one of Kashmir’s principal rivers: its

crystalline water is the wine that she has drunk over a concourse of births.

The reference to eating human flesh seems to have puzzled or unsettled

several observers. Following Grierson, I would annotate this image in the

following way: Lalla visualises the Self here as an anthropophagic entity,

one that has, metaphorically, consumed numerous bodies in passing through

a sequence of lives. Admittedly this image is cast in the rasas or affective

registers of bhayānaka (the terrifying) or bibhatsa (the disgusting), and so

may not accord with the taste of readers who prefer their classical authors to

be well-behaved, measured, circumspect and attentive to the proprieties.

The truth is that Lalla is not a classical author in this limited sense; rather,

she claims the authority of a classic by virtue of her thunder-loud

utterances, her robust images and her lightning-clear insights, which pierce

the heart of the universe.

133. K: 125

ṅ

gas manz chuy by

n by

n labun

Here, as in the preceding poem, Lalla employs the allegory of the world as

a theatre: the venue for līlā, the play of forms by which the Unmanifest

manifests Itself. The Self is the actor who has worn many personae on this

stage, and vanishes behind the parts He plays. How can one find Him? By

ridding oneself meticulously of all negative emotions, Lalla teaches, and by

developing the qualities of equanimity and resilience.

134. K: 117

asi āsi tay asīy āsav

This poem revisits what I have called the ‘dance of perpetual circularity’,

which Lalla dwells on in poem 8. The substance of the Self abides across

time, even as the universe comes into being, is dissolved and is brought into

being again. Shiva is invoked here as the Breaker of Worlds, as regular as

the solar cycle, presiding over the wheel of existence, guiding every kalpa

from one cosmic deluge to the next.

135. G: 78 | K: 120

kus

ḍ

ingi ta kus zāgi

136. G: 79 | K: 121

man

ḍ

ingi ta ak

l zāgi

Paired as question and answer, like poems 66 and 67, vākhs 135 and 136

carry the cadence of an initiation ritual. The questioner asks a series of

questions of seemingly vast and cosmic-scale import, beginning with the

memorable ‘Who’s asleep and who’s awake?’ The answers centre the locus

of redemption in the bodied self: the mind and its ability to slough off the

material attachments and parameters of space, time and particularity that

weigh it down; the organs of sense, their energy replenished by the

activated sahasrāra, are the lake from which a rain of nectar falls

constantly; Shiva’s favourite offering is ‘knowledge of Self’; and the

parama-pad or Supreme Word—this term can also mean ‘Supreme

Place’—that the seeker is looking for is tsētana-Shiv, ‘Shiva-

consciousness’, the recognition that one is identical with the Shiva-

principle. I have compressed this recognition as ‘The Supreme Word you’re

looking for/is Shiva Yourself.’

137. K: 43

ṅ

dachi hā

ṅ

kal kar chaynäm

As in poems 92–94, in which she responds to the curses and insults of her

detractors, Lalla here contemplates the shame in which other people try and

mantle her. She indicates the strategies by which the chain and robe of

shame can be eliminated. Resilience is called for, as well as the need to curb

and tame the wild horse of the mind, so that it remains focused on the

inward quest and is not tempted to divert its energies into reacting to

provocations.

138. K: 44

parān parān zěv tāl phajim

139. K: 34

treśi b

chi mō kreśināvun

140. K: 31

ṅ

dyo karakh ka

ṅ

di ka

ṅ

dē

141. K: 32

man gārun manz yath ka

ṅ

dē

In the small garland of poems from 138 to 141, Lalla contemplates

questions of spiritual hygiene, dwelling variously on themes such as the

relationship between the body and the mind, the difference between the

mere repetition of mantras and the inspired entry into transcendent

awareness, and the correct attitude towards the body.

In poem 138, Lalla ridicules the mindless repetition of prayers and

chants, undertaken as quantitative performances meant to generate spiritual

merit rather than in the spirit of devotion and self-overcoming. While they

may exhaust the individual physically—tongue cloven to the palate, thumb

and finger raw from telling the beads—they can neither qualify as true

worship nor can they purify the consciousness of its persisting discontents.

In vākh 139, Lalla turns the searchlight of critique on the pursuit of

mindless austerities. She addresses a perennial tendency within ha

ṭ

ha-yoga

—the branch of Yogic practice dedicated to the purification of the body in

preparation for higher meditational exercises—which fetishises the cult of

self-mortification as an end in itself. Instead of brutalising the body with

fasts and extreme vows (which is really to yield to the spiritual sin of

arrogance), she urges the aspirant to practise a rigorous morality: to

demonstrate altruism and compassion, to release the self towards others and

their needs. This poem, like poem 91, resonates with the Buddha’s teaching

of the brahma-vihāras, the accent here being specifically on maitri/metta,

loving-kindness, and karu

ṇ

ā, compassion.

Pointing to the inevitable fate of the body as a perishable vehicle for the

Imperishable, in poem 140, Lalla deplores the obsession with the body as

an expression of doomed and futile vanity. This poem has the ring of a

meditation intended to guide the aspirant beyond normal, body-centred

consciousness, and to pass beyond the illusion of the permanence of the

body, its desires and idiosyncrasies. Such meditations on mortality are well

documented in other spiritual traditions as well: for instance, the Aghora

Śaivite practice of meditating in cemeteries, the Tantrayāna meditation on a

skull, and the Catholic monastic exercise of contemplation in an ossuary.

In vākh 141, Lalla corrects the balance in favour of a sane respect for the

body. Urging us not to reject the body, she describes it as the svarūp, the

Self’s own form: an opportunity to take bodied human existence seriously

as an experiment in perfectibility. Lalla suggests that, by refining away the

lower passions, the aspirant can realise the potentiality of the soul’s

corporal sheath, so that it reveals itself to be ‘this body as bright as the sun’,

yathi ka

ṅ

di tīz tay sor prakāśa.

142. K: 25

zanum prāvith věbav nō tsō

ṇḍ

In this brief and intensely moving manifesto, similar in tenor to poems 45

and 90, Lalla asserts that she never sought fame, notoriety or affluence in

life; nor did she wish to indulge in the pleasures of the floating world of

appearances and desires. The oddly personal detail in the third line,

concerning her moderate meals, gathers poignancy when she passes lightly

over her years of starvation and pain, to close the poem with the healing

vision of the Divine.

143. G: 73

tsāmar ch

ạ

thar rathu simhāsan

144. G: 74

kyah b

ǒḍ

ukh muha bhawa-s

dari-dārě

145. G: 75

karm zah kāran trah k

mbith

146. G: 76 | K: 102

jñān

ki ambar pairith tanē

The poems numbered 143, 144, 145 and 146 here form a group of

variations on the contrast between absorption in worldly pleasures and

absorption in the spiritual question, with the fear of death as a constant

presence; indeed, all four poems end with variations on the disquieting

phrase, maranünü shökh.

Poem 143 lays out the privileges of royal status: the regalia of the chowry

or yak-tail fly-whisk, the ceremonial canopy, the chariot and the lion throne;

the enjoyment of theatrical performances, a comfortable bed. But can these

withstand the fear of death? Poem 144 is set in the Kashmiri countryside,

and pits the fugitive self that has squandered the opportunity for

transcendence and fallen into the ‘marsh of shadows’ against the inexorable

figure of Yama, Lord of Death. His warders are unforgiving in the

prosecution of their task; in dragging the fugitive to Yama’s palace, they

subject him, in Lalla’s words, to the mediaeval punishment known in

Kashmiri as chōra-dārě karun, when the prisoner is dragged along the

ground, so that he leaves a wake of blood behind him.

In poem 145, Lalla lays out a succinct metaphysics of redemption. There

are two kinds of karma: good and bad, each leaving its residues. There are

three kinds of causes of the conditional existence of the material world, all

technically defined as malas or taints: ā

ṇ

ava-mala, the taint of believing

that the soul is finite; māyīya-mala, the taint of maintaining cognitive

distinctions between one thing and another; and kārma-mala, the taint of

generating action, and therefore pleasure and pain. The residues of both

kinds of karma and all three taints must be destroyed by the yogini, using

the breath-control technique of kumbhaka, holding up and containing the

body’s vital breath currents. The yogini’s passage through life must be, in J.

Krishnamurti’s vivid and memorable phrase, like the flight of the eagle,

which leaves no mark. Poem 145 celebrates the soul’s journey to the

Supreme, transiting through the house of the sun.

In poem 146, the last vākh in this translation, Lalla invites the aspirant to

put on the robe of wisdom and commit her vākhs to memory and practice.

Through mindful devotion to the primal syllable, Om, she says, she became

absorbed in the light of the awakened consciousness, tsěth-jyōti, and so

defeated the fear of death: an exemplar that can be emulated, a spiritual

technology of hope and liberation that can be passed on to future

generations.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my parents, Chandra and Raghuvir Hoskote, for more

than I could ever put into words: my life as a writer began with their

indulgent and unwavering faith that I would, in fact, be able to make such a

life for myself. This book is dedicated to them.

I would also like to thank my wife, Nancy Adajania, for more than two

decades of intense companionship and collaborative adventures; and in

particular, for her encouragement of my Lalla project and her meticulous

responses to this manuscript in its various avatars. This book is a journey

we have made together.

Although this is my twentieth book to appear in print, it could very well

have been my first. No mystery is intended: I began work on it in February

1991, shortly before putting together my first collection of poems, Zones of

Assault, which was published later that year. Over these many years, I,

Lalla has benefited considerably from the pressure exerted by a circle of

friends who have charted its progress, and constantly summoned me back to

it. Specifically, I wish to thank Shirin, Jehangir and Aafreed Sabavala, who

embraced Lalla, asked searching questions, offered responses and

periodically demanded results; and Mehlli and Cavas Gobhai, to whose

chikoo orchard in Gholvad we have all retreated annually for New Year’s,

on which occasions these translations have been read and tested out.

There is much that can never adequately be acknowledged. Having

admitted this, I record my thanks to four brother writers and fellow

pilgrims: Ilija Trojanow, for his passionate belief in the writerly life as a

ceaseless experiment in consciousness, his infectious and life-affirming

optimism and abundant generosity of spirit; Richard Lannoy, for his

intellectual adventurousness and receptivity towards all that seems

enigmatic and strange, and his refreshingly original approach to Indian

culture and religious life; Jürgen Brôcan, for his love of the travelling text

and the spirit of place, his sensitivity to the grammar of the invisible

hovering above the page; and Axel Fussi, for conversations on Indic

mysticism as a discovery procedure, and for a magical weekend in Ehrwald,

where J. Krishnamurti experienced his key process of transformation.

My thanks are due to Daniel Weissbort, who directed the Iowa Translation

Workshop, University of Iowa, Iowa City, where I first read from these

translations and discussed them, in 1995; and to the Librarian and Staff of

the University of Iowa Library, the Brown University Library, and the

Asiatic Society of Bombay, for their invaluable help in sourcing texts and

materials.

For their hospitality and collegiality, I would like to acknowledge my

colleagues at five writing residencies which provided me with a most

conducive combination of emotional repose and bracing intellectual

exchange: in 1995, the International Writing Program at the University of

Iowa (Clark Blaise, Daniel Weissbort, Peter and Mary Nazareth, Marc

Nieson and Carolyn Brown); in 2003, Villa Waldberta, Munich (Verena

Nolte, Karin Sommer, Eva Schuster, and Katrin Dirschwigl); in Spring

2010, Theater der Welt, Essen/Mülheim (Christine Peters, Frie Lysen and

Max Philip Aschenbrenner) ; in Spring 2010 also, ‘The Promised City’,

mobilised by the Goethe-Institut, Bombay and Warsaw, and the Polnisches

Institut, Berlin (Marla Stukenberg, Martin Wälde, Tomasz Dabrowski and

Jacek Glaszcz); and in Autumn 2010, BAK/basis voor actuele kunst,

Utrecht (Maria Hlavajova, Cosmin Costinas, Arjan van Meeuwen, and

Marlies van Hak).

My thanks are due, also, to Nissim Ezekiel, who chose some of these

translations for the poetry page that he edited for The Independent

(Bombay) in the early 1990s, as well as to Stefan Weidner, Editor, Art and

Thought (Bonn), and Bina Sarkar Ellias, Editor, International Gallerie

(Bombay), who have published earlier versions of some of these

translations.

This project has drawn sustenance from the keen interest of Veer Munshi

and Gargi Raina: friends from other branches of the Kashmiri diaspora,

with whom I have often talked about the complex fate of our homeland. For

illuminating and deeply moving conversations in Srinagar, I thank Shafi

Shauq, poet, linguist and Head of the Department of Kashmiri, University

of Kashmir.

I wish to record a lasting debt of gratitude, also, to my late cousin, Pandit

Gurudutt Shukla, for initiating me long ago into an appreciation of the

beauty and elegance of my Kashmir Śaiva heritage. He was snatched away

too early for me to share fully in his various commitments to philosophy,

Hindustani classical music and Sanskrit aesthetics; but he guided me

towards the startling epiphany that the Vedanta of Śankara is not the only or

the most productive world-view in the Hindu philosophical universe. That

understanding informs the present book.

At Penguin, for their kindness, patience, generosity and friendship, which

have survived my various delays and numerous missed deadlines, I thank

Ravi Singh and R. Sivapriya. Ravi received this idea with his customary

warmth and enthusiasm many years ago; as an evolving manuscript, it

could not have been placed in more sensitive and meticulous hands than

Sivapriya’s. I would also like to thank Bhavi Mehta for her exquisite cover

design for the original hardcover edition of this book, based on the kong-

poush, the saffron flower, which evokes both Lalla’s profound solitude as

well as the gift of her poems, which have crossed great distances in space

and time, to enter many hearts.

THE BEGINNING

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This collection published 2011

The moral right of the author has been asserted

ISBN: 978-0-143-42078-1

This digital edition published in 2016.

e-ISBN: 978-9-351-18233-7

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