Lal Ded-A Mystic Poetess of Ancient Kashmir

LAL DED – A MYSTIC POETESS OF
ANCIENT KASHMIR

Lalla or Lal Ded was a female wandering Saiva ascetic (Yogini) of Kashmir in the 14th century A. D. She was an apostle of sweetness and light and is remembered with divine adoration both by the Hindus and the Muslims in Kashmir. Her verses are of extreme value for two reasons. They form the oldest known specimen of the Kashmiri language and they represent the teaching of the Saiva Yoga as it presented itself through her to the ordinary Kashmiri followers of that religious system.

She was born about the middle of the 14th century of the Christian era in the time of Sultan Ala-ud-din, the third Muhammadan king of Kashmir, who succeeded to the throne in 1347 A. D. On page 286 of his admirable Outline of the Religious Literature of India, Dr. J. N. Farquhar also dated Lal Ded as “c. 14th century” on the faith of Sir George Grierson’s article in JRAS., 1918, p. 157. Her parents lived at Pandrenthan (the ancient Puranadhishthana, the old capital) four miles to the south-east of Srinagar. The boy to whom Lal Ded was married had his father living but had lost his mother, and his father had married a second wife. The step mother-in-law used to treat Lal Ded (called Padmavati as the bride) very harshly. She spoke ill of her to her son in order to prejudice his mind against his wife. She span thread as fine as the fibres of lotus stalk, yet her step mother-in-law would scold her for having spun it coarsely. At last she brought this chapter of her life to a close by quitting her home. Fired as she was with divine love, she tore away her garment and began to roam about.

Lal Ded became the disciple of Sidh, another Saint, and learnt Yoga from him but in course of time she excelled him in practising it. She propounded the Yoga philosophy and also high moral truths in Kashmiri verse. These are called Lal Wakhi or Sayings of Lal and are, apart from being the utterances of a holy woman, expressive of grand and lofty thoughts, and spiritual laws–short, apt, sweet, thrilling, life-giving and pregnant with the greatest moral principles–aye, simply pearls and diamonds and “gems of the purest ray serene” of the Kashmiri literature. A few instances will suffice to show how sublime is the philosophy contained in them.

When by repeated practice (of Yoga) the visible objects go to absorption.
When the qualified universe gets merged within the ether.
Then remains none but the Supreme Being.
This is, O Brahman, the true doctrine.

Tell thy mind that there is no highness or lowness there;
There is no entry there by either silence or mystic attitude;
Neither Shiva nor Shakti remain there.
If any one remains that is the true doctrine.

There is no light like that of the knowledge of God.
There is no pilgrimage like that of the search of God;
There is no relation compared to the Deity;
There is no ease like that got from the fear of God;

As is usual with spiritual geniuses, Lal Ded used to lead people from observation to reflection, making easy remonstrances at hypocrisy and mere show of religious ceremonies and formalities. Some instances are given below:

Idol is of stone, temple is of stone;
Above (temple) and below (idol) are one;
Which of them wilt thou worship, O foolish Pandit?
Cause thou the union of mind with soul.
The same stone is in the road and in the pedestal:
The same stone is the sacred place:
The same stone is the turning mill;
Shiva is difficult to be attained, take a hint for guidance (from thy guru).

Dr. Farquhar seems to be quite right in describing Lal Ded as belonging to the period of Muslim influence on Hinduism. She is consistently described by tradition not only as a contemporary, but as a friend of Sayyid ‘Ali Hamadani’, the Muslim apostle of Kashmir in 1380-1386; and one of her verses runs as follows:

Let Him bear the name of Siva, or of Kesava, or of
the Jina, or of the Lotus-born Lord–
whatever name he bear,
“May He take from me, sick woman that I am,
the disease of the world.
Whether He be he, or he, or he, or he.”

“By whatever name the worshipper may call the Supreme, He is still the Supreme and He alone can give release. Kesava means Vishnu: by the name of ‘Jina’ is indicated both a ‘Jina’, the Saviour of the Jains and also the Buddha. The Lotus-born Lord is Brahma.”

“But is not Lal Ded forestalling Kabir (1440-1518) who followed and improved on Ramananda (1400-1470), who preached “a compromise between theism and strict monism,” and the roots of whose teaching go much further in the then old Hindu doctrine of bhaktior devotional faith, whether the sects professing it were Saiva or Vaishnava, wrote Sir R. C. Temple. Lal Ded could never have heard of Ramananda and his doctrines and she must have died before Kabir was born, but Ramananda was not the first, without giving up his caste, to take all castes and conditions of men into his personal following, even Muhammadans, and to be on terms of mutual respect with the last. In fact, in this respect he adopted a fashion that was then springing up among both Hindu and Muhammadan teachers, under Muslim influence. This influence was Sufi mysticism. Though a Muhammadan at bottom, the Sufi was not orthodox and was imbued with outside influences, European and Asiatic, and even Indian thought. He tended to identify himself with God, like the early Hindu, and to lose his individuality after death in eternal companionship with God. His object in this life was to escape from individuality, in order “to realize that God is the only reality.” His practice to this end came very near to the Hindu Yoga, and to him all religious systems tended to become unreal and of equal value. It is not difficult to understand that a Yoginiof the fourteenth century, in contact with Muhammadanism, should quickly absorb such a line of thought. And the interesting point in Lal Ded’s life and popular teaching is that we here seem to get a glimpse into the trend of the Hindu mind that gave Ramananda, and more largely his great pupil Kabir, the enormous sway they have wielded over the religion of India of their own and even the present day.

How deeply the general idea conveyed in Lal Ded’s verse above quoted has struck its roots into the everyday Indian mind is shown in a couplet taught to children when very small.

Ram nam laddu; Gopal nam ghi;
Har ka nam misri; ghol ghol pi.

The name of Ram is the sweet; Gopal’s name is the butter:
Har’s name is the sugar; mix up well and take.

The form of the couplet is purely Hindu, Ram nam, Gopal nam, Har nam, referring to the age-old doctrine “of the eternity of sound and the indefeasible connexion between the sound of a word and its meaning,” and thence between the attributes of a god and his name; but the sentiment is mediaeval Hindu, like Lal Ded’s. In fact, if we take the couplet to be of Ramaite origin and to mean that Gopal and Hari (Krishna) are subordinate to and absorbed in Ram, the verse is Vaishnava but non-sectarian. In the mind of the common man, however, it surely conveys the equality of the Supreme by whatever name He was called.

Lal Ded enforced her doctrines wandering about singing and dancing in a nude or nearly-nude condition. This was nothing new in Saiva, or indeed in other forms of Hinduism, or in Judaism or Islam. She defends the practice in the following verse:

“My teacher spake to me but one precept.
He said unto me ‘from without enter thou the inmost part.’
That to me became a rule and a precept,
And therefore naked began I to dance.”

The commentary of Sir George Grierson and Dr. L. D. Barnett on this is:

“The Guru or spiritual preceptor, confides to his disciple the mysteries of religion. Lalla’s account is that he taught her to recognise the external world as naught but an illusion, and to restrict her thoughts to meditation on her inner Self. When she had grasped the identity of her Self with the Supreme Self, she learnt to appreciate all externals at their true value. So she abandoned even her dress and took to going about naked….Here she says that she danced in this state. Filled with supreme rapture, she behaved like a madwoman. The dance, called tandava, of the naked devotee is supposed to be a copy of file dance of Siva, typifying the course of the cosmos under the god’s rule. It implies that the devotee has wholly surrendered the world, and become united with Siva.”

While going about, Lal Ded was followed by a number of children, who used to shout mockingly at her, as is usual with youngsters when they see a strange person. But her spirit was ever unperturbed.

Let them jeer at me a thousand times,
My mind shall never be pained.
If I am a lover of God,
How can ashes make a mirror dirty (on the contrary it will make it cleaner)?
Anybody mocking or scoffing at me
Shall not be disliked by my heart.
When my Siva favours me,
What can the ridicule of the people do to me?

She was essentially nothing more than the product of her race and time and incapable of founding a sect or organised following, and it is quite possible that her popularity was founded on her reputation as a dancing ascetic, coupled with her capacity for stating in fascinating verse the doctrines taught her. The emotional dancing would draw the necessary attention to her and the quality of her verse would remain in the public memory. A century after her time we have a strong instance of this in a very different Hindu personage, teaching a doctrine in some aspects poles apart from hers–the Bengali Brahman Visvambhara Misra (1485-1533), known to fame as Chaitanya. A Vaishnava of the general Bhagavata community, he practised the passionate variety of devotional faith bhakti, concentrating in his case on the story of the loves of Krishna and Radha in hymns, and enforcing his doctrine by the public dancing of himself and his followers with extraordinary fervour and emotion.

Lal Ded purported to popularise the highly anthropomorphic doctrines of the Saiva Yoga. This was no easy task, for the Yogic philosophy was so abstruse and difficult to follow and so full of technicalities, that obviously the workaday unlettered population could never grasp it; and the technicalities, which would come to be repeated glibly enough, must have largely appeared to the public like “the blessed word Mesopotamia”; and so it is with some justification that Granny Lal’s editors point out the importance of her songs from “the fact that they are not a systematic expose of Saivism on the lines laid down by the theologians who preceded her, but illustrate the religion on its popular side.” The songs are current coins of quotation, a volume being packed in a single saying. They touch the Kashmiri’s ear as well as the chord of his heart and are freely quoted by him as maxims on appropriate occasions in conversation, having moulded the national mind and set up a national ideal. Besides, they have reached us, like the vedic hymns, as handed down by word of mouth from generation to generation, and give a valuable example of the manner in which their language must have changed from generation to generation before their text was finally established.

Lal Ded died at an advanced age at Bijbehara, 28 miles to the south-east of Srinagar, just outside the Jama Masjid there; near its south-eastern corner. There are many stories current among the Kashmiri’s illustrative of the miraculous powers of this hermitess. One of them is that when she gave up her soul, it buoyed up like a flame of light in the air and then disappeared.