“Dancing Naked”: Gender, Trauma and Politics in the Mystical Poetry of Lal Ded

Abstract

Lal Ded, the fourteenth century Kashmiri female mystic, is revered as a spiritual exemplar by both the Hindus and the Muslims of Kashmir. She walked away from a difficult marriage at the young age of twenty-six to pursue the Śaiva path to spiritual liberation. Lal Ded records her long and arduous spiritual journey in a Kashmiri poetic form, vākh (a short poem of four lines with four stresses in each line), which is also one of the earliest genres of Kashmiri poetry. Even though most scholarship on Lal Ded’s vākhs does invoke her difficult life as a Kashmiri woman in a turbulent political milieu, it rarely poses the question of gender and politics in relation to her mystical poetry. My paper offers a close reading of selected vākhs to argue that the figures of loss (rāvan-tyol, loss-blister), shame (mandchhi hạ̄nkal, iron fetters of shame) and joy (nangaē natsun, dancing naked) in Lal Ded’s mystical poetry can be read not merely as stages on the path of a Śaiva liberation but also as a distinctive proto-feminist perspective on political self-transformation.

Keywords:

• Kashmiri Poetry
• Lal Ded
• Mysticism
• Kashmir
• Trauma

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Lal Ded is revered and remembered as Lalleshwarī, Lallā ‘Ārifā and simply Lal (the name she uses to address herself in the vākhs). Lal Ded literally means “Lal, the Grandmother.” Even though dẏad (which has been standardized in English language spelling to Ded) has often been translated as “grandmother”, it is a general honorific used in Kashmiri for a wise, old woman. In contemporary Kashmiri, it is also used more generally for an old woman.

2 The way Lal Ded often uses her first name Lal with the first-person personal pronoun bu’ as Lal bu’ (I, Lalla, as Ranjit Hoskote translates it) suggests an individual voice that has left a strong mark on the entire Lal Ded corpus.

3 It is likely that Mīr Sayyid “Ali Hamadānī visited Kashmir only once even though some scholars believe that Hamadānī visited Kashmir on three separate occasions” (Khan 2002, 3). Hamadani’s influence in Kashmir continued to grow after the arrival of his son, Mīr Muḥammad Hamadānī in Kashmir (Khan 2002, 80).

4 Neerja Mattoo (2019, 70) transcribes gēlun as gelum. I decided to follow J. L. Kaul’s rendering in the Kashmiri Nastaliq script (Kaul 1993, 110). Gēlun means to blame or to slander.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Governing Intimacies project funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (Grant no.: 41600691).

Notes on contributors

Abir Bazaz

Abir Bazaz is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Ashoka University. He has a PhD in Asian Literatures, Cultures, and Media from the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. He also has an MA in the Humanities from the University of Chicago. He is currently working on a book project on the mystical poetry of Nund Rishi–a Kashmiri Sufi–tentatively titled The Negative Theology of Nund Rishi. He is also a documentary filmmaker.