Lallā

There is hardly a Kashmiri, Hindu or Muslim, who cannot finish one of her lines once someone else has begun it. Her sayings are spoken at the hearth and in the market, quoted in an argument, murmured over a grief, set down beside the proverbs that a whole valley uses to say what it means. People call her Lal Ded, Granny Lal, or simply Lal. In Sanskrit she is Lallā Yogeśvarī, Lallā the mistress of yoga, or Lalleśvarī. Some say Lal Didi is the name Muslims use for her and Lalishri the name Hindus use; however that may be, Lal Ded is what nearly everyone calls her.

Nothing written in her own time has come down: no page of her sayings, and no account of her life. What came through the centuries came by mouth: four-line sayings in the old Kashmiri of her day, which Kashmir calls her vākh, her speech, and which a valley full of people kept repeating because they were short enough to carry and too true to drop.

Around those sayings a life gathered, as lives do around the people a country loves. The stories that follow are that life as the people of Kashmir tell it, with its wonders intact; and where the tellers disagree, they disagree still.

Everyone who tells her story agrees on one point of time. She lived in the fourteenth century, in the years when Islam was first taking root in the valley, and she was a contemporary of Sayyid ʿAlī Hamadānī, the saint from Persia whom Kashmiri Muslims remember as the apostle of their faith. He came to Kashmir in the reign of Sultan Quṭb ud-Dīn and stayed some five or six years, near the end of the fourteenth century. The great mosque in Srinagar that bears the name of Shāh Hamadān keeps his memory.

Hindu tellers in Kashmir add more. They say she was born about the middle of that century, in the reign of Sultan ʿAlāʾ ud-Dīn, and that her parents lived at Pandrethan, the old capital, four miles south-east of Srinagar.

Both communities hold her as their own, and both with reason. Her sayings are the speech of a yoginī of the Śaiva path of Kashmir: they speak of Śiva and Śakti, of prāṇa and apāna, of the unstruck sound and the dvādaśānta, of the guru's word and the light of Caitanya. Yet the Muslims of the valley, who honour Sayyid ʿAlī as the bringer of their faith, have always looked on her with the deepest respect, and their own memory sets her beside their saints. Some Hindu tellers say that Sayyid ʿAlī learned from her; Muslim tellers do not say so, and they revere her none the less. She herself, in one of her sayings, leaves the names to whoever wants them:

Śiva or Keśava or the Jina, or the Lord born of the lotus, whatever the name he bears: let him take from me, a helpless woman, the sickness of becoming. Let it be he, or he, or he, or he.

Hindu tellers begin before her birth, with a story about a question.

It is told that in an earlier life she was a young wife in a family at Pandrethan, and that she bore a son. The family priest was a man named Siddha Śrīkaṇṭha, who stood in the line of teachers that went back to Vasugupta, who first set down the Śaiva teaching of Kashmir. On the eleventh day after the birth he came to perform the rite of cleansing for mother and child. The young mother asked him a strange question: what was this newborn child to her?

"Your son," said the priest. "What else would he be?"

"No," she said. And she told him that she was about to die, that she would be born again as a filly in a certain village with certain markings, and that if he wanted the true answer he should come and find her there in a year's time. Then she died.

The priest's curiosity would not let him rest. A year later he went to the village, found the filly with the markings she had named, and asked his question again. The filly answered that she was about to die once more, and would be born next as a puppy at Bijbehara; he should seek her there in six months. As she spoke a tiger sprang from the bushes and carried her off. At Bijbehara he found the puppy, and the puppy told him the same: another death was coming, another birth, another place. A rider's pony trampled it as it spoke. Six times, the story says, she led him from birth to birth without giving him his answer, until he gave up the chase and went into the hills to do his penances.

In the seventh birth she came back into the same family at Pandrethan. This was Lallā.

She was married young. Hindu tellers say she was twelve, and that the marriage was arranged into a Brahmin family of Pāmpur, not far from Srinagar. Her husband had lost his own mother, and his father had married again; the woman who ruled the house was her husband's stepmother. Her father-in-law gave her a new name, Padmāvatī, and they say that she and her husband never lived together as man and wife.

They say also that Siddha Śrīkaṇṭha came back from the hills in time to preside over the wedding, and that while the rites were being performed the bride leaned to him and whispered: the child whose meaning you followed through six births is the bridegroom standing here. The priest remembered, and was astonished.

What every teller remembers, whatever else they keep or leave out, is the mother-in-law. She starved the girl and worked her without rest, and she starved her by a trick. When food was served in front of others, she would put a stone in the girl's dish and spread a thin layer of rice over it, so that anyone watching saw a generous plate. The girl ate the rice, and said nothing. She would quietly give the stone back when the meal was over. Hindu tellers say this went on for twelve years.

It came out by accident. A sheep had been killed in the house for a feast, and a neighbour, meeting the young wife on the way to the river for water, teased her that she would eat well that night. Out came the words that Kashmir still repeats as a proverb: whether they kill a big sheep or a small one, Lal will have her stone. Her father-in-law, on the other side of the wall, heard it. That evening he snatched the plate from her hand, and there was the stone beneath the rice. He was furious with his wife, and his wife, sure that the girl had complained of her, hated her the more.

The mother-in-law spoke against her constantly to her son. She found fault with everything; it is told that even when the girl spun thread as fine as the fibres of a lotus stalk, she was scolded for spinning it coarse. And still, every teller says, the girl did not complain.

The household's suspicions turned at last into a plot, and here the story is told two ways.

In the telling that the Muslims of the valley have kept, the girl was hardly given time to say her prayers, and the mother-in-law convinced her son that his wife was false to him, and persuaded him to follow her to the spring where she went for water each day, so that he might catch her at a meeting with a lover. He followed her, and found her at her prayers. The mother-in-law then threw a stone at the girl's pitcher as she came back from the spring, and it broke a hole in it; but the water stayed where it was, held by a skin of its own as if the pot had a lining of glass.

In the telling that Hindu tellers keep, it was the husband himself. She used to rise before dawn and cross the river to sit alone at a place of worship on the far bank, at Zinpura, where she would bathe and remain absorbed in God; the tellers add that she crossed the river without her feet sinking into it. Her husband, suspicious, followed her one morning and saw her sitting there alone, and could make nothing of it except that it looked like madness. When she came home with her pot of water on her head he struck it in anger with a stick. The pot broke into pieces, and the water stood whole upon her head. She walked into the house and filled every empty vessel there from it, and still it was not finished. What was left she poured out beside the house, and it became a pool. They show the pool still, and call it Lal Trāg, Lal's pond.

In either telling the house would not keep her for long. She left it, or was turned out of it.

Her own sayings speak of setting out:

I, Lallā, set out in longing; searching, I wore myself out day and night. Then I saw the pandit in my own house, and I caught hold of him: the star and the hour were in my favour.

She went out with nothing. The tellers say she wandered the valley in rags at first, and in time with no clothing at all, singing and dancing in the ecstasy of the Lord. Children ran after her and jeered; people called her mad. In the telling the Muslims of the valley keep, she was fed from heaven. When she was rebuked for going about unclothed, she is remembered to have answered that they alone are men who fear God, and that there were very few of those about. Others put her answer more sharply: there were no men in Kashmir to be ashamed before.

One story has her caught out by her father-in-law, who saw her watching a crowd gathered for a play in Pāmpur and called her home to scold her for her lack of modesty. She answered that there was no human being in that crowd to cover herself from. He laughed at her; she told him to look out of the window, and when he did, he saw no people there at all, only a yard full of fowls, sheep and goats.

Hindu tellers explain the name Lal itself from this time of her life. Her own saying tells it another way:

I burned away the dirt of my heart, and I killed the passion in me. Only then did the name Lallā go out, when I spread my skirt before him there.

The tradition remembers that the mockery could not touch her. One of her sayings answers it:

Let them speak a thousand hard words to me; no sorrow will make its home in my heart. If I am truly Śaṅkara's devotee, what stain can ash leave on a mirror?

Her teacher was the same Siddha Śrīkaṇṭha, whom the people of the valley remember as Sed Bāyu. His house, they say, stood at Pāmpur, with a cave where he did his worship; the bathing place where he went down to the river is still called Sidh Yār, and pilgrims on the way to Amarnāth bathe there. From him she learned yoga. And the tellers agree on one thing: in time she went further than he did.

Two stories of it are told.

Once the Siddha had undertaken a hard fast of forty days. Lallā came to his house and asked his wife what he was doing. "He is at his meditation," the wife said. "No," Lallā called out, "his pony has been kicked at Nandamarg." The Siddha heard it and was ashamed, for at that very moment his mind had wandered from God to his pony, which he had sent away to graze at Nandamarg.

Then she invited him to watch how she kept a penance of her own. On the night of the full moon she went into a clean, empty room and stood there without moving, with one earthen pot beneath her feet and another upon her head. As the moon waned, her body waned with it, until on the night of no moon the two pots met. The Siddha watched all of it. When the pots closed he lifted the upper one, and saw something in the lower like quicksilver, trembling; he set the lid back. As the moon waxed again her body grew again, and at the full moon she stood as she had been before. He asked her what the trembling thing had been. "It was I," she said, "trembling in case even this penance should not be acceptable to God; for without his grace nothing we do has any worth." The Siddha, it is told, then said: the disciple has climbed higher than the guru; grant, O God, that I may become like her.

Her sayings carry the same teaching without the wonder:

Kuśa grass, flowers, sesame, lamps and water are not needed. One who takes the guru's word into the mind with true feeling, who longs of his own will to remember Śambhu: that is what is called the sahaja rite.

The tradition remembers her teaching less by speeches than by things she did, each of them aimed at a show of religion that had forgotten what it was for.

One day her guru was bathing in the river, and a little upstream from him Lallā began scrubbing the outside of an earthen pot that was full of dirt. He told her, with some scorn for her simplicity, that a pot could never be made clean by washing the outside. "Then how," she answered, "can your body become pure by bathing, so long as the inside is not made pure as well?"

Another day she went into a temple where the Siddha was worshipping the images. She told him she wanted somewhere private, being unclothed, to answer a call of nature. He hurried her out: this was a place where the gods were worshipped, he said, and what she meant to do would be a sacrilege. Then, she said, show me a place where there are no gods. He led her to a spot outside, and she scraped away the earth, and images lay beneath it. He led her to another, and again she uncovered images. Then she said to him:

The god is a stone, the temple is a stone; above and below, it is all one piece. Whom will you worship, stubborn Brahmin? Join your mind with the breath.

A third story is about praise and insult. A crowd of children was following her through a street with their usual noise, and a cloth merchant, angry on her behalf, drove them off. She went up to his shop and asked him for a length of cloth. He gave it at once. She asked him to cut it into two pieces of exactly equal weight, and he did, weighing them in his scales. She laid one piece over each shoulder and went on her way. Through the day, whenever someone greeted her with respect, she tied a knot in the cloth on one shoulder; whenever someone mocked her, she tied a knot in the cloth on the other. In the evening she came back to the merchant and asked him to weigh the two pieces again. They balanced exactly. Why were you angry with the children, she asked him; honour and abuse had made no more difference to her than the knots had made to the cloth.

The tellers set this saying beside the story:

Let them curse me, let them hurl words at me, let each say of me whatever he pleases; let them worship me with the flowers of sahaja. I am without stain: what is left over, and for whom?

Many tell the story of how she hid in a baker's oven, and they tell it in more than one way.

In the usual telling she was still wandering unclothed when Sayyid ʿAlī Hamadānī came to Kashmir. One day she saw him in the distance, and she cried out, "I have seen a man!", and turned and fled. A baker's shop stood close by, its oven fully heated for the day's bread, and she leapt into the blazing oven and vanished. The saint followed and asked whether any woman had come that way; the baker's wife, afraid, said she had seen no one. He went on searching, and suddenly Lallā came up out of the oven dressed in the green garments of Paradise.

Hindu tellers set the meeting at Khampur, south-west of Srinagar on the road to Shopian. They say she ran first into a shopkeeper's shop and was turned out of it, and only then into the baker's oven, so that people still say of her that she came to the shopkeeper and went to the baker. They say the baker fell senseless with fear, sure that the king would punish him for a woman's death, and that she rose from the oven clothed in gold. And they say that she hurried after the saint, and that from that day he became her constant companion. Others say that she came up out of the oven and was never seen again.

The Muslims of the valley keep another form of the story, in which the man she saw was not Sayyid ʿAlī but the Kashmiri saint Shaikh Nūr ud-Dīn. In that telling he searched for her after she had vanished into the oven and found nothing, until she appeared of her own accord in the green garments of Paradise; asked where she had been, she smiled and said that her soul had mingled with God. Then he, not to be outdone, vanished on the spot, and after a long search she found him hidden between two platters in the form of a diamond.

Some tellers say that from the day she saw "a man" she covered herself. Others make no such claim. The tellers read her cry by her own words: a man was one who feared God, and she had seen one.

Kashmir honours Shaikh Nūr ud-Dīn as its own patron saint. Hindus call him Nund Rishi or Sahajānanda, and people go out every week to his shrine at Tsrār Sharīf, to be there for the Friday prayers. His people's memory and hers grew into each other, and a number of stories set the two of them side by side.

It is said that she learned from him; Hindu tellers, for their part, say she was there at his beginning. When he was born, the story goes, the infant would not take his mother's milk. Lallā went to him and said: you were not ashamed to be born, so why are you ashamed to drink? And the child began to feed. She asked his mother her name, and when the mother answered that it was Sudar, Lallā said: truly, pearls come out of the ocean.

Other stories set her with both saints at once, and with her own teacher. Once, they say, she played hide and seek with Shaikh Nūr ud-Dīn and Sayyid ʿAlī. She found each of them where he had hidden; but when her own turn came they could not find her anywhere, until they called her name three times as she had told them to, and she was suddenly there. Asked where she had been, she said she had merged herself in the five elements, where no one could have found her.

Another day the four of them, the two saints, the Siddha and Lallā, were sitting together talking of God when a storm cloud gathered. One said rain was coming, one said hail, one said snow. Lallā rebuked them for making predictions: if this is asceticism, she said, why the trickery? The Kashmiri word for trickery is also the word for a small round sleet like poppy seed; and as soon as she had said it, that sleet began to fall.

Hindu tellers also remember a contest of powers with Sayyid ʿAlī, who set a pot of rice and water on his own head and made it boil there without fire. Lallā led him down to the river, dipped her hand in the water, and the whole river grew hot and began to bubble.

The Muslims of the valley, for their part, preserve verses in which Lallā, Nūr ud-Dīn and his disciple answer one another, each finishing the same four-line form in turn. In one exchange they speak of the best light, the best pilgrimage, the best kinsman and the best comfort. Lallā's answer comes last: there is no light like the knowledge of God, no pilgrimage like the search for him, no kinsman like the Lord, and no comfort like the fear of God.

Others tell the same exchange as one between Lallā and her own teacher, Sed Bāyu, and there too she answers last.

No one agrees on how Lallā left the world, and the disagreement is part of how she is remembered.

Some say she never died: she passed through the baker's fire and came out of it clothed, and she is held to be living still, one of the saints who do not die.

Others say she lived to a great age and died at Bijbehara, south-east of Srinagar, just outside the great mosque there, near its south-eastern corner. When she gave up her life, they say, her soul rose up into the air like a flame of light, and then was gone.

The Muslims of the valley who keep the story of Lallā and Nūr ud-Dīn end it by saying that the shrine of these two holy persons is much visited by the people of Kashmir and the lands around it.

She herself speaks of death without fear:

I came into saṃsāra for tapas, and I found the natural light of awakening. No one will die for me, and I will die for no one. If I die, it is well; if I live, it is well.

No early book of her sayings has come down, and no two of the handwritten collections that were made agree in what they hold or how they word it. Many of her sayings were forgotten, one by one, as the years went by. The rest lived in memory, in a land where learning had always been carried in memory, by people who were careful to pass on every word exactly as they had received it.

In the eighteenth century, it is said, a learned man of Kashmir named Rājānaka Bhāskara gathered sixty of her sayings and set beside each of them a verse of his own in Sanskrit, saying the same thing in the language of the learned. He opened his work by bowing to Gaṇeśa and remembering his guru's sandals, and closed it with a single verse: that he had set out plainly, in sixty ślokas, the sayings of the yoginī Lallā, and that the work was offered to Śiva. His sixty, each with his verse beside it, are the sayings gathered here.

Other collections were made later, larger than his, and other reciters kept still other sayings. In the twentieth century a very old man of the village of Gush, some thirty miles beyond Bārāmūla and not far from the shrine of Śāradā, was found to know more than a hundred of her sayings by heart. He had received them from his own family, generation after generation, and he recited them word for word, including words whose meaning no one any longer knew. He would not change a syllable to make them easier. It was the way her words had always travelled.

It is told that she once came back to explain one of them. Long after her time a holy man named Mirza Kak was coming home from the shrine of Jvālāmukhī at Khrew, and as they drew near Pāmpur his disciples asked him what one of her sayings meant. It was this one:

Rise, lady, make ready the worship; take wine, meat and cakes in your hand. If you know the supreme state, the Imperishable, then take hiśīkhar and kṣiśīkhar as well.

He explained it to them for hours, and still they wondered in their hearts how Lallā herself would have explained it. He knew their wish without their speaking it. That night he took them to Lal Trāg, the pool beside her old house, and they stayed there. At midnight a woman stood before them. Mirza Kak bowed to her and gave her a seat, and of her own accord she began to explain the saying, more deeply than he had done. Then she went away, and was gone. It was Lallā herself, he told them, come to give them what they had wished for.

She left her own account of the knowledge she found, and of how few go in to take it:

I grew weary searching for my own self by myself; no one has reached the hidden knowledge. I went into laya in it and came to the wine-house: the jars stand full and brimming, and no one is drinking.