LAL DED – A MYSTIC POETESS OF
ANCIENT
Lalla or Lal Ded was a female wandering Saiva ascetic (Yogini) of
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
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
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 back
in the then old Hindu doctrine of bhakti or
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 Yogini of
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 back 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.