I, Lalla Read online

  RANJIT HOSKOTE

  I, LALLA

  The Poems of Lal Dĕd

  Translated from the Kashmiri with an Introduction and Notes by

  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 southwar
d 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 bef
ore 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: