Power, Gender, and the Classification of a Kashmir Saiva 'Mystic'

Abstract

The hermeneutic of suspicion Grace Jantzen applies to the gendered construction of Christian 'mysticism' is a useful lens for understanding the religious authority attributed to Lalleśwarī of Kashmir. In the hagiographies and hagiographical scholarship about Lalleśwarī, three strands run parallel to Jantzen's genealogy: the exclusion of women from the institutions of religious authority, the coding of religious authority as masculine, and the association of women with the erotic. The two narratives intersect in the 20th century, when Lalleśwarī's claim to spiritual authority through her experience of 'the void' of Śiva-consciousnessiscementedthroughappealtowestern(particularlyJamesian) discourse on mysticism as an ineffable subjective state of union. At each juncture, however, the evidence of Lalleśwarī's vaakhs pushes against her interpreters' assumptions to suggest something of her own authorising strategies. A seventeenth-century Persian chronicle, The Secrets of the Pious, tells of the meet- ing of a famous Sufi teacher, Shāh Hamadān, with an unnamed wise woman (yoginī). Having transcended the world's scruples about external appearance, the yoginī sat naked by the roadside to dispense wisdom to passersby. When Hamadān came to town, however, she exclaimed, 'I have seen a man!' and ran to hide at the grocer's shop. The grocer shooed her away, and she proceeded to the baker's house. The baker, too, was less than welcoming; but before he knew it, she had jumped into the hot oven for cover. Miraculously, she then emerged fully clothed in garments of gold and went out to converse with the saint. 1 This yoginī would later be identi- fied as the Kashmiri poet-saint Lalleśwarī, also known as Lalla or Lal Ded, who lived in Kashmir in the fourteenth century. 2 Kashmiris tell this story about her so fre- quently that it is encapsulated in a famous proverb: 'She came to the grocer's but arrived at the baker's'. Although this tale, as part of Hamadān's hagiography, is designed to assert his superiority over other holy persons, Lalleśwarī is also revered as a great mystic in her own right. 3