Power, Gender, and the Construction of a Kashmir Saiva Mystic

Author’s final version Michelle Voss Roberts, “Power, Gender, and the Construction of a Kashmir aiva Mystic,” Journal of Hindu Studies 3.3 (2010): 279-297. A seventeenth-century Persian chronicle, The Secrets of the Pious, tells of the meeting 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.i This yoginī would later be identified as the Kashmiri poet-saint Lalle warī, also known as Lalla or Lal Ded, who lived in Kashmir in the fourteenth century.ii Kashmiris tell this story about her so frequently 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, Lalle warī is also revered as a great mystic in her own right.iii Like most hagiographies, the stories surrounding Lalle warī reveal much about the views of religious authority belonging to the people who tell them. In the monikers applied to her— ‘prophetess’,iv ‘siddha yogini’,v ‘the wise old woman of Kashmiri culture’,vi ‘a goddess, a seer, who had descended upon this earth with a divine message for mankind’,vii and a ‘mystic saintpoetess’viii—one can variously discern a Jewish-Christian emphasis on prophecy, an interest in claiming a predecessor for the contemporary Siddha Yoga movement to, a diasporic concern for preserving Kashmiri culture, and a manner of Hindu piety. Each of these titles, however, is likely influenced by the concept of the ‘mystic’. In the modern period, whether in India or the West, 1 Author’s final version mysticism weighs heavily in notions of religious authority. As Grace Jantzen has demonstrated in Power, Gender, and Christian Mysticism, the content ascribed to this word tells a great deal about who counts as a religious authority in any given context, and why. Changes in this content point to gendered issues of power. When the wise woman declares that among all the human beings she has known, she has finally ‘seen a man’ in the Sufi saint, she testifies to her ability to recognize spiritual authority—a spiritual authority that is coded as masculine, either in her own view or in the view of those who construct her identity for subsequent generations. Although Jantzen’s genealogy of mysticism attends almost exclusively to Christian discourse, it is worth considering how her thesis that ‘the idea of mysticism and who counts as a mystic is a social construction’ix applies in other contexts. The hagiographies and verses of Lalle warī will serve as a case study for the gendered construction of religious authority in India. It may be possible to glimpse rays of Lalle warī’s own authorizing strategies—such as her renunciation and her mastery of a yogic tradition—through the patriarchal readings I survey here; yet I will refrain from a new exercise of hagiographical power that would claim to find the ‘real’ Lalle warī beneath so many layers of interpretation. I focus on the gendered power that operates in the posthumous construction of her authority rather than attempting such a full-scale construction myself. Jantzen’s insight that power and gender shape our categories holds true for Lalle warī’s legacy. The first written records of Lalle warī’s life that appear three hundred years afterwards exhibit patterns similar to the Western genealogy regarding female embodiment, sexuality, and emotion.x Further parallels come into relief in twentieth-century Indian commentaries that mirror the modern Western construction of mysticism more directly. In order to distinguish historically 2 Author’s final version between earlier ‘indigenous’ interpretations of female religious authority and those inflected by colonial scholarship, I briefly trace India’s place in the genealogy of mysticism. Genealogies of Mysticism Jantzen follows Michel Foucault in tracing the operation of power in the construction of mysticism, but she attends particularly to gendered ideals and exclusions. Her genealogy of the mystical begins with the secret rituals of ancient Greek mystery religions. In most sects initiates (mustikoi) were almost exclusively men. Within the first few centuries of Christianity, the mystical became an issue of access to scriptural texts and a way of reading that uncovered a hidden, allegorical meaning. The mysteries of God were increasingly bound to scripture, liturgy, and the male ecclesiastical hierarchy that controlled them. The mystical paths that developed in the Middle Ages emphasized denial of the body and the importance of the intellect. The intellectual strand extending from Pseudo-Dionysius to Meister Eckhart equated women with sensuality or a lower kind of reason. An affective strand of mysticism appealed strongly to many women, even as Bernard of Clairvaux and others opposed their sensory and erotic tendencies. When women claimed direct contact with God through visions, scholastic discourse recoiled with ever more intellectualized models of religious authority. Women paid for what authority they gained through strict control of their bodies and sexuality; and in the heresy trials and witch hunts of the later Middle Ages, women were suspected of being especially susceptible to the demonic. In a dramatic reversal of the emphasis on intellect, Kant asserted the impossibility of the mind’s access to God. William James’s definition of mysticism as an ineffable, non-rational, subjective, private psychological state became enormously influential in the modern period. Jantzen observes that with this last move, women’s access to mysticism is finally rendered safeŚ 3 Author’s final version no longer public or powerful, it is relegated to the domestic sphere. In each case, historical definitions of mysticism are tied up with ‘what religion is really about’ś and each case, for Jantzen, the shifts in meaning mark the foreclosure of women’s access to religious authority. Richard King extends the genealogy of the mystical to include India. He demonstrates how what was excluded from modern western constructions of rationality was projected on the ‘mystic East’ in nineteenth-century colonial scholarship. The teachings of the non-dualist philosophical system of Advaita Vedānta and the practices of yoga offered intense, subjective, unitive experiences that came to stand for Hinduism as a whole. Western scholars wearing Jamesian lenses found in these schools what they were looking for: an essentially mystical East. xi Conveniently for the colonial endeavor, mysticism no longer counted as authoritative in the public sphereŚ ‘the patriarchal discourses that have excluded the ‘feminine’ and the female from the realms of rationality, subjectivity, and authority have also been used to exclude the nonwestern world from the same spheres of influence’.xii The feminization of the mystical and that of India functioned in Orientalist and colonial thought to justify the subjugation of India by the more rational, technologically superior West. Although introduced through colonial means, these perspectives left their trace on modern Indian religion and scholarship.xiii Figures such as Vivekananda embraced the stereotype of the mystical East to counter western attitudes of superiority: as the more spiritual culture, India provided the cure for what ails the technologically advanced but spiritually bereft West. Indian scholars have also used the Jamesian concept of mysticism as a lens for viewing Indian saints like Lalle warī. In The Ascent of Self: A Reinterpretation of the Mystical Poetry of LallaDed, B. N. Parimoo uses James’ distinction of ‘second-hand’ institutional religion from ‘firsthand’ mystical religion to describe Lalle warīŚ she ‘was a mystic to the core …. Aside of 4 Author’s final version mysticism, she felt not the least interested in any dogmatic religion. ‘Direct awareness’ of the Lord was the be-all and end-all of her life’.xiv Parimoo treats yoga and mysticism as synonyms. He codes Lalle warī’s message that the ‘Universal Spirit is One, and we are but His earthly tabernacles’ as ‘the basic tenet of all religious teaching’.xv He also arranges Lalle warī’s sayings to form a stage-wise mystical progression complete with a ‘dark night’ of despair, progress through yogic discipline, and the subjective unity of the self with reality. Lalle warī’s hagiographies offer a window into the gendered process by which Indian religious figures are grafted into the genealogy of Christian mysticism.xvi Four sites in Lalle warī’s identity as a ‘mystic’ invite deeper comparisonŚ the exclusion of women from the institutions of religious authority, the notion of spiritual authority as masculine, the association of women with the erotic, and the role of experience in religious authority. At each of these junctures, the gendered construction of religious authority runs parallel to or intersects with Jantzen’s western genealogy. ‘My Guru Told Me Only One Word’: Gendered Institutions of Authority Lalle warī left behind no writing, but her aphoristic sayings (vaakhs) lived on in oral culture and were written down centuries later. We have little reliable historical evidence for her life save the hagiographies that emerged beginning in the seventeenth century that testify to her iconoclastic behavior and yogic powers.xvii Lalle warī’s life mirrors the hagiographies of many women saints in India. She married into a family unsympathetic to her spiritual life. Lalle warī’s mother-in-law effectively starved her and told lies impugning her fidelity. The situation came to a head one day when Lalle warī returned from the river where she lingered in meditation. Suspecting an affair, her husband struck out at her, shattering the water jar she carried upon her 5 Author’s final version head. Miraculously, the water remained in its shape upon her head until she could finish her chores. After she tossed the remaining water into the yard (where it grew into a pond known as Lalla Trag), she renounced her home to wander in pursuit of union with iva. Because institutions play a large part in defining religious authority, Lalle warī’s renunciation of such institutions makes her authority somewhat problematic for Kashmir aiva hagiographers. We may recall that in the Christian Middle Ages, when the mystical was a way of reading scripture, ‘mystics’ had access to the church’s educational systems and were eligible for office in ecclesiastical institutions. By definition, they were men; women like Hildegard of Bingen or Heloise were exceptions that proved the rule. Recognizing that Lalle warī’s relationship to Kashmir aiva institutions is occluded by hagiographical efforts designed to elevate her and simultaneously to leave the tradition’s self-understanding intact, we must attempt to glean hints about the institutional spaces that may or may not have been open to a woman like Lalle warī. In Lalle warī’s day, several mutually influential textual and ritual schools of Kashmir aivism were in operation. Proponents of the Spanda, Krama, Trika, and Kaula schools all accepted the texts of the others. A strong emphasis on the guru-disciple relationship locates most Kashmir aiva adepts within a lineage of transmission of texts and meditation practices from the tradition’s founder, Vasugupta (c. 875-925 CE), to the great systematizer, Abhinavagupta (c. 975-1025). Women appear in these texts primarily as accessories, as yoginīs or dūtīs that serve as partners for male practitioners in esoteric or ‘left-handed’ sexual rites of the Kaula branch.xviii Although Lalle warī attests that ‘left-handed rites’ can lead to the Absolute (K60-61), the hagiographers are adamant that Lalle warī eschewed this roleŚ ‘her husband was a follower of the left handed tantrik order (vamacara) in which wine and flesh were freely made use of … 6 Author’s final version [S]he could not get reconciled with her husband but rather admonished him on this account’.xix The androcentric nature of the rites, in which female sexual partners are primarily instruments in the male’s liberation, renders the idea of her participation repugnant to hagiographers. The importance of the patriarchal household also complicates Lalle warī’s position within her tradition. Although Kashmir aiva traditions were rooted in Tantric (non-Vedic) texts and practices, by the fourteenth century they had reached a comfortable compromise with Vedic orthopraxy. Tantric practitioners had somewhat more extensive ritual obligations; but the major difference was the Kashmir aiva insistence that sannyāsa, the renunciation of the home and material goods that is the fourth and final life stage of an upper-caste Hindu male, was unnecessary: liberation could be gained from within the householder stage of life.xx Furthermore, although renunciation is a common form of religious authorization outside of Kashmir aivism, by the fourteenth century, Kashmir aivism had become the practice of householders rather than wandering ascetics. As Lalle warī affirms, ‘even if attending worldly affairs [vèvahö:ry] night and day’ or engaging in the ‘householders’ active life’ (K110, 111), one can remain awake to one’s true identity. Lalle warī’s renunciation of her marriage home stands in stark opposition to this ideal. In theory, the female householder should have been able to pursue her spiritual path in the midst of her worldly lifeś this option was foreclosed to Lalle warī, given her family’s opposition. Although her exit from her marriage is somewhat unique because of the adamancy with which her tradition eschews renunciation, it illustrates a pattern that has been observed among other Indian holy women. For example, in the twelfth-century Vira aiva movement, which radically rejected Brahmanical values, ‘the high percentage of unmarried Shiva Sharanes, nearly 50 percent of the total number of women Virasaivites, in contrast to the male Shiva Sharanas, the 7 Author’s final version majority of whom are married, is reflective of the spiritual politics which inheres in a patriarchal society’.xxi Vijaya Ramaswamy argues that deviant spiritual behavior is more difficult for women than even for low-caste men, whose behavior could be incorporated into a patriarchal framework and whose spiritual authority would be accepted by the women in their households.xxii Women effectively take a double renunciation, from patriarchy as well as from caste values. Antoinette DeNapoli observes that contemporary female ascetics choose the difficult path of leaving home as an avenue for female power, authority, and agency.xxiii Although Lalle warī’s renunciation might be viewed as a marker of her spiritual authority, subsequent tradition ameliorates its challenge by reintegrating her into the householder system. In response to the danger posed by her husband’s violence, the hagiographers treat her marriage home as an anomaly, faulting it for being less learned and pious than her family of originŚ ‘Having been brought up in an atmosphere of piety and scholarship she could not get reconciled with her husband, but rather admonished him on this account. This was one of the factors that accounts for her renunciation of worldly life so soon after marriage’.xxiv By reading Lalle warī’s renunciation as a judgment upon a single impious family rather than upon a system with no space for women’s religious authority, the hagiographers reincorporate her into the patriarchal framework she leaves behind. An appeal to the father’s home, which Lalle warī left to marry around the age of ten, also partially resolves the problem of how she gained access to the Sanskrit texts and practices of the tradition. The legends agree that she was born to a Brahmin family, where she would have participated in religious worship and received some education. Although Lalle warī exhibits familiarity with the technical vocabulary of the Vijñānabhairava and Svacchanda Tantras,xxv the full extent of her Sanskrit education is uncertain because all of her teachings are in vernacular 8 Author’s final version Kashmiri. Hagiographical speculation steps in to posit that her father ‘must have been a pious, religious man, of course, for the Lord in the Bhagavadgītā says that those who do not accomplish yoga in their lifetime, despite their best efforts, take birth in the house of a yogi or a pious man’. Parimoo elaborates, ‘A close study of Lalla’s verses leaves one in no doubt that her parental home had been a veritable yogic school and a spiritual seminary for the budding, enthusiastic child’xxvi—an explanation that both educates Lalle warī and outfits her for the trial of her marriage. In the Kashmir aiva tradition, as with the original mustikoi of the Greek mystery religions, initiation as a ‘mystic’ requires extensive training. The tradition accounts for the remainder of Lalle warī’s mystical formation through an appeal to the guru who, as Grierson and Barnett put it, ‘confides to his disciple the mysteries of religion’.xxvii Although Lalle warī nowhere names her preceptor, Kashmiri tradition secures an authoritative lineage for her by identifying him as Siddha rikantha, a man ‘descended in direct lineage from Vasugupta, the founder of Kashmir aivaism [sic] in its present form’.xxviii Commentators disagree about the nature and extent of their relationship. Some place her firmly within a long tutelage that begins, again, in her father’s home. Thus, Parimoo names Siddha rikantha as the family priest, who schools the young until she is fully ‘competent (adhikāri)’ to be ‘initiated into the mysteries of sacred lore’.xxix For other commentators, the nature of Lalle warī’s initiation ( ) poses a problem. Alexis Sanderson describes three modes of initiation shared by the Trika and Krama schools: a lengthy program of contemplative worship, a higher path of ‘sudden enlightenment’ through the use of ‘mystical aphorisms’, and the most immediate means, in which ‘the goal was believed to be attained without any instruction, either spontaneously or through some non-verbal stimulus such as the guru’s glance’.xxx Because of the 9 Author’s final version relative difficulty for a girl under the age of ten to attain the first two kinds of training, Lalle warī’s initiation is thought to have been of the third type.xxxi She states that her guru told her only ‘one word’ (vachan, K21): My guru gave me this one precept: ‘withdraw your gaze from without, and concentrate on the self within.’ That became the turning point in Lalla’s life, and naked I began to dance. (K21) Rather than sitting at the guru’s feet for extended expositions of the sacred aiva texts, her contact with her guru may have been limited to a single meeting in which she gained instant enlightenment and thereby surpassed human institutions. This latter interpretation obviates the gendered problem of engagement in protracted study in a lineage of (male) teachers and disciples. Posthumous negotiations to locate a space for Lalle warī in the household, religion, and authoritative lineages of Kashmir aivism fit uneasily with the scant information that remains of the historical figure. She chafes against androcentric institutions, breaks completely with her marital home, and thus poses a challenge to those who posit her preservation of traditional values. In contrast to those who would claim her through association with a pious household or guru-student lineage, she appears to self-authorize precisely through renunciation of these authorizing institutions. ‘I Have Seen a Man’: Spiritual Authority as Masculine 10 Author’s final version Lalle warī’s habitual nudity, attested in legend and verse (K21, above), poses a further challenge for patriarchal hagiography. As in the West, women’s cultural associations with the body and materiality are obstacles to their spiritual authority. The prominence of Lalle warī’s naked body in her legacy leaves the tradition with some explaining to do, and hagiographies deftly use it to firm up a sense of spiritual authority as masculine. For example, according to the legend cited at the beginning of this article, Lalle warī is unconcerned about her nakedness until Shāh Hamadān shows upś she then cries, ‘I have seen a man’, and miraculously clothes herself. In the same vein, Neerja Mattoo reports, She seems to have become completely unself-conscious, almost unaware of her body. … She refused to be bothered by what the world would say when she went about naked. When she was asked whether she felt no shame at showing her body to all the men around her, she asked whether there was a man around! To her the ordinary mass of people was no better than sheep or other dumb animals. … who, apart from the Lord, was a real man?xxxii For Mattoo, Lalle warī’s nakedness is a sign of her authority because it signals her transcendence of (rather than identification with) her female body. Spiritual authority is masculine because, in Lalle warī’s own words, only the Lord is a ‘real man’. The devaluation of the feminine in such statements is not accidental but has roots in Kashmir aiva cosmology. The feminine principle, akti, impels iva to create but is not his equal partner. He is the more basic principle; she emanates from him and is again absorbed into him in the cycle of cosmic dissolution. This absorption of the feminine is echoed in aiva mythology when iva appears in ‘his’ androgynous state. The goddess ‘occupies a position beneath [ iva] and acts as an intermediary between the immanent and transcendent pole of 11 Author’s final version reality’.xxxiii The feminine is thus closer to the body and the material realm. Jaishree Kak Odin argues that ‘Ordering reality into hierarchical dualities and binaries, the Hindu discourses lead to fundamental gender splitting which reduces women to their bodies and assigns them an ultimate object status that makes them unsuitable for any direct salvation schemes of the tradition’.xxxiv She writes of the Hamadān episode, ‘[Lalle warī] as a woman of flesh and bones is unfit to encounter such a man, and hence, she must go through the ordeal of fire to get rid of her physical impurities and emerge fully clothed before encountering the Sufi teacher’.xxxv Lalle warī attempts to transcend gender, but the naked fact of her physicality remains to be purified and clothed. Despite the common argument that all persons share the same essential nature, and that enlightened persons should scorn external appearances including those that differentiate men and women,xxxvi Lalle warī’s transcendence of gender remains incomplete for her tradition. The hagiographical explanations for her nakedness are somewhat at odds with the pictures that accompany these stories. In one attempt to cover the offending body parts, a spurious etymology for the name Lalla posits that ‘the flabbiness of the lower part of her belly (lal in Kashmiri) increased in size and hung loose over her pubic region’.xxxvii Hence, in twentieth-century art depicting Lalle warī without clothes, her body modestly covers itself, stomach sagging downward to cover her pubic area, her hair covering her breasts. In another notable rendition, excerpts from her own text are plastered over her midsection from neck to knees.xxxviii It is not difficult to find lurking beneath the desire to cover Lalle warī’s body an unarticulated suspicion of the ‘free-floating chaotic potential’ of a ‘strong, independent female’,xxxix particularly a female who has removed her sexuality from the control of the patriarchal household. 12 Author’s final version Heroic physical restraint is often central to patriarchal constructions of religious authority. Jantzen argues that European women ‘had to pay for their spirituality by fierce bodily control’xl and notes that late medieval efforts to uncover heresy often accused ‘false’ mystics of sexual promiscuity. The hagiographic tradition’s rejection of Lalle warī’s participation in the tantric rites indicates the importance of controlling her sexuality: she must not possess the kind of sexual agency lauded in accomplished male practitioners. Lalle warī takes bodily control in a different direction. She recognizes the so-called ‘left-handed’ tantric rites involving meat, wine, and sex as possible routes to the Absolute (K60-61); but she teaches a simpler path. Like the female Christian mystics, she embraces the bodily control of yogic practice; however, she eschews the harsh asceticism associated with her medieval Christian counterparts (and some of her contemporaries). Eating too much will lead you nowhere, not eating will make you conceited. Be moderate in eating and you will become even minded. Because of moderation the gates will be unbolted to you. (K27) Moderation and attention to the simple, natural (sahaj) movement of the breath are sufficient for realizing union with ivaŚ ‘to contemplate sahaj is the teaching’ (my translation, cf. K59). Through this teaching, she lays claim to a deep-seated confidence that is concerned with neither external appearance nor excessive constraint. In the larger Indian sectarian context, Lalle warī’s decision to roam naked stirs the waters of longstanding debates about women’s spiritual authority. A dispute between the Digambara (sky-clad) and vetāmbara (white-clad) Jains revolves around whether renunciation of clothing is necessary for salvation. The Digambaras answer this question in the affirmative; but because 13 Author’s final version they bar women from nudity and hence from full mendicancy, they also teach that women cannot attain within their current life. The Digambara requirement of renunciation is at odds with the Kashmir aiva embrace of the married, non-celibate life; yet Lalle warī would find full inclusion by neither community’s standards. In fact, as Padmanabh Jaini has noted in her survey of the Jain debates, no sect within Brahminical Hinduism supports women’s mendicancy, and while Buddhism makes provisions for the order of celibate nuns, there is no place for nudity.xli Beyond trends regarding the treatment of women’s bodies and sexuality in Lalle warī’s hagiographies, a further parallel with Jantzen’s narrative exists in the notion of the sublimated eroticism of women’s devotion. ‘Passionately I Loved Him’: Women’s Spirituality as Erotic Excluded from intellectual modes of mysticism, women in the Christian Middle Ages found spiritual authority through a more affective path. Bernard of Clairvaux and the Victorines read the erotic poetry of the biblical Song of Songs as an allegory for the spiritual encounter of Christ and the soul. This mystical reading of scripture escaped the control of the men who were trained in scriptural interpretation, and relatively uneducated nuns and laywomen began employing the bridal idiom for their direct encounters with God. A subsequent backlash against those that took this path to uncomfortably literal levels did not prevent women from capitalizing on affective and experiential possibilities. A parallel to the erotic spirituality of the female Christian mystics appears in the bhakti movement in India. This devotional mode of spirituality appealed to both men and women as an alternative to intellectual (jñāna) or work-focused (karma) paths to union with God. Bhakti-yoga is laid out as early as the epic period in the Bhagavad Gītā. As a full-fledged devotional 14 Author’s final version movement, it worked its way through India starting in the far south in the sixth century CE, spreading through the middle and western regions around the twelfth century, and flourishing in the north by the seventeenth century.xlii Hindu women’s voices emerge in full force in this movement. Some bhaktas were passionate lovers of God with attributes (sagun ). For example, in much of the poetry of the sixteenth-century Rajasthani saint Mirabai, she crafts her spiritual identity as one of the female cowherd (gopī) lovers of Lord Krishna. Her verses brim with the idiom of erotic longing, jealousy, flirtation, and sexual union. In other places, however, Mirabai worships a god beyond attributes ( ), as do Mahadeviyakka, a twelfth century Kannada saint who worshiped iva in his aniconic form, and Bahina Bai, a seventeenth century Marathi poetess who focused on the non-dual reality behind the forms of Vishnu. Lalle warī’s hagiographers enjoy painting her with the same brush as the female bhaktas.xliii These women transgress boundaries of caste and religious observance by teaching in the vernacular (see Lalle warī’s vaakhs K57, 73, and 121). They also tend to transgress gender codes. Some, like Antal in the ninth century, refuse to marry any but God; others fail to fulfill their marital duties by leaving home like Lalle warī. Like Mirabai, Lalle warī suffers under a cruel mother-in-law and is accused of infidelity. Like Mahadeviyakka, she foregoes clothing. Some reports emphasize her yogic powers; like Bahina Bai, she is rumored to have had knowledge of past lives. And like both Antal and Mirabai, Lalle warī is also said to have avoided mortal death by simply merging into God. By assimilating Lalle warī to such frameworks, later Kashmir aivas are able to interpret her spiritual authority as feminine. Gendered ideals of sainthood are perhaps most striking in a subtle eroticization of Lalle warī’s spirituality. Lalle warī is no self-styled adulterous gopi. iva is not her lover, but the non-personal source and goal of the identity she realizes through yoga. Yet Kotru asserts, 15 Author’s final version ‘Bhakti is loving God with all our being’ś and he claims that Lalle warī’s ‘religion is more an affair of the heart than of the head’.xliv J. L. Kaul elaborates upon the mother-in-law’s charges of infidelity by describing Lalle warī’s prolonged absences as her ‘daily tryst with God’.xlv Grierson and Barnett depict her ‘dancing and singing in an ecstatic frenzy’śxlvi and S. S. Toshkhani elaborates her ‘mystical feelings’ in terms of the pangs of separation from [ iva], the passionate urge to unite with Him, the desperate quest and the frustration of losing the direction, the difficulties of the path, the intensity of suffering which only strengthens her determination to seem [sic] Him face to face and possess Him, the total surrender of will and the ecstasy of the final beatitude.xlvii Much of this litany could be lifted directly from any summary of Mirabai’s imagination of the gopī’s experience of Krishna-bhakti. This erotic slant finds its way into translation of Lalle warī’s verses. For example, the Kashmiri phrase lay körmas, which denotes immersion, mixing, or mingling, appears regularly in the vaakhs. In one line, which Odin translates, ‘Selfabsorption led me to the house of nectar’ (Odin #17), Kotru injects the theme of passionate loveŚ ‘Passionately I loved Him and reached the tavern’.xlviii It is questionable, however, whether Lalle warī ought to be associated with the bhakti movement at all. Her first hagiographies were not recorded until the seventeenth century, when the bhakti ideals of sainthood that had permeated the Indian subcontinent had made a definite imprint on these tales. Lalle warī’s thought does share some of the features of bhakti, including a transcendence of gender ideals that belies the attempt to find erotic sagun imagery in her verses. However, she precedes by generations the appearance of bhakti saints like Kabir and Ravidas in the far north.xlix These discrepancies indicate that, unlike Christian women saints who appropriate the eroticism of male monastics, Lalle warī’s biographers (and 16 Author’s final version not Lalle warī herself) gender her experiences as feminine through assimilation with bhakti frameworks. The stretch to project a ‘feminine’ spirituality onto her work overlooks the much more obvious yogic motif that Lalle warī draws from the wellspring of her Kashmir aiva tradition. Among over 128 of the vaakhs thought to be genuinely attributed to her, erotic imagery appears in only two verses; even here, yogic notions of merger through meditation predominate. I bore the pangs of his love, woke my beloved [la:l] saying, ‘Here is Lalla, Lalla, Lalla’. My body got purified when my mind attained oneness with Him. (K88) Maddened with love [lolà] I, Lalla, set out in search of Him … And, lo, I found the wise one in my own house. (K97) Lalle warī meditates upon the deity within and attains oneness through meditation. She plays on the resonance between her name, lal, that of the beloved la:l, and love itself, lolà, to describe the religious authority she gains through her mastery of yogic practice. The predominance of such yogic terminology in Lalle warī’s work is better explained through Kashmir aivism than through the incipient bhakti movement and its attendant eroticism.l In the modern period, Jantzen tells us, mysticism is treated as subjective and intensely emotionalś therefore, ‘women, who are deemed to be prone to such emotional intensity, are prime candidates for being counted mystics’.li If Lalle warī is a bhakta, wrapped up in the subjective, emotional, private realm of her mystical experience, then she poses no real threat to the public sphere of masculine reasoning. Indeed, Toshkhani insists that her ‘poetry is not the poetry of social concern …. This is again a false image, a deliberate twist given to her spiritual humanism to suit ideological considerations’.lii In contrast to Lalle warī’s claim to the heart of 17 Author’s final version her tradition, the tendency to eroticize her thought reinforces the association of women with sexuality and emotion and undercuts the philosophical and practical thrust of her teaching. ‘The Void Mingles With the Void’: Mystical Experience as Ineffable In the medieval Christian world, women gained audience through appeals to experience. Jantzen observes, ‘But for the women, what else than their own experience was available? The usual routes of education and ecclesiastical preferment were not open to them’.liii Thus, women’s point of departure was not scriptural texts, systematic treatises, or displays of intellect or rationality, but something more direct and unmediated. Visionaries like Hildegard of Bingen monopolized experiential claims to such an extent that even men who had visions were ‘accused of being ‘feminine.’’liv Lalle warī, too, has visions—she witnesses three cosmic cycles of creation and dissolution (K10-11, 114)—yet the experience that secures her reputation today is not her prowess as a visionary as much as her non-dual relation with iva. Whereas Lalle warī challenges her interpreters regarding her relation to religious institutions, the masculinity of religious authority, and the eroticism of feminine spirituality, she and her twentieth-century hagiographers agree about the importance of the experience of union with God. This confluence of interests presents a surprising counterpoint to Janzen’s critique of modernity’s definition of mysticism. Jantzen charges that William James’ assumption of an ineffable core mystical experience is based in misleadingly selective readings of Meister Eckhart and John of the Cross. The purportedly ineffable experience of union that clinches modernity’s definition of mysticism (and that draws Hindu spirituality into contemporary definitions of the mystical) is based on erroneous interpretations of the Christian tradition. Jantzen makes the important distinction that ‘the ineffability of God should not be confused with the alleged 18 Author’s final version ineffability of subjective experiences with which contemporary philosophers are preoccupied’.lv She also notes that the Christian ‘mystics’ appear to have plenty to say about their supposedly ‘ineffable’ experiences. If Lalle warī’s appeal to ‘the void’ as the apex of her spiritual search secures her status as a mystic by modern standards, is a similar kind of distortion occurring in contemporary readings of her work? As Parimoo reconstructs Lalle warī’s journeyŚ And now, at last, by a supreme effort of yogic practice, she was able to annihilate the lower fields of consciousness and in the Supra-mental state merge into the Absolute Being, which is attributeless, nameless, and formless. She uses the word … Void, because the transcendental Being is ineffable. It may have been an experience approaching that of ‘nothingness.’ Nothingness is certainly difficult to describe. Therefore, Lalla uses the word ūnya, as the synonym for the Self, immanent and transcendental, which in the state of yoga are said to be experienced as one.lvi It would be possible to read Parimoo as an instance of Indian scholarship’s reliance on western narratives of mysticism or upon western essentialization of Hindu traditions. Surprisingly, however, the evidence of Lalle warī’s own testimony suggests that when it comes to the assumption that mysticism is an ineffable experience, her spirituality matches the modern definition better than the medieval Christian mystics. In order to understand this claim, one must know something about the unity of ontology and epistemology in Kashmir aivism, which offers some basis for an experience of union beyond thought or language.lvii The Kashmiri aiva cosmos consists of thirty-six levels or tattvas that emanate from divine consciousness.lviii Yogic practitioners can reverse the process of creation by ascending in meditation through the gross elements; the organs of sense, action, and cognition; and various degrees of subject-object relation to arrive at iva tattva, the 19 Author’s final version consciousness of pure ‘I’. Before the cosmos emanates from its source in divine consciousness, there is iva tattva. This complete unity of subject and object can be retrieved through meditation because human consciousness participates in universal consciousness. Although each of the tattvas represents a way of experiencing the world, Lalle warī comments that the material senses and mind are insufficient to apprehend their source. Mind and intelligence, which—like language—operate in the sphere of subject-object duality, are only middle tiers among the possible modes of consciousness. Lalle warī names the apex of her journey ‘the void’Ś By constant practice the manifested universe gets merged in the universal self. The world of name and form gets merged in the vastness of the void as one homogeneous whole. This, O Brahmin, is the true doctrine. (K133) She employs a word related to that for ‘emptiness’ ( ūnyatā) in Buddhist thought to evoke the utter absence of dualityŚ ‘The void gets merged into the void’ (Su:nyès Su:nya:h mi:lith gav, K90). Unlike the preponderance of medieval Christian evidence, both the experience and the object experienced are ultimately void for Lalle warī. Three features of Lalle warī’s thought resonate with the modern definition of mysticismŚ its subjectivity, its ineffability, and its transcendence of reason. First, the ‘subjectivization and … psychologization of mysticism’ one sees in modern theorists such as Evelyn Underhill takes an interesting twist in Kashmir aivism, where liberation is the complete awareness of the Ultimate Subject.lix Second, the yoginī’s experience of iva is ineffable insofar as it transcends the duality of subject and object upon which language is based. Third, the idea that mind and intellect are 20 Author’s final version limited powers resembles the Romantic concept of mysticism as ‘an experience of union as contrasted with a process of rationality’.lx Through this lens Lalle warī’s experience reads like a prototype for the mystical, yet the historical contingency of the category must not be forgotten. For Lalle warī, the void is but one of a multitude of possible relations between subject and object; and between manifestation and absorption there is much that can be objectively cognized and described. Although James and Underhill forge their definitions of mysticism in a period of increased contact with Asian traditions, their essentialism remains ill-suited for the intricacies of Indian schools of though. Conclusion The hermeneutic of suspicion Jantzen applies to the gendered construction of ‘mysticism’ is a useful lens for understanding the religious authority attributed to Lalle warī of Kashmir. Kashmir aivas in the fourteenth century were not engaged in disputes over the nature of mysticism and who qualified as a mystic: the word was not part of their vocabulary. Other categories for the adept—yogi, sādhaka, pandit—would have been prominent, along with particular institutions for training and rites of initiation. From what little we know about the historical woman, Lalle warī encountered gendered ambivalences in the religious institutions of her dayŚ her householder’s life proved untenable, her renouncer’s life unorthodox, and the nature of her initiation and relation with her guru controversial. Her earliest hagiographies overcome these difficulties by coding religious authority as masculine and linking her to male-dominated religious institutions. They also render her life acceptable through association with the feminized devotional mode of the later bhakti saints. Lalle warī’s hagiographical tradition runs parallel with the western genealogy on each of these points. 21 Author’s final version The two stories intersect in modernity. Lalle warī’s modern hagiographies reflect an interanimation of Orientalist research, Indian scholarship, and modern concepts of mysticism, so that the Jamesian definition of mysticism as private, subjective, intense psychological states has imprinted Lalle warī scholarship with ambiguous power dynamics. Jantzen would have us register how the public impact of Lalle warī’s life and message—including her challenge to patriarchal institutions—is neutralized if mysticism is entirely privatized and domesticated. It keeps God (and women) safely out of politics and the public realm; it allows mysticism to flourish as a secret inner life, while those who nurture such an inner life can generally be counted on to prop up rather than to challenge the status quo of their workplaces, their gender roles, and the political systems by which they are governed, since their anxieties and angers will be allayed in the privacy of their own hearts’ search for tranquility. lxi If mysticism denotes only private, subjective states, then the objective philosophical content of Lalle warī’s teaching about the origin and meaning of the world, the benefits of meditation, and the functioning of society disappear. Jantzen’s hermeneutic clears the way for other aspects of Lalle warī’s legacy to emerge, such as her renunciation, her teaching of a simple or natural path, and her appropriation of a space for women within Kashmir aiva yoga, all of which provide alternatives to masculinist constructions of authority. Because Jantzen writes with an eye to lifting up women’s suppressed authority, critics have viewed ‘her own feminist attempt to deconstruct and unmask previous relationships of mysticism to power as being just one more attempt to seize power’.lxii Indeed, all interpretation wields power, and Foucauldian investigations such as Jantzen’s have just begun to lay bare the gendered circuitry underlying knowledge and rewire it in new ways. Given the scarcity of reliable historical information available on Lalle warī, my suggestions regarding Lalle warī’s 22 Author’s final version conception of her authority must be held loosely. The primary benefit of Jantzen’s approach is to illuminate the discourse surrounding the yoginī, if not the yoginī herself. Is Lalle warī a mystic? The notion of mystical experience as ineffable resonates more with Lalle warī’s epistemological framework than with the Christian mystics used to forge this definition. But the question of whether Lalle warī is a mystic is for Jantzen—and, if we have read her sympathetically, for us as well—the wrong question. Because ‘there is no such thing as an ‘essence’ of mysticism, a single type of experience which is characterized as mystical while others are excluded’,lxiii we proceed most fruitfully when we ask what definitions are being applied, why she is deemed worthy of the label, and what currents of power and gender flow through these negotiations. 23 Author’s final version REFERENCES Baba, Duru. ‘Lal Ded (Kashmiri)’. http://lalded.blogspot.com/. Bhat, S. ‘Lal Ded: Her Spiritualism and Present Scientific World Order’. In Lal Ded: The Great Kashmiri Saint-Poetess, edited by S. S. Toshkhani, 25-37. New Delhi: APH Publishing Corporation, 2002. DeNapoli, Antoinette. ‘“Crossing Over the Ocean of Existence”: Performing “Mysticism” and Exerting Power and Agency by Female Sādhus in Rajasthan’. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Society for Hindu-Christian Studies, Chicago, IL, November 1-3, 2008. Flood, Gavin D. ‘The aiva Traditions’. In The Blackwell Companion to Hinduism, edited by Gavin Flood, 200-28. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003. ________. Body and Consciousness in Kashmir aivism. San Francisco: Mellen Research University Press, 1993. Grierson, Sir George, and Lionel D. Barnett. Lallā-VākhyāniŚ The Wise Sayings of Lal Dĕd, a Mystic Poetess of Ancient Kashmīr. London: Royal Asiatic Society, 1920. Jaini, Padmanabh S. Gender and Salvation: Jaina Debates on the Spiritual Liberation of Women. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. Jantzen, Grace. Power, Gender and Christian Mysticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Lawrence, David Peter. Rediscovering God with Transcendental Argument: A Contemporary Interpretation of Monistic Kashmiri Saiva Philosophy. Albany: SUNY Press, 1999. Kaul, Jai Lal. Lal Ded. New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1973. King, Richard. Orientalism and Religion: Postcolonial Theory, India and ‘the Mystic East’. London and New York: Routledge, 1999. Kinsley, David. ‘Devotion as an Alternative to Marriage in the Lives of Some Hindu Women Devotees’, in Journal of Asian and African Studies, 15(1-2), pp. 86-87, 1980. Kotru, Nil Kanth. Lal Ded, Her Life and Sayings. Srinigar: Utpal Publications, 1989. Koul, Anand. ‘Life Sketch of Laleshwari - a Great Hermitess of Kashmir’, in Indian Antiquary 50, pp. 302-308, 1921. Martin, Nancy M. ‘North Indian Hindi Devotional Literature’. In The Blackwell Companion to Hinduism, edited by Gavin Flood, 182-98. Malden, NJ: Blackwell, 2003. 24 Author’s final version Mattoo, Neerja. ‘Lal Ded - the Poet Who Gave a Voice to Women’. In Lal Ded: The Great Mystic Saint-Poetess, edited by S. S. Toshkhani, 67-80. New Delhi: APH Publishing Corporation, 2002. McDaniel, June. ‘Does Tantric Ritual Empower Women? Renunciation and Domesticity among Female Bengali Tantrikas’. In Women's Lives, Women's Rituals in the Hindu Tradition, edited by Tracy Pintchman, 159-75. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. Miller, Jane. Seductions: Studies in Reading and Culture. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991. Muktananda, Swami. Lalleshwari: Spiritual Poems by a Great Siddha Yogini. Translated by Gurumayi. South Fallsburg, NY: SYDA Foundation, 1981. Odin, Jaishree Kak. To the Other Shore: Lalla's Life and Poetry. New Delhi: Vitasta, 1999. Padoux, Andre. ‘What Do We Mean by Tantrism?’ In The Roots of Tantra, edited by Katherine Harper and Robert L. Brown, 17-24. Albany: SUNY Press, 2002. Parimoo, B. N. The Ascent of Self: A Reinterpretation of the Mystical Poetry of Lalla-Ded. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1987. Pintchman, Tracy. The Rise of the Goddess in the Hindu Tradition. Albany: SUNY Press, 1994. Ramanujan, A. K. Speaking of Siva. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973. Ramaswamy, Vijaya. Divinity and Deliverance: Women in Virasaivism. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996. Razdan, P. N. ‘Gems of Kashmiri Literature and Kashmiriyat’. http://www.koausa.org/KashmiriGems/LalDed.html. Sanderson, Alexis. ‘ aivism and the Tantric Traditions’. In The World's Religions: The Religions of Asia, edited by Friedhelm Hardy, 128-72. London: Routledge, 1988. Sapru, Chaman Lal. ‘Lalleshwari and Kabir’. In Lal Ded: The Great Kashmiri Saint-Poetess, edited by S. S. Toshkhani, 127-33. New Delhi: APH Publishing Corporation, 2002. Temple, Richard Carnac. The Word of Lalla the Prophetess. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1924. Tobin, Frank. ‘Review of Power, Gender and Christian Mysticism’, in Church History 66(2), pp. 343-35, 1997. Toshkhani, Shashi Shekhar. ‘Reconstructing and Reinterpreting Lal Ded’. In Lal Ded: The 25 Author’s final version Great Kashmiri Saint-Poetess, edited by S. S. Toshkhani, 39-66. New Delhi: APH Publishing Corporation, 2002. Voss Roberts, Michelle. Dualities: A Theology of Difference. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2010. For this legend see Sir George Grierson and Lionel D. Barnett. Lallā-VākhyāniŚ The Wise Sayings of Lal Dĕd, a Mystic Poetess of Ancient Kashmīr (London: Royal Asiatic Society, 1920), 121-22. Unless otherwise noted, citations of Lalle warī’s vaakhs follow the translation and numbering of Nil Kanth Kotru, Lal Ded, Her Life and Sayings (Srinigar: Utpal Publications, 1989), as K1, K2, and so on. Transliterations from of the Kashmiri follow Duru Baba, ‘Lal Ded (Kashmiri)’, http://lalded.blogspot.com/. ii Jai Lal Kaul, Lal Ded (New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1973) provides a critical biography. iii Scholars have disputed the likelihood of a meeting between her and Hamadān. The earliest textual evidence does not identify the yoginī by name and excludes the fantastic tale of the oven. Kaul 19-22. iv Richard Carnac Temple, The Word of Lalla the Prophetess (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1924). v Swami Muktananda, Lalleshwari: Spiritual Poems by a Great Siddha Yogini, translated by Gurumayi (South Fallsburg, NY: SYDA Foundation, 1981). vi Jaishree Kak Odin, To the Other Shore: Lalla's Life and Poetry (New Delhi: Vitasta, 1999), ix. vii S. Bhat, ‘Lal DedŚ Her Spiritualism and Present Scientific World Order’, in Lal Ded: The Great Kashmiri SaintPoetess, edited by S. S. Toshkhani (New Delhi: APH Publishing Corporation, 2002), 25. viii Grierson and Barnett; also B. N. Parimoo, The Ascent of Self: A Reinterpretation of the Mystical Poetry of LallaDed (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1987). ix Grace Jantzen, Power, Gender and Christian Mysticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 24. x I consider Lalle warī’s spiritual authority vis-à-vis her tradition in comparison with a medieval European beguine, Mechthild of Magdeburg, in chapter five of Dualities: A Theology of Difference (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2010). xi For example, Grierson and Barnett explain yoga in terms of ‘mystic conceptions of the natural and spiritual world’ (9) and apply the word ‘mystic’ to yogic conceptsŚ cf. references to the ‘mystic syllable Ọ’ (88), ‘mystic formula, or mantra’ (60, cf. 83), and the ‘mystic moon’ that drips ‘mystic nectar’ (60, cf. 86). xii Richard King, Orientalism and Religion: Postcolonial Theory, India and ‘the Mystic East’ (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), 114. xiii For the interests that united Hindus and their colonizers in defining Hindu religion as essentially ‘mystical’, see King, chapter 8. xiv Parimoo, 24-25. Parimoo also takes up James’ categories of the once- and twice-born (31). xv Parimoo, xviii. xvi A fully gendered genealogy of mysticism in India remains to be written. King’s genealogy of mysticism in Orientalism and Religion does not incorporate the voices of Indian women. Jane Miller notes that the scholarship that uncovers the discursive feminization of the East occludes actual womenŚ ‘The sexual use and productiveness of women are allowed to seem equivalent to their actual presence and their consciousness’. Jane Miller, Seductions: Studies in Reading and Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), 122. xvii For a list of early textual references to Lalle warī, see Kaul, 1-5. The first few written legends about her appear with the Persian Bābā Dāwūd Mishkātī’s Asrār-ul-Abrār (The Secrets of the Pious, 1654). The next earliest Persian record of her is in Khwāja Muhammad ‘Azam Dedamari’s Wāqi ‘āti Kashmir (1746). Bābā Nasīb-ud-dīn Ghazi’s Nūrnāma, a seventeenth-century hagiography of Nund Rishi, is likely the earliest Kashmiri text that mentions her. Many Lalle warī legends were first written down in early twentieth-century sources such as Anand Koul, ‘Life Sketch of Laleshwari - a Great Hermitess of Kashmir’, Indian Antiquary 50 (1921). xviii The adhikāra or requirements for a woman to participate in such rites likely exclude Lalle warī once she had left her husband and family: Abhinavagupta and Jayaratha agree that she should be ‘any female member of the siddha’s family’, with Jayaratha adding the practitioner’s wife and a ‘beautiful friend’. Gavin D. Flood, Body and Consciousness in Kashmir aivism (San Francisco: Mellen Research University Press, 1993), 292-93. Although there is little space for Lalle warī’s way of life in Kashmir aiva texts, this does not necessarily make it unprecedented. The idealized roles of women in texts are not always reflected in the actual roles they inhabit. In the context of tantra in contemporary West Bengal, for example, June McDaniel discovers five roles for female practitioners that do not appear in the texts, including the grihi sadhika, the woman who, like Lalle warī, ‘has left her husband to pursue a spiritual life’. McDaniel, ‘Does Tantric Ritual Empower Women? Renunciation i 26 Author’s final version and Domesticity among Female Bengali Tantrikas’, in Women's Lives, Women's Rituals in the Hindu Tradition, edited by Tracy Pintchman (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 160. xix Kotru, vii. xx For detailed overviews of the various aiva sects, consult Gavin Flood, ‘The aiva Traditions’, in The Blackwell Companion to Hinduism, edited by Gavin Flood (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003); and Alexis Sanderson, ‘ aivism and the Tantric Traditions’, in The World's Religions: The Religions of Asia, edited by Friedhelm Hardy (London: Routledge, 1988). xxi Vijaya Ramaswamy, Divinity and Deliverance: Women in Virasaivism (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996), 26. xxii Ramaswamy, 27. xxiii Antoinette DeNapoli, ‘“Crossing Over the Ocean of Existence”: Performing “Mysticism” and Exerting Power and Agency by Female Sādhus in Rajasthan’ (paper presented at the annual meeting of the Society for Hindu-Christian Studies, Chicago, IL, November 1-3, 2008). xxiv Kotru, vii. xxv Odin outlines aspects of the tantras that appear in Lalle warī’s work in Odin, 75-92. See K71, K85, and K91-96. xxvi Parimoo, 4-5. xxvii Grierson and Barnett, 107. xxviii Kotru, x-xi; cf. Koul, 302. xxix Parimoo, 67, 58. According to legend, she eventually outstrips her guru in insight and power: see Koul, 306-308. xxx Sanderson, 167. For a detailed discussion of the main branches of initiation ( ā) of males in aiva traditions, see Flood, Body and Consciousness, 220-28. xxxi Personal conversations with Omkar Kaul, S. N. Bhatt, and S. S. Toshkhani, March-April 2006. xxxii Neerja Mattoo, ‘Lal Ded - the Poet Who Gave a Voice to Women’, in Lal Ded: The Great Mystic Saint-Poetess, edited by S. S. Toshkhani (New Delhi: APH Publishing Corporation, 2002), 76. xxxiii Odin, 65. xxxiv Odin, 61. Tracy Pintchman elucidates connections between women, sexuality, fertility, and the material realm in The Rise of the Goddess in the Hindu Tradition (Albany: SUNY Press, 1994). xxxv Odin, 16-17. xxxvi Bhakti hagiographies commonly use this argument assert the equality of devotees. For example, Mahadeviyakka gained acceptance into the Vīra aiva community at Kalyana after she debated the teacher Allama by arguing that everyone there was a woman, a lover of iva. For her story, see A. K. Ramanujan, Speaking of Siva (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), 111-114. See Mattoo, 76-77, for a similar story about Mirabai. xxxvii Kaul, 13. Kaul discredits this theory. The name she uses for herself, Lalla, was probably her maiden name and, therefore, preceded her renunciation and the need for miraculous discretion. xxxviii These images are available online: P. N. Razdan, ‘Gems of Kashmiri Literature and Kashmiriyat’, http://www.koausa.org/KashmiriGems/LalDed.html. xxxix Pintchman, 205, 212. xl Jantzen, 160. xli Padmanabh S. Jaini, Gender and Salvation: Jaina Debates on the Spiritual Liberation of Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 22-24. xlii For an overview of the many-pronged bhakti movement, see Nancy M. Martin, ‘North Indian Hindi Devotional Literature’, in The Blackwell Companion to Hinduism, edited by Gavin Flood (Malden, NJ: Blackwell, 2003). xliii There are few reliable historical sources for the biographies of the women saints of India, and many contemporary works are unabashedly hgiographic. For the most complete compendium and scholarly criticism of legends about Lalle warī, see Kaul, chapter 1. Those who classify her as a bhakti saint or compare her with others in the ‘movement’ include Kotru, xi-xii; Odin, 39-44; and Mattoo, 75-79, and David Kinsley, ‘Devotion as an Alternative to Marriage in the Lives of Some Hindu Women Devotees’, Journal of Asian and African Studies, 15(12), 1980. xliv Kotru, xi. xlv Kaul, 11. xlvi Grierson and Barnett, 3. xlvii Shashi Shekhar Toshkhani, ‘Reconstructing and Reinterpreting Lal Ded’, in Lal Ded: The Great Kashmiri SaintPoetess, edited by S. S. Toshkhani (New Delhi: APH Publishing Corporation, 2002), 50. xlviii J. L. Kaul translates the same line (lay körmas tà vö:tsas al-tha:nas), ‘I stopped searching, and love led me to the Tavern door’ (K99). 27 Author’s final version bhakta, see Chaman Lal Sapru, ‘Lalleshwari and Kabir’, For similarities between Lalle warī and one in Lal Ded: The Great Kashmiri Saint-Poetess, edited by S. S. Toshkhani (New Delhi: APH Publishing Corporation, 2002). Lalle warī does call herself Sankar bökhts, a devotee of ankara ( iva), once, in K39. l This is not to say that features of bhakti were entirely absent in Kashmiri religion. Andre Padoux observes a complicated relation between tantric religion and bhaktiŚ ‘gaining liberation while alive in this world, being in this world but not of it, being entirely dedicated to God, is the basic teaching of bhakti from the Bhagavad-Gītā onward. Since, however, the love of God and the essential role of God’s grace to gain liberation are insisted upon in such Tantric works as those of Abhinavagupta, where does bhakti end and Tantra begin?’ Andre Padoux, ‘What Do We Mean by Tantrism?’ in The Roots of Tantra, ed. Katherine Harper and Robert L. Brown (Albany: SUNY Press, 2002), 20. li Jantzen, 345. lii Toshkhani, 54. liii Jantzen, 159. liv Jantzen, 190. lv Jantzen, 283. lvi Parimoo, 99. lvii David Peter Lawrence elaborates the links between ontology, epistemology, and soteriology in Kashmir aivism in Rediscovering God with Transcendental ArgumentŚ A Contemporary Interpretation of Monistic Kashmiri aiva Philosophy (Albany: SUNY Press, 1999). lviii Lalle warī’s vaakhs demonstrate familiarity with the tattvas and their traditional groupings (K6). lix Jantzen, 317. lx Jantzen, 317. lxi Jantzen, 346. lxii Frank Tobin, ‘Review of Power, Gender and Christian Mysticism‘, in Church History, 66(2), 1997, 345. lxiii Jantzen, 331. xlix 28