Roberts - Power, Gender and Mystic

The Journal of Hindu Studies 2010;3:279–297 Doi: 10.
1093/jhs/hiq025
Advance Access Publication 9 September 2010
Power, Gender, and the Classification

of a Kashmir Śaiva ‘Mystic’
Michelle Voss Roberts
Abstract: The hermeneutic of suspicion Grace Jantzen applies to the gendered

construction of Christian ‘mysticism’ is a useful lens for understanding the
Downloaded from http://jhs.oxfordjournals.org/ by guest on November 17, 2014

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-consciousness is cemented through appeal to western (particularly Jamesian)
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
Like most hagiographies, the stories surrounding Lalleśwarī reveal much about
the views of religious authority belonging to the people who tell them. In the mon-
ikers applied to her – ‘prophetess’,4 ‘siddha yogini’,5 ‘the wise old woman of
Kashmiri culture’,6 ‘a goddess, a seer, who had descended upon this earth with a
divine message for mankind’,7 and a ‘mystic saint-poetess’8 – one can variously
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280 Power, Gender, and the Classification of a Kashmir Śaiva ‘Mystic’
discern a Jewish-Christian emphasis on prophecy, an interest in claiming a prede-

cessor for the contemporary Siddha Yoga movement, a diasporic concern for pre-
serving 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, mysticism carries much weight in notions of religious
authority. As Grace Jantzen has demonstrated in Power, Gender, and Christian Mysti-
cism, the content ascribed to this word tells a great deal about who counts as a reli-
gious 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 tes-
tifies to her ability to recognise 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’9 applies in other contexts. The hagiogra-
phies and verses of Lalleśwarī will serve as a case study for the gendered construction
of religious authority in India. It may be possible to glimpse rays of Lalleśwarī’s own
authorising strategies – such as her renunciation and her mastery of a yogic tradition
– through the patriarchal readings I survey here; yet I will not exercise this hagiogra-
phical power anew by claiming to find the ‘real’ Lalleśwarī beneath so many layers of
interpretation. I focus on the gendered power that operates in the posthumous con-
struction 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
Lalleśwarī’s legacy. The first written records of Lalleśwarī’s life that appear 300
years afterwards exhibit patterns similar to the Western genealogy regarding
female embodiment, sexuality, and emotion.10 Further parallels come into relief
in 20th century Indian commentaries that mirror the modern Western construc-
tion of mysticism more directly. In order to distinguish historically 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 construc-
tion of mysticism, but she attends particularly to gendered ideals and exclusions.
Her genealogy of the mystical begins with the secret rituals of ancient Greek mys-
tery 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
Michelle Voss Roberts 281
developed in the Middle Ages emphasised 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 intellectualised 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 empha-
sis 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
safe: 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’; 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 demon-
strates 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 prac-
tices 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.11 Conveniently
for the colonial endeavour, mysticism no longer counted as authoritative in the
public sphere: ‘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 non-western world from the same spheres of influence’.12
The feminisation of the mystical and that of India functioned in Orientalist and
colonial thought to justify the subjugation of India by the more rational, technolo-
gically superior West.
Although introduced through colonial means, these perspectives left their trace
on modern Indian religion and scholarship.13 Figures such as Vivekananda
embraced the stereotype of the mystical East to counter western attitudes of super-
iority: as the more spiritual culture, India provided the cure for what ails the tech-
nologically advanced but spiritually bereft West. Indian scholars have also used the
Jamesian concept of mysticism as a lens for viewing Indian saints like Lalleśwarī. In
The Ascent of Self: A Reinterpretation of the Mystical Poetry of Lalla-Ded, B.N. Parimoo
uses James’ distinction of ‘second-hand’ institutional religion from ‘first-hand’ mys-
tical religion to describe Lalleśwarī: she ‘was a mystic to the core … Aside of mysti-
cism, 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’.14 Parimoo treats yoga and mysticism
as synonyms. He codes Lalleśwarī’s message that the ‘Universal Spirit is One, and
we are but His earthly tabernacles’ as ‘the basic tenet of all religious teaching’.15
He also arranges Lalleśwarī’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.
Lalleśwarī’s hagiographies offer a window into the gendered process by which
Indian religious figures are grafted into the genealogy of Christian mysticism.16
Four sites in Lalleśwarī’s identity as a ‘mystic’ invite deeper comparison: the exclu-
sion 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 con-

struction of religious authority runs parallel to or intersects with Jantzen’s western
genealogy.
‘My guru told me only one word’: Gendered institutions of authority

Lalleśwarī left behind no writing, but her aphoristic sayings (vaakhs) lived on in
oral culture and were written down centuries later. We have little reliable histor-
ical evidence for her life save the hagiographies that emerged beginning in the
seventeenth century that testify to her iconoclastic behaviour and yogic powers.17
Lalleśwarī’s life mirrors the hagiographies of many women saints in India. She mar-
ried into a family unsympathetic to her spiritual life. Lalleśwarī’s mother-in-law
effectively starved her and told lies impugning her fidelity. The situation came
to a head one day when Lalleśwarī 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 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 Śiva.
Because institutions play a large part in defining religious authority, Lalleśwarī’s
renunciation of such institutions makes her authority somewhat problematic for
Kashmir Śaiva 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 institu-
tions. By definition, they were men; women like Hildegard of Bingen or Heloise
were exceptions that proved the rule. Recognising that Lalleśwarī’s relationship
to Kashmir Śaiva institutions is occluded by hagiographical efforts designed to ele-
vate 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 Lalleśwarī.
In Lalleśwarī’s lifetime, several mutually influential textual and ritual schools of
Kashmir Śaivism 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 Śaiva adepts within a lineage of

transmission of texts and meditation practices from the tradition’s founder, Vasu-
gupta (c. 875–925 CE), to teachers such as the great systematiser, 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.18 Although Lalleśwarī attests that ‘left-handed rites’ can lead to the
Absolute (K60–1), the hagiographers are adamant that Lalleśwarī eschewed this role:
‘her husband was a follower of the left handed tantrik order (vamacara) in which wine
and flesh were freely made use of … [S]he could not get reconciled with her husband
but rather admonished him on this account’.19 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 Lalleśwarī’s posi-
tion within her tradition. Although Kashmir Śaiva traditions were rooted in Tantric
(non-Vedic) texts and practices, by the fourteenth century they had reached a com-
fortable compromise with Vedic orthopraxy. Tantric practitioners had somewhat
more extensive ritual obligations; but the major difference was the Kashmir Śaiva
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: lib-
eration could be gained from within the householder stage of life.20 Furthermore,
although renunciation is a common form of religious authorisation outside of
Kashmir Śaivism, by the fourteenth century, Kashmir Śaivism had become the
practice of householders rather than wandering ascetics. As Lalleśwarī 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.
Lalleśwarī’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 spiri-
tual path in the midst of her worldly life; this option was foreclosed to Lalleśwarī,
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 Viraśaiva 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 majority of whom are married, is reflective of the spiritual politics
which inheres in a patriarchal society’.21 Vijaya Ramaswamy argues that deviant
spiritual behaviour is more difficult for women than even for low-caste men, whose
behaviour could be incorporated into a patriarchal framework and whose spiritual
authority would be accepted by the women in their households.22 Women effec-
tively 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.23
Although Lalleśwarī’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 vio-
lence, the hagiographers treat her marriage home as an anomaly, faulting it for
being less learned and pious than her family of origin: ‘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’.24 By
reading Lalleśwarī’s renunciation as a judgement 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 Lalleśwarī 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 Lalleśwarī exhibits familiarity with the techni-
cal vocabulary of the Vijñānabhairava and Svacchanda Tantras,25 the full extent of her
Sanskrit education is uncertain because all of her teachings are in vernacular
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’26 – an
explanation that both educates Lalleśwarī and outfits her for the trial of her
marriage.
In the Kashmir Śaiva 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 Lalleśwarī’s mystical formation through an appeal to the guru
who, as Grierson and Barnett put it, ‘confides to his disciple the mysteries of reli-
gion’.27 Although Lalleśwarī nowhere names her preceptor, Kashmiri tradition
secures an authoritative lineage for her by identifying him as Siddha Śrikantha,
a man ‘descended in direct lineage from Vasugupta, the founder of Kashmir Śaiva-
ism [sic] in its present form’.28 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 Śrikantha as the family
priest, who schools the girl in the Upaniṣads and yoga until she is fully ‘competent
(adhikāri)’ to be ‘initiated into the mysteries of sacred lore’.29 For other commenta-
tors, the nature of Lalleśwarī’s initiation (dīkṣā) poses a problem. Alexis Sanderson
describes three modes of initiation shared by the Trika and Krama schools: a
lengthy programme of contemplative worship, a higher path of ‘sudden enlighten-
ment’ 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’.30

Because of the relative difficulty for a girl under the age of ten to attain the first
two kinds of training, Lalleśwarī’s initiation is thought to have been of the third
type.31 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
Śaiva texts, her contact with her guru may have been limited to a single meeting
in which she gained instant enlightenment and thereby surpassed human institu-
tions. 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 Lalleśwarī in the household, reli-
gion, and authoritative lineages of Kashmir Śaivism 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-authorise precisely through renunciation of these
authorising institutions.
‘I have seen a man’: Spiritual authority as masculine

Lalleśwarī’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 Lalleśwarī’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 spiri-
tual authority as masculine. For example, according to the legend cited at the
beginning of this article, Lalleśwarī is unconcerned about her nakedness until Shāh
Hamadān shows up; 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?32
For Mattoo, Lalleśwarī’s nakedness is a sign of her authority because it signals her
transcendence of (rather than identification with) her female body. Spiritual author-
ity is masculine because, in Lalleśwarī’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 Śaiva cosmology. The feminine principle, Śakti, impels Śiva to cre-
ate 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 absorp-
tion of the feminine is echoed in Śaiva mythology when Śiva appears in ‘his’ andro-
gynous state. The goddess ‘occupies a position beneath [Śiva] and acts as an
intermediary between the immanent and transcendent pole of reality’.33 The fem-
inine 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’.34 She writes of the Hamadān episode, ‘[Lalleś-
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’.35 Lalleśwarī 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,36 Lalleśwarī’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’.37 Hence, in 20th century art depicting
Lalleśwarī without clothes, her body modestly covers itself, stomach sagging down-
ward to cover her pubic area, her hair covering her breasts. In another notable ren-
dition, excerpts from her own text are plastered over her midsection from neck to
knees.38 It is not difficult to find lurking beneath the desire to cover Lalleśwarī’s
body an unarticulated suspicion of the ‘free-floating chaotic potential’ of a ‘strong,
independent female’,39 particularly a female who has removed her sexuality from
the control of the patriarchal household.
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’40 and notes that late medieval efforts to uncover heresy often
accused ‘false’ mystics of sexual promiscuity. The hagiographic tradition’s rejection
of Lalleśwarī’s participation in the tantric rites indicates the importance of control-
ling her sexuality: she must not possess the kind of sexual agency lauded in accom-
plished male practitioners. Lalleśwarī takes bodily control in a different direction.
She recognises the so-called ‘left-handed’ tantric rites involving meat, wine, and
sex as possible routes to the Absolute (K60–1); but she teaches a simpler path. Like
the female Christian mystics, she embraces bodily control; however, in her yogic
practice 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 realising union with Śiva: ‘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, Lalleśwarī’s decision to roam naked stirs
the waters of longstanding debates about women’s spiritual authority. A dispute
between the Digambara (sky-clad) and Śvetāmbara (white-clad) Jains revolves
around whether renunciation of clothing is necessary for salvation. The Digam-
baras answer this question in the affirmative; but because they bar women from
nudity and hence from full mendicancy, they also teach that women cannot attain
mokṣa within their current life. The Digambara requirement of renunciation is at
odds with the Kashmir Śaiva embrace of the married, non-celibate life; yet
Lalleśwarī 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.41
Beyond trends regarding the treatment of women’s bodies and sexuality
in Lalleśwarī’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 alle-
gory 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 interpre-
tation, and relatively uneducated nuns and laywomen began employing the bridal
idiom for their direct encounters with God. A subsequent backlash against those
who took this path to uncomfortably literal levels did not prevent women from
capitalising 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 movement, it worked its way through
India starting in the far south in the sixth-century CE, spreading through the mid-
dle and western regions around the twelfth century, and flourishing in the north by
the seventeenth century.42 Hindu women’s voices emerge in full force in this move-
ment. Some bhaktas were passionate lovers of God with attributes (saguṇa). 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
(nirguṇa), as do Mahadeviyakka, a twelfth-century Kannada saint who worshiped
Śiva in his aniconic form, and Bahina Bai, a seventeenth-century Marathi poetess
who focused on the non-dual reality behind the forms of Vishnu.
Lalleśwarī’s hagiographers enjoy painting her with the same brush as the female
bhaktas.43 These women transgress boundaries of caste and religious observance by
teaching in the vernacular (see Lalleśwarī’s vaakhs K57, 73, and 121). They also tend
to transgress gender codes. Some, like Antal in the ninth century, refuse to marry
anyone but God; others fail to fulfil their marital duties and leave home like
Lalleśwarī. Like Mirabai, Lalleśwarī suffers under a cruel mother-in-law and is
accused of infidelity. Like Mahadeviyakka, she foregoes clothing. Some reports
emphasise her yogic powers; like Bahina Bai, she is rumoured to have had knowl-
edge of past lives. And like both Antal and Mirabai, Lalleśwarī is also said to have
avoided mortal death by simply merging into God. By assimilating Lalleśwarī to
such frameworks, later Kashmir Śaivas are able to interpret her spiritual authority
as feminine.
Gendered ideals of sainthood are perhaps most striking in a subtle eroticisation
of Lalleśwarī’s spirituality. Lalleśwarī is no self-styled adulterous gopī. Śiva is not
her lover, but the non-personal source and goal of the identity she realises through
yoga. Yet Kotru asserts, ‘Bhakti is loving God with all our being’; and he claims that
Lalleśwarī’s ‘religion is more an affair of the heart than of the head’.44 J.L. Kaul
elaborates upon the mother-in-law’s charges of infidelity by describing Lalleśwarī’s
prolonged absences as her ‘daily tryst with God’.45 Grierson and Barnett depict her
‘dancing and singing in an ecstatic frenzy’;46 and S.S. Toshkhani elaborates her
‘mystical feelings’ in terms of
the pangs of separation from [Śiva], 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.47
Much of this litany could be lifted directly from any summary of Mirabai’s imagi-
nation of the gopī’s experience of Krishna-bhakti. This erotic slant finds its way into
translation of Lalleśwarī’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, ‘Self-absorption led me to the house of nectar’
(Odin #17), Kotru injects the theme of passionate love: ‘Passionately I loved Him
and reached the tavern’.48
It is questionable, however, whether Lalleśwarī ought to be associated with the
bhakti movement at all. Her first hagiographies were not recorded until the seven-
teenth century, when the bhakti ideals of sainthood that had permeated the Indian
subcontinent had made a definite imprint on these tales. Lalleśwarī’s thought does

share some of the features of nirguṇa bhakti, including a transcendence of gender
ideals that belies the attempt to find erotic saguṇa imagery in her verses. However,
she precedes by generations the appearance of nirguṇa bhakti saints like Kabir and
Ravidas in the far north.49 These discrepancies indicate that, unlike Christian
women saints who appropriate the eroticism of male monastics, Lalleśwarī’s bio-
graphers (and not Lalleśwarī 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 Lalleśwarī draws from the wellspring of her Kashmir
Śaiva tradition. Among over 128 of the vaakhs thought to be genuine, 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)
Lalleśwarī meditates upon the deity within and attains oneness through medita-
tion. 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 mas-
tery of yogic practice. The predominance of such yogic terminology in Lalleśwarī’s
work is better explained through Kashmir Śaivism than through the incipient
bhakti movement and its attendant eroticism.50
In the modern period, Jantzen tells us, mysticism is treated as subjective and
intensely emotional; therefore, ‘women, who are deemed to be prone to such emo-
tional intensity, are prime candidates for being counted mystics’.51 If Lalleśwarī 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 reason-
ing. Thus, 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’.52 In contrast to Lalleśwarī’s claim to the heart of

her tradition, the tendency to eroticise 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 experi-
ence was available? The usual routes of education and ecclesiastical preferment
were not open to them’.53 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 monopolised
experiential claims to such an extent that even men who had visions were ‘accused
of being ‘feminine.’’54 Lalleśwarī, 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 Śiva.
Whereas Lalleśwarī challenges her interpreters regarding her relation to reli-
gious institutions, the masculinity of religious authority, and the eroticism of fem-
inine spirituality, she and her 20th century hagiographers agree about the
importance of the experience of union with God. This confluence of interests pre-
sents 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 on misleadingly selective readings of Meister Eckhart and John
of the Cross. The purportedly ineffable experience of union that clinches moder-
nity’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 ineffability of subjective experiences with
which contemporary philosophers are preoccupied’.55 She also notes that the
Christian ‘mystics’ appear to have plenty to say about their supposedly ‘ineffable’
experiences.
If Lalleśwarī’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 occur-
ring in contemporary readings of her work? As Parimoo reconstructs Lalleśwarī’s
journey:
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 diffi-

cult to describe. Therefore, Lalla uses the word Śūnya, as the synonym for the
Self, immanent and transcendental, which in the state of yoga are said to be
experienced as one.56
It would be possible to read Parimoo as an instance of Indian scholarship’s reliance

upon western narratives of mysticism or upon western essentialisation of Hindu
traditions. Surprisingly, however, the evidence of Lalleśwarī’s own testimony sug-
gests that when it comes to the assumption that mysticism is an ineffable experi-
ence, 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 Śaivism, which offers some basis for an
experience of union beyond thought or language.57 The Kashmiri Śaiva cosmos con-
sists of thirty-six levels or tattvas that emanate from divine consciousness.58 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 Śiva tattva, the consciousness of pure
‘I’. Before the cosmos emanates from its source in divine consciousness, there is
Śiva tattva. This complete unity of subject and object can be retrieved through med-
itation because human consciousness participates in universal consciousness.
Although each of the tattvas represents a way of experiencing the world, Lalleś-
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. Lalleśwarī names the apex of her journey ‘the void’:
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’ (śūnyatā) in Buddhist thought to
evoke the utter absence of duality: ‘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 Lalleśwarī.
Three features of Lalleśwarī’s thought resonate with the modern definition of
mysticism: its subjectivity, its ineffability, and its transcendence of reason. First,
the ‘subjectivization and … psychologization of mysticism’ one sees in modern the-
orists such as Evelyn Underhill takes an interesting twist in Kashmir Śaivism,
where liberation is the complete awareness of the Ultimate Subject.59 Second,
the yoginī’s experience of Śiva 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 limited powers resembles the Romantic concept of mysticism as ‘an
experience of union as contrasted with a process of rationality’.60 Through this lens
Lalleśwarī’s experience reads like a prototype for the mystical, yet the historical
contingency of the category must not be forgotten. For Lalleśwarī, 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
cognised 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 thought.

Conclusion
The hermeneutic of suspicion Jantzen applies to the gendered construction of
‘mysticism’ is a useful lens for understanding the religious authority attributed
to Lalleśwarī of Kashmir. Kashmir Śaivas 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, Lalleśwarī encountered gendered ambivalences in the religious institutions
of her day: her householder’s life proved untenable, her renouncer’s life unortho-
dox, 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 ren-
der her life acceptable through association with the feminised devotional mode of
the later bhakti saints. Lalleśwarī’s hagiographical tradition runs parallel with the
western genealogy on each of these points.
The two stories intersect in modernity. Lalleśwarī’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 Lalleśwarī scholarship with
ambiguous power dynamics. Jantzen would have us register how the public
impact of Lalleśwarī’s life and message – including her challenge to patriarchal
institutions – is neutralised if mysticism is entirely privatised 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 in-
ner life can generally be counted on to prop up rather than to challenge the sta-
tus 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.61
If mysticism denotes only private, subjective states, then the objective philoso-
phical content of Lalleśwarī’s teaching about the origin and meaning of the world,
the benefits of meditation, and the functioning of society disappear. Jantzen’s her-
meneutic clears the way for other aspects of Lalleśwarī’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 Śaiva 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’.62 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 infor-
mation available on Lalleśwarī, my suggestions regarding Lalleśwarī’s 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 Lalleśwarī a mystic? The notion of mystical experience as ineffable resonates
more with Lalleśwarī’s epistemological framework than with the Christian mystics
used to forge this definition. But the question of whether Lalleśwarī 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 characterised as mystical while others are excluded’,63 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.
References
Baba, D., ‘Lal Ded (Kashmiri)’. <http://lalded.blogspot.com>.
Bhat, S., 2002. ‘Lal Ded: Her spiritualism and present scientiﬁc world order’. In: Toshkhani, S.S.
(Ed.), Lal Ded: The Great Kashmiri Saint-Poetess, pp. 25–37. New Delhi: APH Publishing
Corporation.
DeNapoli, A., 2008. ‘“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, 1–3 November
2008.
Flood, G.D., 1993. Body and Cosmology in Kashmir Śaivism. San Francisco: Mellen Research
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Flood, G.D., 2003. ‘The Śaiva traditions’. In: Flood, G. (Ed.), The Blackwell Companion to Hinduism,
pp. 200–28. Oxford: Blackwell.
Grierson, Sir G., Barnett, L.D., 1920. Lallā-Vākhyāni: The Wise Sayings of Lal Dĕd, a Mystic Poetess
of Ancient Kashmīr. London: Royal Asiatic Society.
Jaini, P.S., 1991. Gender and Salvation: Jaina Debates on the Spiritual Liberation of Women. Berkeley:
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Lawrence, D.P., 1999. Rediscovering God with Transcendental Argument: A Contemporary

Interpretation of Monistic Kashmiri Saiva Philosophy. Albany: SUNY Press.
Kaul, J.L., 1973. Lal Ded. New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi.
King, R., 1999. Orientalism and Religion: Postcolonial Theory, India and ‘the Mystic East’. London
and New York: Routledge.
Kinsley, D., 1980. ‘Devotion as an alternative to marriage in the lives of some hindu women
devotees’. Journal of Asian and African Studies 15(1–2), 86–87.
Kotru, N.K., 1989. Lal Ded, Her Life and Sayings. Srinigar: Utpal Publications.
Koul, A., 1921. ‘Life sketch of Laleshwari – a great hermitess of Kashmir’. Indian Antiquary 50,
302–308.
Martin, N.M., 2003. ‘North Indian Hindi devotional literature’. In: Flood, G. (Ed.), The Blackwell
Companion to Hinduism, pp. 182–98. Malden, NJ: Blackwell.
Mattoo, N., 2002. ‘Lal Ded – the poet who gave a voice to women’. In: Toshkhani, S.S. (Ed.), Lal
Ded: The Great Mystic Saint-Poetess, pp. 67–80. New Delhi: APH Publishing Corporation.

McDaniel, J., 2007. ‘Does tantric ritual empower women? Renunciation and domesticity
among female Bengali Tantrikas’. In: Pintchman, T. (Ed.), Women's Lives, Women's Rituals in
the Hindu Tradition, pp. 159–75. New York: Oxford University Press.
Miller, J., 1991. Seductions: Studies in Reading and Culture. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Muktananda, S., 1981. Lalleshwari: Spiritual Poems by a Great Siddha Yogini (Gurumayi, Trans.).
South Fallsburg, NY: SYDA Foundation.
Odin, J.K., 1999. To the Other Shore: Lalla's Life and Poetry. New Delhi: Vitasta.
Padoux, A., 2002. ‘What do we mean by Tantrism?’ In: Harper, K.A., Brown, R.L. (Eds.), The
Roots of Tantra, pp. 17–24. Albany: SUNY Press.
Parimoo, B.N., 1987. The Ascent of Self: A Reinterpretation of the Mystical Poetry of Lalla-Ded. Delhi:
Motilal Banarsidass.
Pintchman, T., 1994. The Rise of the Goddess in the Hindu Tradition. Albany: SUNY Press.
Ramanujan, A.K., 1973. Speaking of Siva. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
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KashmiriGems/LalDed.html>.
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Poetess, pp. 127–33. New Delhi: APH Publishing Corporation.
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Notes
1 For this legend, see Sir George Grierson and Lionel D. Barnett (1920), pp. 121–22.
Unless otherwise noted, citations of Lalleśwarī’s vaakhs follow the translation and
numbering of Nil Kanth Kotru (1989), as K1, K2, and so on. Transliterations from of
the Kashmiri follow Duru Baba.
2 Jai Lal Kaul (1973) provides a critical biography.
3 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, pp. 19–22.
4 Richard Carnac Temple (1924).
5 Swami Muktananda (1981).
6 Jaishree Kak Odin (1999), p. ix.
7 S. Bhat (2002), p. 25.
8 Grierson and Barnett; also B.N. Parimoo (1987).
9 Grace Jantzen (1995), p. 24.

10 I consider Lalleśwarī’s spiritual authority vis-à-vis her tradition in comparison with a
medieval European beguine, Mechthild Magdeburg in Michelle Voss Roberts (2010),
chapter 5.
11 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 concepts
as in their references to the ‘mystic syllable Oṃ’ (88), ‘mystic formula, or mantra’
(60, cf. 83), and the ‘mystic moon’ that drips ‘mystic nectar’ (60, cf. 86).
12 Richard King (1999), p. 114.
13 For the interests that united Hindus and their colonisers in defining Hindu religion
as essentially ‘mystical’, see King, chapter 8.
14 Parimoo, pp. 24–25. Parimoo also takes up James’ categories of the once- and twice-
born (31).
15 Parimoo, p. xviii.
16 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
feminisation of the East occludes actual women: ‘The sexual use and productiveness
of women are allowed to seem equivalent to their actual presence and their
consciousness’. Jane Miller (1991), p. 122.
17 For a list of early textual references to Lalleśwarī, see Kaul, pp. 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 Lalleśwarī legends were first written
down in early 20th century sources such as Anand Koul (1921).
18 The adhikāra or requirements for a woman to participate in such rites likely exclude
Lalleśwarī 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 (1993),
pp. 292–93. Although there is little space for Lalleśwarī’s way of life in Kashmir Śaiva
texts, this does not necessarily make it unprecedented. The idealised 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 Lalleśwarī, ‘has left her husband to pursue a spiritual life’.
McDaniel (2007), p. 160.
19 Kotru, p. vii.
20 For detailed overviews of the various Śaiva sects, consult Gavin Flood (2003) and
Alexis Sanderson (1988).
21 Vijaya Ramaswamy (1996), p. 26.
22 Ramaswamy, p. 27.
23 Antoinette DeNapoli (2008).
24 Kotru, p. vii.
25 Odin outlines aspects of the tantras that appear in Lalleśwarī’s work in Odin,
pp. 75–92. See K71, K85, and K91–96.

26 Parimoo, pp. 4–5.
27 Grierson and Barnett, p. 107.
28 Kotru, pp. x–xi; cf. Koul, p. 302.
29 Parimoo, p. 67, 58. According to legend, she eventually outstrips her guru in insight
and power: see Koul, pp. 306–308.
30 Sanderson, p. 167. For a detailed discussion of the main branches of initiation (dīkṣā)
of males in Śaiva traditions, see Flood (1993), pp. 220–28.
31 Personal conversations with Omkar Kaul, S.N. Bhatt, and S.S. Toshkhani,
March–April 2006.
32 Neerja Mattoo (2002), p. 76.
33 Odin, p. 65.
34 Odin, p. 61. Tracy Pintchman (1994) elucidates connections between women,
sexuality, fertility, and the material realm.
35 Odin, pp. 16–17.
36 Bhakti hagiographies commonly use this argument to assert the equality of devotees.
For example, Mahadeviyakka gained acceptance into the Vīraśaiva community at
Kalyana after she debated the teacher Allama by arguing that everyone there was a
woman, a lover of Śiva. For her story, see A.K. Ramanujan (1973), pp. 111–14. See
Mattoo, pp. 76–77, for a similar story about Mirabai.
37 Kaul, p. 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.
38 These images are available online: P.N. Razdan.
39 Pintchman, p. 205, 212.
40 Jantzen, p. 160.
41 Padmanabh S. Jaini (1991), pp. 22–24.
42 For an overview of the many-pronged bhakti movement, see Nancy M. Martin (2003).
43 There are few reliable historical sources for the biographies of the women saints of
India, and many contemporary works are unabashedly hagiographic. For the most
complete compendium and scholarly criticism of legends about Lalleśwarī, see Kaul,
chapter 1. Those who classify her as a bhakti saint or compare her with others in the
‘movement’ include Kotru, pp. xi–xii; Odin, pp. 39–44; Mattoo, pp. 75–79; and David
Kinsley, 1980.
44 Kotru, p. xi.
45 Kaul, p. 11.
46 Grierson and Barnett, p. 3.
47 Shashi Shekhar Toshkhani (2002), p. 50.
48 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).
49 For similarities between Lalleśwarī and one nirguṇa bhakta, see Chaman Lal Sapru,
(2002). Lalleśwarī does call herself Sankar bökhts, a devotee of Śankara (Śiva), once, in
K39.
50 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 bhakti:
‘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 (2002), p. 20.
51 Jantzen, p. 345.
52 Toshkhani, p. 54.
53 Jantzen, p. 159.
54 Jantzen, p. 190.
55 Jantzen, p. 283.
56 Parimoo, p. 99.
57 David Peter Lawrence (1999) elaborates the links between ontology, epistemology,
and soteriology in Kashmir Śaivism.
58 Lalleśwarī’s vaakhs demonstrate familiarity with the tattvas and their traditional
groupings (K6).
59 Jantzen, p. 317.
60 Jantzen, p. 317.
61 Jantzen, p. 346.
62 Frank Tobin (1997), p. 345.
63 Jantzen, p. 331.

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The Journal of Hindu Studies 2010;3:279–297 Doi: 10.

Power, Gender, and the Classification

Abstract: The hermeneutic of suspicion Grace Jantzen applies to the gendered

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discern a Jewish-Christian emphasis on prophecy, an interest in claiming a prede-

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‘My guru told me only one word’: Gendered institutions of authority

guru-disciple relationship locates most Kashmir Śaiva adepts within a lineage of

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Although Lalleśwarī’s renunciation might be viewed as a marker of her spiritual

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spontaneously or through some non-verbal stimulus such as the guru’s glance’.30

My guru gave me this one precept:

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‘I have seen a man’: Spiritual authority as masculine

She seems to have become completely unself-conscious, almost unaware of her

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Eating too much will lead you nowhere,

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‘Passionately I loved him’: Women’s spirituality as erotic

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I bore the pangs of his love, woke my beloved [la:l]

suit ideological considerations’.52 In contrast to Lalleśwarī’s claim to the heart of

‘The void mingles with the void’: Mystical experience as ineffable

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an experience approaching that of ‘nothingness.’ Nothingness is certainly diffi-

It would be possible to read Parimoo as an instance of Indian scholarship’s reliance

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By constant practice the manifested universe

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Lawrence, D.P., 1999. Rediscovering God with Transcendental Argument: A Contemporary

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