I was passionate / filled with longing / I searched / far and wide. 

But the day / that the Truthful One / found me / I was at home.

— Lal Ded, translated by Jane Hirshfield

Lal Ded — also known as Lalla or Lalleshwari — remains one of the most enigmatic figures in the literary and spiritual history of the Indian subcontinent. A 14th-century mystic poet-saint born in Pandrethan, near Srinagar in present-day Kashmir, her spoken poetry, transmitted orally through vaakh — or concise spiritual quatrains — offers a deeply personal yet universally resonant vision of mysticism and resistance. Written in Old Kashmiri, Lal Ded's quatrains transcend the boundaries of time and faith, functioning not only as religious or philosophical texts but also as radically embodied expressions of spiritual freedom.

A Poet-Saint Of A Liminal World

The 14th century was a period of great sociopolitical upheaval and growing conflict as well as cultural exchange between Hindu and Islamic traditions in Kashmir. Lal Ded's poetry emerged at this unique historical, political, and social juncture. Her vaakhs, rooted within the mystic Trika school of Kashmiri Shaivism and Islamic Sufi mysticism, display a profound non-dualist orientation — asserting the essential oneness of all existence, the unity of the self with Shiva, and the futility of rituals devoid of inner awakening.

Lal Ded was not only a mystic poet lost in her own abstraction. Her ideas were startlingly grounded, forged in the crucible of personal suffering and social nonconformity. She left an unhappy, abusive marriage, renounced materialism, discarded her clothing, and chose a life of wandering asceticism at a time when a woman asserting herself so explicitly was a rarity. These acts were not only spiritual renunciations but also political gestures of dissent against patriarchy, gendered expectations, and organised religion.

A Protest-Poet In 14th-Century Kashmir

In her quatrains, Lal Ded consistently rejected the external ritualism of organised religion — temples, idols, fasts, prayers — for a fiercely introspective path. For her, the spiritual pursuit was not one of linear progression of good deeds or rituals; it was a surrender, a dissolving of the self into a higher awareness. Her mystical language was metaphorically rich — drawing on the local landscape, on bodily imagery, and on everyday acts to forge a poetic and spiritual tradition of direct experience rather than dogmatic diktats.

Today, Lal Ded and her poetry can be read as a feminist icon avant la lettre. While the term 'feminist' is anachronistic for her time, her life and work exemplify a radical assertion of female subjectivity in a deeply patriarchal society. She reclaimed her body, and the female body at large — not as shameful or passive, but as the site of profound spiritual insight. In that context, her nakedness, often moralized or romanticized, can be seen as a potent metaphor of this spiritual stripping: an unflinching exposure of the self and the world.

To learn more about Lal Ded and other mystic poets of Kashmir, read 'The Mystic and the Lyric: Four Women Poets from Kashmir' by Neerja Mattoo.

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