Pampore
Content note: this entry describes domestic abuse and starvation within a marriage. Helplines are given in the section on it.
Lal Ded, roughly 1320 to 1392, is the founding figure of Kashmiri literature and the author of the oldest surviving poetry in the language.
Her names, and there are several, which is itself the point:
- Lalleshwari, or Lalla, among Kashmiri Hindus
- Lal Arifa, or Lalla Arifa, among Kashmiri Muslims
- Lal Ded, grandmother Lal, which is what everybody in Kashmir calls her
Where: born at Pandrethan, also given as Sempore, near Srinagar, into a Kashmiri Pandit family, and married into a family at Pampore.
The marriage
She was married at twelve, which was standard, and renamed Padmavati by her husband's family, which was also standard.
And she was starved.
What her mother in law did, and it is the detail Kashmir has never forgotten:
She would put a stone on Lalla's plate and spread a thin layer of rice over it, so that the plate looked full when it was carried in and when anybody looked at it.
Underneath there was almost nothing.
The line Lalla is said to have made about it is one of the best known things in Kashmiri, and in substance it runs:
Whether they killed a fat sheep or a lean one, Lalla had her stone.
Meaning: it made no difference what the household was eating. On feast days and ordinary days, at weddings and at funerals, whatever was cooked, her plate had the same stone on it.
She said nothing about it for years.
What must be said
This is not a story about admirable endurance and this app will not present it as one.
What is being described is a woman being systematically starved by her husband's family, over years, in a household where everybody could see her plate and nobody said anything.
And in current terms:
- Denying food is domestic violence. In India it falls squarely within the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act 2005, which covers physical, emotional and economic abuse and specifically includes deprivation of resources
- Cruelty by a husband or his relatives is a criminal offence
- Women's helpline 181; police 112
- One Stop Sakhi Centres operate in most districts and provide shelter, medical aid, legal aid and counselling together
- Free legal aid is a statutory right, national number 15100
- Tele MANAS 14416 for the mental health side
Nobody is required to endure this, and Lalla's own solution, in the end, was to leave.
Leaving
At around twenty four, she walked out.
She did not go back to her parents, which was the only other available option and would have been a scandal of its own. She left entirely, took up the life of a wandering ascetic, and went about Kashmir on foot for the rest of her life.
Her guru: Sed Bayu, also given as Siddha Srikantha, a teacher in the Trika or Kashmir Shaiva tradition.
And on the nakedness
The accounts say she wandered without clothing, or nearly so.
How to state it: it is a fact of her biography, it is the subject of some of her own verses, and it is the same phenomenon as Akka Mahadevi in Kannada two centuries earlier: a woman who had been valued and disposed of on the basis of her body removing the terms of that valuation entirely.
Her own line on it, in substance: dance then, Lalla, wearing nothing but the air; sing then, clad in the sky; and what is as clean as those.
It is not presented as a spectacle in the tradition and it is not the interesting thing about her. The verses are.
The Vakhs
What a vakh is
Vakh, from the Sanskrit vakya, a saying or an utterance.
- Four lines, generally
- In Kashmiri, the spoken language
- Rhymed, and metrically regular
- Meant to be remembered and repeated, and they have been, orally, for six hundred years
Around 250 survive, with the attribution problems every oral corpus has.
Why they matter linguistically
They are the oldest surviving Kashmiri.
Before Lal Ded, the literature of Kashmir is in Sanskrit, and it is a very large literature: the Rajatarangini, the whole Kashmir Shaiva philosophical corpus, the Kathasaritsagara.
She is where the language starts, and the vakhs are still quoted in ordinary Kashmiri conversation as proverbs, by people who do not necessarily know or care that they are quoting her.
What is in them
One. Kashmir Shaivism, in the vernacular.
The vakhs use the technical vocabulary of the Trika system: the breath, the central channel, the ascent, shunya, the void, and the identity of Shiva and Shakti.
Which means she had been trained, in a demanding philosophical tradition, and was putting its content into four line verses that a woman at a mill could remember.
Two. Attacks on external religion.
One of her most quoted:
The idol is stone. The temple is stone. Top to bottom, all of it is stone. What are you worshipping, you stubborn pandit? Join the breath and the mind together.
Note who it is addressed to: the pandit, which is to say her own community, her own family's profession, and the people who would have been telling her what to do.
Three. The uselessness of the search once you know where you looked.
I, Lalla, went out looking for Shiva everywhere. I wandered and wore myself out. And then I looked, and he was sitting in his own house, which was me.
Four. The boat.
Her single most famous vakh, and it is an image any Kashmiri understands because of the lakes:
I am towing my boat across the sea with a thread that has not been twisted. Will he hear me and bring me across?
An untwisted thread has no strength; it is a single fibre and it snaps. The image is of doing something entirely beyond your means with a tool that will not hold.
And it does not resolve. The vakh ends on the question.
Five. Food and asceticism.
Given her history, her verses on eating are worth noticing. Several deal with hunger, with fasting, and with the difference between the two, and one observes plainly that starving the body does not by itself achieve anything.
Six. Everything became practice.
One of the best known, in substance: whatever work I did became worship; whatever I said became mantra; whatever happened to this body became the practice.
Which is the position this whole series keeps arriving at, arrived at here by a woman who had nothing except the work and the body.
What to Take From Her
One. She left.
After years of being starved in a household where everybody could see her plate, she walked out at around twenty four, with nowhere to go and no protection, into a life that was very hard.
The tradition honours her for the verses, not for the years of endurance, and the endurance is not the lesson.
In current terms: withholding food is domestic violence and is covered by the 2005 Act. Women's helpline 181, police 112, One Stop Sakhi Centres, free legal aid 15100, Tele MANAS 14416. Nobody has to stay.
Two. The stone under the rice.
The detail everybody remembers is that the plate looked full.
Her mother in law was not simply cruel; she was maintaining an appearance for everybody else in the house while the thing itself was a stone.
That is a general observation about how abuse works in families: it is usually invisible from outside because it is arranged to be, and the people around it are participating by not looking.
Three. The idol is stone, the temple is stone.
Addressed to a pandit, by a woman from a pandit family, about the tradition she came from.
And note what she says instead: join the breath and the mind. She is not saying there is nothing. She is saying the material of the practice is not out there, and she gives the alternative in the same verse.
Four. The untwisted thread.
Towing a boat across the sea with a fibre that has not been twisted, and asking whether he will hear.
The image is honest about the inadequacy of the means, and it does not resolve. That is unusual in devotional poetry and it is why the vakh survived.
Anybody who has tried to do something serious with what they actually have will recognise it.
Five. Everything became practice.
Whatever work I did became worship, whatever I said became mantra, whatever happened to this body became the practice.
Arrived at by somebody who had no leisure, no security, no household and no possessions, which is the same route Janabai took at the grinding stone and Gora took at the wheel.
A daily practice from this entry:
- Om Namah Shivaya
- One vakh, read and left alone. Translations by Ranjit Hoskote and others are widely available in English, and Kashmiri and Hindi editions exist
- The recognition question, which is the whole of Kashmir Shaivism: not what do I have to get, but what am I not noticing
- And, once: the boat with the untwisted thread, for a day when the means are obviously not equal to the task
A closing thought
A girl was married at twelve into a house at Pampore and given a new name, and her mother in law used to put a stone on her plate and spread rice over it so that it looked like food.
She ate around it for years, in a house where everybody could see the plate.
At about twenty four she walked out with nothing and spent the rest of her life going around Kashmir on foot, saying four line verses that people learned by hearing them once.
And six hundred years later Kashmiri Hindus call her Lalleshwari, Kashmiri Muslims call her Lal Arifa, everybody calls her grandmother, and her verses are still quoted in ordinary conversation by people who do not always know whose they are.
The Short Version
Who: Lal Ded, roughly 1320 to 1392, the founding figure of Kashmiri literature and the author of the oldest surviving poetry in the language. Known as Lalleshwari or Lalla among Kashmiri Hindus, Lal Arifa among Kashmiri Muslims, and Lal Ded, grandmother Lal, by everybody.
The marriage: married at twelve into a family at Pampore and renamed Padmavati. Her mother in law would put a stone on her plate and spread a thin layer of rice over it so that it looked full. Her own line about it is that whether they killed a fat sheep or a lean one, Lalla had her stone. Withholding food is domestic violence and is covered in India by the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act 2005: women's helpline 181, police 112, One Stop Sakhi Centres, free legal aid 15100.
Leaving: at around twenty four she walked out entirely, took up the life of a wandering ascetic, and went about Kashmir on foot for the rest of her life. Her guru was Sed Bayu, also given as Siddha Srikantha, of the Trika or Kashmir Shaiva tradition.
The vakhs: around 250 four line verses in spoken Kashmiri, rhymed and metrically regular, meant to be remembered and repeated, and transmitted orally for six hundred years. They are the oldest surviving Kashmiri, since the earlier literature of the region is in Sanskrit.
What they say: Kashmir Shaiva philosophy in the vernacular, using the technical vocabulary of the Trika system; attacks on external religious form addressed directly to pandits, including the famous one that the idol is stone and the temple is stone and what are you worshipping; the search that ended at home; and the boat being towed across the sea with a thread that has not been twisted, which does not resolve.
Why both communities claim her: she is a Hindu saint of the Kashmir Shaiva tradition by formation, vocabulary and initiation, and she is genuinely revered across communities in Kashmir and has been for six hundred years, including by the Rishi order founded by Nund Rishi. Both are true at once.
Reading Her
Where to find the vakhs
- Ranjit Hoskote's I, Lalla is the standard modern English translation and has a substantial introduction on the transmission and the attribution problems
- George Grierson and Lionel Barnett's Lalla Vakyani, from 1920, is the first scholarly edition and is out of copyright and freely available
- Jayalal Kaul's Lal Ded is the standard Kashmiri scholarly treatment
- Kashmiri and Hindi editions are available, and the vakhs circulate widely online
How to read them
One at a time. They are four lines and they were designed to be heard once and remembered. Reading forty in a sitting defeats the form.
Expect them to be technical. A number of the vakhs use Kashmir Shaiva vocabulary that will not make sense without some idea of the system, and a translation with notes is worth having.
And expect the attribution problem. Vakhs signed Lalla were composed for centuries after her, which is what happens to every oral corpus in this series, and no edition can fully separate them.
Where to go
- Pandrethan, near Srinagar, given as her birthplace
- Pampore, where she was married
- Bijbehara and other places in the valley associated with episodes of her life
- Chrar e Sharief, the shrine of Nund Rishi, which is one of the most important sites in Kashmir
A note on visiting Kashmir: check current travel advisories and local conditions before planning anything, and follow official guidance. That is practical advice rather than commentary of any kind.
A few vakhs to start with
In substance, and in the order that works:
- The boat with the untwisted thread, which is the one to start with
- The stone idol and the stone temple, addressed to the pandit
- I went out looking for Shiva and found him at home
- Whatever work I did became worship
- The one about not distinguishing between a Hindu and a Musalman
- The one about the fat sheep and the lean one, which is her biography in two lines
And her name
Lal Ded means grandmother Lal, and it is worth thinking about what a culture is doing when it names its most uncompromising philosophical poet after the oldest woman in the house.
Quick Answers
Who was Lal Ded?+
A fourteenth century Kashmiri poet and Shaiva ascetic, roughly 1320 to 1392, and the founding figure of Kashmiri literature. She is called Lalleshwari or Lalla by Kashmiri Hindus, Lal Arifa by Kashmiri Muslims, and Lal Ded, grandmother Lal, by everybody. Around 250 of her four line verses, called vakhs, survive, and they are the oldest surviving poetry in the Kashmiri language, since the earlier literature of the region is in Sanskrit.
What is the story of the stone on her plate?+
She was married at twelve into a family at Pampore and renamed Padmavati. Her mother in law would put a stone on her plate and spread a thin layer of rice over it, so the plate looked full when it was carried in and when anybody looked at it, while underneath there was almost nothing. Her own line about it, one of the best known things in Kashmiri, is that whether they killed a fat sheep or a lean one, Lalla had her stone: it made no difference what the household was eating. She endured it for years and left at around twenty four.
What is a vakh?+
A four line verse in spoken Kashmiri, rhymed and metrically regular, from the Sanskrit vakya meaning a saying or an utterance. They were designed to be heard once and remembered, and they were transmitted orally for six hundred years before being written down. Around 250 survive under Lal Ded's name, with the attribution problems every oral corpus has, and they are still quoted in ordinary Kashmiri conversation as proverbs by people who do not always know whose they are.
What is the vakh about the untwisted thread?+
Her most famous verse, in substance: I am towing my boat across the sea with a thread that has not been twisted; will he hear me and bring me across? An untwisted thread is a single fibre with no strength, and it snaps, so the image is of attempting something entirely beyond your means with a tool that will not hold. The vakh does not resolve; it ends on the question. That refusal to resolve is unusual in devotional poetry and is a large part of why the verse survived.
Why is Lal Ded revered by both Hindus and Muslims in Kashmir?+
She is a Hindu saint of the Kashmir Shaiva tradition by formation, vocabulary and initiation, and she has also been genuinely revered across communities in Kashmir for six hundred years, as Lalleshwari and as Lal Arifa. Both are historically real positions. A number of her vakhs attack external religious form directly, including her own community's, and one of her most quoted says in substance that Shiva is in every particle and that one should not distinguish between a Hindu and a Musalman. Kashmir also tells the story of her nursing the infant Nund Rishi, founder of the Rishi order, when he refused his mother's milk.
What is Kashmir Shaivism and why does it matter for reading her?+
Trika, the threefold, also called Kashmir Shaivism or Pratyabhijna, is the philosophical tradition that developed in Kashmir from around the ninth century, with Vasugupta, Somananda, Utpaladeva and Abhinavagupta as its major figures. Its claims are that there is one conscious reality which is Shiva, that the world is not an illusion but Shiva's own self expression and as real as he is, that the individual self is Shiva having forgotten, and that liberation is therefore recognition rather than acquisition: nothing has to be gained, something has to be noticed. Lal Ded was trained in it and her vakhs use its technical vocabulary, so a translation with notes is worth having.
About the author
Pandit Ravindra Sharma · Vedic Rituals & Bhakti, 22+ years
Pandit Ravindra is the Vandnaa editorial team's resident specialist on aarti, chalisa, and daily devotion. He has performed home and temple pujas across Varanasi and Delhi for over two decades and contributes the bhakti-focused articles on this site.
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