Mysticism in Kashmiri Poetry
Mysticism, it is said, "is the belief that knowledge of God and
of spiritual truth is gained through personal insight or intuition instead of
logic and reasoning". It also means a way of living based on such a belief.
"Mysticism has got a philosophical side and a practical side.
Philosophically, all mystics believe that there is a supreme all-pervading and
in-dwelling power to whom all things are one and hence it should be the intense
effort of the human mind to apprehend the Divine Essence or the Ultimate
Reality". On the practical side a mystic believes that there can be direct
communication with the "Being of Beings" and one can draw supreme
anand (joy) from His blessed intercourse. This can be achieved by a kind of
transfusion of identification, in which one becomes a partaker of the Divine
nature".
KASHMIRI MYSTICISM
Mysticism in Kashmir is unique in being the amalgam of Hindu mysticism and
Sufism of Islam. This is because the Kashmiri community, comprising chiefly of
Hindus and Muslims, is very closely knit and these components intimately
interact, resulting in a fusion of religious and mystical traditions and
conventions, which is hard to break. In Kashmir the gems of mysticism, latent in
Hinduism and Islam were developed by the political, social and intellectual
conditions which prevailed, from time to time, in the blessed land. In the early
history of Kashmir, the ruthless military despotism, the luxury of upper classes
and the hard mechanical piety of the orthodox creeds gave a churning to the
minds of many a speculative people and thereby a host of mystic poets got
skimmed off the social surface. These are Lalleshwari, Nund Rishi, Rup Bhawani,
Shah Gafoor, Shah Qalanadar, Shams Faqir and Zinda Koul.
LALLESHWARI, THE MYSTIC POET
We may here dwell upon two old and two modern mystic poets. The greatest of
all the mystic poets is Lalleshwari, affectionately called Lal Ded, who was born
in the socio-religious milieu which was full ofturmoil and discord. No Kashmiri
has such a superabundant wealth of spiritual power that she had and in this
regard none has deeper significance than she. It is about 1335 A.D. that she was
born in a Brahmin family at Pandrethan, four miles to the south-east of Srinagar.
She got a thorough grounding in Shaivism and Yoga from her family priest, named
Sed Shri Kanth or Sed Mot and from her early childhood people could see in her
the glow of a poetic impressionality, of a gift for visionary and mystical
effects. She was married at an early age of twelve to a Brahman boy of Pampore,
a village at a distance of eight miles from Srinagar. Then she had to suffer the
tyranny of her mother-in-law and the onslaughts of her husband. Soon after, in a
transcendental flash, she decided to leave her house and thus renouncing the
world she turned into a wandering recluse and in a semi-nude state went into
jungles and stayed in mountain caves. She preached her mystical and moral
idealism through her facile, dignified and delightfully harmonious verses called
"vakyas". Her spiritual ardour sustained the spontaneous elevation of
their language.
Lal Ded (URL)
The foundation of her spirituality is Shaivism and Upanishidic wisdom
alongwith the mysticism of Sufism. Parmanand, the great divine poet of the last
century, speaks of her spiritual practice thus:
"Lalleshwari realised anhata, nada, bindu and Om. Being unique in her
Yoga of Dvadshanta Mandala she grasped the supreme Ananda".
DIFFERENT STAGES OF HER ASCENT
The quality of her vakyas lies in the fact that she shares her soul's deeper
secrets with the people and one can easily trace the ascent of her 'self' from
them. Firstly, she practised self-discipline and tried to purify her life and
refused to be the slave of lust, pride and greed. Then at the second stage she
adopted the holy indifference and detachment towards the worldly interests and
desires. Later, she escaped from the trammels of daily life and daily tried to
rouse her mind by the solitary musings and meditations. She found many dogmatic
tenets regarding idol worship, superficial differences of caste or religion as
absurd. She turned away from rituals and the religious worship in all its pomp
of sacrificing animals. She practised many hard disciplines and awakened
Kundalini by means of mastering her vital airs, prana and apana. She says:
"I closed the door and windows of my body's mansion and caught my
life-breath as thief within:
I bound him fast in cell of my heart and with stinging whip of Om I flayed
him there".
Finally, she reached the transcendental stage when her mind could go beyond
matter and could know more than she saw and experienced. She found herself a
part of one Soul which spoke to her and through her in a unique way. To attain
this Reality she also advocated the annihilation of duality and merger with the
Supreme.
These different stages, to some extent, correspond to the Sufi's different
stages on the path of God. R.A. Nicholson, in her book, "The Mysticism of
Islam", says: Sufism teaches that everything is an emanation from God and
the goal of life is reunion with its source. "Lalleshwari too had this
belief. What Rabis of Basra was to Sufism, Lalleshwari was to Hindu mysticism.
Both set forth the doctrine of mystical love in their sayings and believed that
every aspiration was centred in the inward life of dying to self and living in
God".
SHEIKH NOOK-U-DIN WALI
Lalleshwari's younger contemporary Sheikh Noor-u-Din of Tsrar-I-Sharif,
popularly called Nund. Rishi, was a Sufi par excellence. He was born in 1378
A.D. and his ancestors came from Kishtwar and settled in Kashmir. The beacon
light of Nund Rishi's endeavours was Lalleshwari and in his verses he
acknowledges her supremacy.
His susceptibility to emotion was very strong; human suffering and pain
stirred up his feelings of religious sublimity and imagination. His aim was to
grasp the Divine realities and he believed in the doctrine of annihilation (fana)
that is, the passing away of individual consciousness in the will of God.
Ziyarat-i-Chrar-e-Sharief (URL)
From the very young age he was of a retiring disposition and showed no
inclination to any trade. Ultimately, he renounced the world and practised
penance for twelve years in a mountain cave and attained the spiritual bliss.
Though he was utterly illiterate, yet he gave utterances to hundreds of dainty
and wise sayings which are considered gems in the treasury of mysticism. These
have been collected in two volumes, entitled Rishi Nama and Nur Nama. His verses
called 'Shrukh' are in a delicate didactic vein of a gentle moralist. He
emphasised two things: first, Zikkar (praise of God) consisting of the
recitation of the name of God and second Tu,rakirl (trust in God), that is
leaving one's self entirely in God's hands. lie firmly believed in quitism, the
abandoning of all desires, with the passive acceptance of whatever comes. In
this regard he says:
"Desire is the knotted wood of the forest. It cannot be made into
planks, beams or into cradles. He who cut and felled it will burn it into
ashes".
Nund Rishi takes place beside Lalleshwari among the great regenerators of the
conscience in a spiritual sense and his work had and still has an influence on
the deeper moral resolves and actions of Kashmiri people, Hindus and Muslims
alike.
With the advent of Dogra rule in Kashmir, an era of unalloyed peace and
enlightenment was ushered in. The Valley was connected with the Punjab by two
metalled roads, postal and telegraphic service. The Dogra rulers, instead of
thrusting Dogri or Sanskrit upon the people, introduced Urdu and later on
English as well into the educational institutions and the offices. Fresh and
fragrant breeze of modernism thus blew over the Valley which brought a
cataclysmic change in the minds of the people. The Kashmiri language blossomed.
Many poets ofthe period felt spiritual impulse which they expressed through the
language of their land and not through an alien language like Persian.
ZINDA KOUL
The eminent mystic poet of modern period is 'Master' Zinda Koul, who was born
in 1889 in a Brahmin family in Srinagar. Early in his life he fell into abject
poverty and had to bear more than his share of those miseries and tribulations,
which most of us are heir to, due to the bad karmas in the previous existence,
for he lost his eldest son and he had to work hard to feed his grandchildren and
his daughter-in-law. He was overwhelmed with grief and at the late age of 58,
mystical numbers flowed from his plaintive pen in Kashmiri. Brooding woke up the
poet in Zinda Koul to pursue a search for the ultimate Reality.
Pandit Zinda Koul (1884-1965) (URL)
It is in the reserves of a latent Hindu mystical individualism as well as in
an intense spiritual sense of life that Zinda Koul finds an untapped vein of
rich ore to be exploited for his poetic work. The genius of Western thought and
literature alongwith Islamic Sufism is "the favourable influence that comes
to stimulate a ripening originality, to quicken its consciousness of itglfand to
supply with assimiable ideas, thus enabling it to emerge and develop".
He became an apostle of his land's traditional mysticism whose foundation was
based on love, but it was the magnetism of Western thought (Plato, Emerson,
Thomson, etc.) and Sufism "which helped to polarise in the tenacious
strain" of mysticism in his nature. While figuring an apostle of stoicism
in the beginning, he was later engulfed in the morass of scepticism, he only
wails and moans. From the slender volume of 35 poems,, entitled Stmiran, which
won him Sahitya Akademi Award, we find that the focus of his moral being is
God's love and guidance to be had in a personal relationship between God and
man, through prayer and hope. Intuitively man feels God's love and when he pours
his love to Him, God becomes then a saviour and protector of the pure-hearted
and the righteous. He says:
"He was always by your side,
He has always been there;
The child listening to Surdas
Singing of his love".
Like a hound of Heaven, God, full of love, pursues man and does not forsake
him. He says:
He further believes that the soul of man yearns to mingle with the Super-Soul
or God and this belief fans the fire of his poems and is blended with an acute
perception of the mutability of life and the transient character of pleasure.
There is a fusion of artistic luxuriance with mystic ideas and wistful
melancholy which gives his poems a unique, unforgettable quality.
SHAMS FAQIR
Shams Faqir, his contemporary, is like a gentle stream beside an impetuous
waterfall. Lacking the force and vigour of Zinda Koul, his mystical poems
contain a crystalline charm of their own. He was a Darvesh and his poetry is an
effusion of his true mystical experience. In his mysticism too we find a
traditional synthesis of Hindu mysticism and Sufism and one wonders at the
numerous allusions to Hinduism found in his poetry. He also revered Lalleshwari.
We find Shams Faqir singing of annihilation (fana) in the Divine.
He also believes that there is no distinction between a Hindu and a Muslim.
Note what he says:
"How to define life and death?
How to call and classify Him?
He has neither mind nor body
His abode is off the boundless bar".
or again:
"O listen I burn in passion of Love
And thus I remember my Love!
In the tavern I drink from the love's goblet
And thus I remember my love!"
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