Lal Ded and her vakhs: the beginnings of Kashmiri poetry

Almost nothing about Lal Ded is certain. The 15th-century continuators of Kalhana's chronicle of Kashmir, Jonaraja and Srivara, do not mention her, and the first written account of her life, in a Persian collection of saints' lives by Mulla Ali Raina, dates from 1587. Tradition holds that she was born into a Brahmin family at Pandrethan near Srinagar, was married at twelve and, ill-treated in her husband's home, left it to follow the Shaiva teacher Sed Boyu and to wander as an ascetic, singing and dancing in ecstasy. Her dates are traditionally given as c. 1320–1392, while most modern scholars place her birth between 1301 and 1320 and her death about 1373; a Persian chronicle of 1746 says she was known under Sultan Ala ud-Din (1343–1354) and died under Shihab ud-Din (1354–1373). Legends make her a contemporary of the Sufi Sayyid Ali Hamadani, and George Grierson concluded only that she "probably lived in the fourteenth century of our era".

Some 285 vakhs (from the Sanskrit vāc, ‘speech’) are attributed to her, though, handed down orally, they have reached us in a much later form of the language. They express the teaching of Kashmir Shaivism — the search for Shiva within oneself, indifference to ritual and outward forms, the merging of the self with the Absolute. No authentic manuscript of her verses survives: they lived in oral tradition and in a few late collections. At George Grierson's request, made in 1914, the scholar Mukunda Rama Sastri wrote down a recension recited by an old Brahmin of the village of Gush, Dharma-dasa Darwesh, and in 1920 Grierson and Lionel Barnett published it with a translation as Lalla-Vakyani, calling the songs the oldest known specimen of the Kashmiri language. Lal Ded was a model for the Sufi Nund Rishi, the founder of the Rishi order, and is venerated by Kashmiri Hindus as Lalleshwari and by Muslims as Lal Arifa.