Part I: Chapter 4

LALLESHWARI - A SHINING SYMBOL OF INDIANNESS

Lalla's pristine personality and philosophical beliefs realised through yogic practices are thoroughly reflected in her verse-sayings, which, if clinically scanned, do not in the least reflect the Islamic teachings nor is there any blend of Islam and Shaivism. As correctly appraised by Sir Richard Temple, she was a Shaiva Yogini neatly grounded in Shaivayoga practices, a self-recognised soul and a spiritualist of depth and maturity. Scholars keen to find an artificial graft of Islam on Lalla's stem of personal cultivation and ultimate flowering catch hold of the verse-saying "Idol is of stone and temple is of stone," not knowing that it is suffused with the Shaivite thought and content, which does not accept adherence to and frankly rejects any conformity to external forms of ritualistic worship based on duality. Idol worship as held by Kashmir Shaivism and also by Tantric enunciations might be useful for an initiate under-taking a spiritual journey for final absorption in the ultimate Reality, but as he goes on ascending step by step from lower planes of consciousness to higher ones, it is abandoned as of no use and utility.

Motivated by their Semitic back-ground, Grierson and Temple baffled by Lall's profundity of thought and intensitv of felt experiences were in assiduous search of traces of Islamic influence in her verse-sayings and went into raptures to find the word 'Jin' which, to them is Arabic in origin and usage. But, to be sure, the said-word, to their dismay, is sanskritic in origin and semantics denoting one 'who has conquered his wayword senses' and Lalla has used it for the Buddha, though it is used for Mahavira also.

Temple with his known Semitic persuasions and Kausambi with all his erudition have indicated and held out a ridiculous thesis that Lalla conceived the idea of 'one God reality' from her associations with Muslim saints like Mir Ali Hamadani. But, these scholars, to the surprise of all, are and seem to be totally oblivious of the fact that the Hindus in their congeries of queries and questionings have not only conceived, but reflected a thorough consciousness of the idea and the same gets expressly revealed through the Hindu works on religion. Though polytheistic-vedic hymns are permeated with polytheistic conceptions about the forces of Nature, yet the concept of 'one reality' is not absent or missing, but is prominently present and palpably existing. In the upanishads, the idea of 'one reality' is the nub of all enquiry, which culminates in the thought-construct of Brahman as the ultimate ground and support of the universe.

Lalla is the essence of Indianness, its luminous and indomitable spirit, its holistic world-view, and its challenge to the forces of hatred and persecution, obliterating its heritage rooted in continuity. Her verse-sayings, thoughtful, intense and esoteric in import, are 'statements of spiritual experiences, lived and felt, and guides to that experience.' As the epitome of indigenous ethos, Lalla is all-embracing, coherent and sweeping, never singing songs of despair and woe, despite a blood soaked catastrophe to which she was said to be a witness, but persistently defiant of hate-mongers and violence-perpetrators through her mystical voice, lofty and resonant, proclaiming that 'equality before God was as much a part of Hinduism as of Islam' and monotheism was not what could have sent her into raptures.

Despite defeat and discomfiture of the native Hindus, Lalla personified their unflinching confidence and deep sense of pride in their heritage and roots and provided them a distinct and unmistakable identity by irrigating the fields of Rishi-ethos with its root systems bedrocked in the Vedic Age only to sharpen the cleavage between a highly tolerant and incredibly eclectic and catholic weltanchauung and a proselytizing and heresy hunting creed. She honed and fine-tuned her thought, lived and felt, when Muslims were sharpening their swords. She as a counter crusader held aloft the pennant of humanism at a time when it was under the process of being cruelly bruised and brutally trampled upon and as a prime mover generated a new wave of humanism flowing from the perennial fountain of Indianness, ever flowing and fresh in contents, defying all attempts by full-blown fundamentalist parochials to give it a hiatus and a break. In sharp defiance of what was alien Lalla thought in her own terms, and mused 'productively, not reproductively'.