The world of Lalla: A journey into the heart of the 14th-century Kashmiri mystic poetess

“Biography as we know it is a modern invention and the fact that we think it important to know the details of people’s personal lives tells us more about ourselves than about them”.

“The biography of a poet, arguably, is insignificant, because he should be known through his poetry.”

Mystics, seers and sages are the earthly equivalents of the sun and stars in more than one way. The Gospel of John notes, “Believers are simply in the world – physically present – but not of it, not part of its values”. The universal appeal, cosmopolitan content and all-encompassing nature of their message, like the light from candles in the sky, is prior and paramount to the historicity and specifics of their lives. The very ambiguity and mystery characterizing them hinges their life accounts between history and hagiography with their lives possessing more of a mythical importance (myth as understood by philosophers and anthropologists like Lucien Bruhl, Mircea Eliade, and others) and archetypal significance (archetype as understood in Jungian psychology) than the mere sequence of mundane events characterizing their corporeal existence. They defy proprietorship and shriek at the idea of being confined to the categories of religion, geography, and time.

The mystic is neither of...

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