Finding without effort, and drinking without the drinker || Acharya Prashant, on Saint Lalleshwari

Acharya Prashant: Lal Ded is the most remarkable name not only in Kashmir, not only in India. She defies being confined to a particular area, or time, or category. Physically, she was born in thirteenth century Kashmir. An ordinary girl, as ordinary as all of us are. Medieval India, she got married at an early age – twelve or thirteen. We do not have any definitive written accounts of her life. In fact, the first words about Lalla were written three hundred years after her physical death. So, most of us that we know, is by way of folklore.

So, she got married at an early age and had quite an unhappy marriage. Kashmiris are usually fond of flesh-eating. It is a cultural thing. Meat is a kind of staple diet. Lal Ded has a certain orientation of compassion. She was still Lalleshwari. Lal Ded comes a little later. When it comes then we will understand what it means. So, she is still Lalleshwari; a thirteen-year-old bride. The husband, the in-laws are asking her to get colored in their own lifestyle.

She refuses. She had a mystical orientation. More than normal pleasures of family life, more than procreating and starting a family of her own, there was something else that called to her.

One of the contemptuous issues that we come to know of was meat eating. She said, “I will not take meat whatever be the conditions.” Her mother in law said that if no meat, then you have to take stones because there is nothing else there. Folklore has it that Lal Ded actually preferred to eat stones than eat meat. Obviously, this is all symbolic but that tells us something about the way she looked at all life forms, this entire universe.

Twenty-two, still quite young, she decided to break away from the marriage. And when she broke away, she did not enter into another relationship of the same kind. Her disenchantment with the world was total. And I often say that in this lies the difference between a Lalleshwari and the rest of us. We also experience pain. Life keeps teaching lessons to all of us. The sufferings, the anxieties, the jolts that we face are all life’s lessons.