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by M. K. Kaw
Friends,
 We have listened to scholars of all day long. People have approached Lal Ded
from different aspects-as a mystic, as a Shaivite devotee, as poet, as architect
of Kashmiri language, as a feminist, as a social reformer and so on. But in this
whole process of dissection of a great personality, we should not forget that
Lal Ded was a holistic person. She was all these rolled into one, in a unique
and unparalleled manner. She was Lal Ded and whatever she did came from the core
of her personality.
On the questions of whether she was a Hindu or a Muslim saint, I think that
many great saints have been subjected to similar controversies. Two major
examples are Kabir and Sai Baba of Shirdi. To my mind, it is pointless to
circumscribe the personality and experience of these great souls in a
straitjacket. Mystics have all had similar experiences while realizing the
oneness of all phenomena. The experiences have to be the same. Human beings are
the same. Therefore, mystic experiences cannot, by definition, be different. It
is fruitless to argue whether a particular mystic draws his experiences from
Hindu sources or Muslim sources.
What is remarkable about Lal Ded that living in tumultuous times, she was
able to retain her catholicity, eclecticism and tolerance. Today, when we have
been subjected as a community to unprecedented trauma and feel injured in our
soul, we need to recall her equipoise and emotional balance so that our wounds
are healed.
In the outer world, there is always bound to be a contest between the forces
of good and evil, those of compassionate humanism and those of fundamentalist
extremism. We have to accept the negative as being as much part of the will of
the divine, as the positive is. There is a divine design to the happenings of
the universe. This world is a drama. We have to play our allotted role and play
it well.
If we model ourselves on Lal Ded, we can retain our sanity and survive these
troubled times. It is her voice of reason that can be a beacon-light of hope to the whole of humanity and guide
us all to the divine. That, ladies an, gentlemen, is her relevance to the modern
age.
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