In his book Man and His Symbols, Carl Gustav Jung argued that symbols, signs, and artifacts of traditional culture in the modern era are used covertly or explicitly to mythologize ideological and political processes in order to justify controversial arguments and claims [Jung, 1964, p. 62]. In the Indian Middle Ages, in particular, there are similar figures-archetypes, in which, as in focus, many similar problems converge and around which there is an endless controversy. One such figure is Lal Dead.

Keywords: Lal Dead, Kashmir problem, cultural heritage, national identity, medieval mystical poetry.

Lal Dead (lit. "grandmother Lal"), aka Lalla, Lalleshwari, Lal Arifa, Lalita (1320 - 1392?) - medieval Indian poet, founder of the literary tradition in the Kashmiri language. Little is known about the life of Lal Dead: it is believed that she was a wandering ascetic who lived on alms, and an adept of the god Shiva. According to legend, Lalla was born into a Brahmin family in a village near Srinagar; at the age of twelve, she was married to a fellow villager, but later abandoned her home and family to become a traveling preacher.

There are many legends about Lalla. The most popular one concerns her appearance: she was supposedly so free from prejudice and indifferent to any social norms that she wandered around naked. In her verses, she explained her habit of going naked with the teachings of her guru Siddha Srikanta, i.e., doctrinal considerations:

My Guru punished me: "Turn your view from the outside inwards
And focus on your True Self."
I, Lali, 1 heeded his words with all my heart
And she wandered around naked

[Kaul, 1973, p. 38].

The poems attributed to Lalla have been preserved almost exclusively in oral transmission and were not written down until the seventeenth century. Many of her sayings have entered the Kashmiri language in the form of sayings, the origin of which is clear only to those who know the legend of Lal Dead. The most popular saying is " Even if a ram is slaughtered, even if a lamb is slaughtered, the fate of Lali is always a stone." In live speech, this saying refers to the unlucky loser, but it goes back to the legend that Lalla's cruel mother-in-law

The article was written with the financial support of the Russian Foundation for National Research, grant "Female leader in Traditional Muslim Society: the Benazir Bhutto phenomenon" N10-03-00014a.

1 In her speeches, the poetess refers to herself as "Lali".

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Each time, instead of food, I served her a stone, sprinkled with a handful of rice on top, to create the appearance of a plate filled with food [Jaishree Kak, 2007, p. 21].

The harassment of her mother-in-law and her husband's cruelty prompted Lalla to leave her family and leave home, i.e. to commit a social and gender protest action that is equally unacceptable for both Hindus and Muslims. Thus, in her gender role, Lalla appears as a marginal figure, deprived of everything that ensures the status of a woman in a patriarchal society-her husband, children, home and caste.

With Lal Dead, the history of the Kashmiri literary language begins, and this makes her an iconic figure for Kashmiri identity. Lalla's truly proverbial folk art and her status as a miracle-working saint represent her as a kind of "feminine" symbol of Kashmir, that earthly paradise that Jawaharlal Nehru once compared to "the body of a beautiful woman" (Lakshmi). The main theme of Lalla's work is characteristic of both Hindu and Muslim mysticism-it is liberation from worldly shackles, ecstatic spiritual search, protest against formalized social and religious institutions, the desire to merge with the Absolute.

The poems of Lal Dead, called watsun, or waakh (from Skt. vachana - "speech", "utterance"), significantly influenced the subsequent tradition of mystical poetry not only in Kashmiri, but also in other vernaculars of Northern India. Tradition considers Lal Dad to be the forerunner of the major mystical poets and religious reformers of South Asia in the 14th and 15th centuries, who belonged to both Sufism and the mystical movements in Hinduism, united by the term bhakti.

Lalla's work is a phenomenon of the common cultural heritage of the peoples of the Indian subcontinent, which after 1947 became the subject of fierce controversy between Hindus and Muslims, Indians and Pakistanis. For example, in the late 1990s, a play by screenwriter Fatima Surayya, dedicated to the life of Lal Dead, was broadcast on Pakistani television. It was called very eloquently: "La se Illallah tak" ("From La to Illallah"), i.e. from the denial of the true faith to its acceptance 2. The play interpreted Lalla's life and creative journey as a spiritual journey-from hostility to Islam, through disillusionment with Hinduism to conversion to Islam. A little later, in 2004, in various cities of India, the monodrama "Lal Dead" was held with great success, based on the life and work of the poet, played by the famous actress Mita Vashisht in three languages: English, Hindi and Kashmiri. The play focused on the poet's Kashmiri patriotism and her protest against the Muslim conquerors.3
These mutually exclusive dramatic interpretations and the constant controversy between authors writing about Lal Dead on both sides of the Indo-Pakistani border suggest that we are dealing with the genderization and mythologization of certain relevant historical events, in particular the origins of the Kashmir problem.

Each side has its own arguments. Muslims rightly point out that everything we know about the existence of Lal Dead is reflected in Muslim sources, the first of which is " Asrar al-abrar "("Secrets of the Pious") Baba Daud Mishkati (1654), who calls her Arifa, a term used in Sufism for a Gnostic who has been granted mystical knowledge (Toshkhani, 1985, p. 179). Further references to Lalla are found exclusively in Sufi hagiographic literature or in Muslim chronicles. As for the Hindu historiographers of Kashmir, in particular Juna Raj, the author of the chronicle "Dvitiya Rajatarangini" (1459), they do not mention her name at all. Other Kashmiri chroniclers, Srivara (1459-1486)

2 Refers to the" first pillar "of Islam, the testimony of "La ilaha illallahu Muhammadur rasulullah", which means: "There is no god but God, and Muhammad is His Prophet."

3 http://nationalschoolofdrama.blogspot.com/2007/04/mita-vasisth-lal-ded.html

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and Prajyabhata (1486-1513), also keep silent about such an outstanding figure [Parmu, 1959, p. 92].

Another Muslim argument is that it recognizes the special role played in the fate of Lalla by the Sufi sheikh of the Kubrawiyya order, Sayyid Ali Hamadani, who came to Kashmir for proselytizing purposes in 1371. When Lalla was asked why she went naked, she usually replied that she did not see men around her, but only sheep and goats. which, they say, have nothing to be shy about. When Lalla met Ali Hamadani (aka Shah Hamadan) during her wanderings around the neighborhood, she realized that this was a "real man", i.e. a true "Man of God". She was immediately ashamed of her nakedness and took refuge in a greengrocer's shop, from which she was expelled. Then Lalla broke into the baker's shop, where she hid in a hot oven (tandoor), from where she came out already dressed in the green robes of Islam. In other words, according to the Muslim tradition, under the influence of Ali Hamadani, Lalla converted to Islam [Parmu, 1959, p. 134]. Muslim hagiography interprets this episode as a spiritual awakening of Lalla in the bosom of Sufism; in the folk tradition, it is preserved in the form of the Kashmiri proverb "She went to the greengrocer, and left the baker" (Sheeraza, 1979, p. 56).

The third argument of the Muslims is that the waakhs of Lalla were written in Arabic script, since the traditional Kashmiri script was based on the Arabic script in its Persian modification with a number of additional characters. However, a small community of Kashmiri speakers who profess Hinduism in the past also used the sharada script, which dates back to the ancient Indian Brahmi script. So, the first European researchers of Lal Dead's work, the Englishmen George Grierson and Lionel Barnett [Grierson, Barnett, 1920] and the American Richard Temple [Temple, 1924], translated her poems written in the charade letter, which is already in the hands of those who perceive Lal Dead exclusively in line with the tradition of Hinduism.

Most contemporary Indian authors, such as Shekhar Toshkani, a well - known researcher of Lal Dad-Shashi's work, believe that "Lalleshwari, a saint who is considered a symbol of everything Kashmiri, cannot possibly belong to the Islamic world. And those who pretend to be scientists are lying, but are guided by their own religious considerations and refer to legends and anecdotes about her conversion to Islam " [Toshkhani, 2000, p. 21].

Lalla's words emphasize that the differences between religions are external and therefore false. A typical example from her poetry:

When my mind was cleansed of impure thoughts,
Like a mirror of dust and rust,
I saw Him in me.
When I realized that He dwells in me,
I have realized the falsity of differences in types and forms of [faith],
For He is all, and I am nothing

[Temple, 1924, p. 49].

In this sense, Lalla, like her predecessor, the Punjabi saint Baba Farid (d. 1265), and her later followers Kabir (1440-1518), Guru Nanak (1469-1539), and many others, can be described as Unitarian, Muwahideen, who did not care which one God to worship - Rama or Rahman, and where to worship - in a mosque or Hindu temple. The claims that the mystic is "neither a Muslim nor a Hindu" and that one should not follow the established external forms of religion are repeated in spiritual poetry in various languages of India with the tenacity of an incantation. Meanwhile, as historiography and hagiographic literature show, most Sufis followed all the prescriptions of Sharia, while Hindu mystics followed the practices and rituals of Hinduism [Suvorova, 2004, p. 182-84].

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At the same time, Indian authors are convinced that Lal Dead was a follower of Kashmiri Shaivism and Tantrism, if only because in her poems the invocation of God is expressed in the appropriate terminology. Her divine lover, her supreme deity, is always Shiva, aka Shankara, sometimes combined with Shakti; 4 her spiritual practice is sadhana, 5 and her fate is determined by karma. In other words, those scholars who believe that Lalleshwari has nothing to do with Sufism and Islam have quite good reasons. Even her custom of going naked can be explained by her association with Tantric practices (Murphy, 1999, p. 173). True, Muslims attribute the same" way of dressing " to Lal Arifa's closeness to the Malamatiya movement, ecstatic Muslim mystics who defied all social norms and sought to attract blasphemy. The most radical of these mystics also wore no clothes.

The Indian side is convinced that it was not Sufism in the person of Shah Hamadan that influenced Lal Dead, but on the contrary, it itself became the forerunner of Kashmiri Sufism. This is partly true if we take into account the Kashmiri Sufi brotherhood of Rishi and its founder Sheikh Nuruddin (1378-1438). The name of this Sufi order is unique, as it is named after Vedic sages-rishis, which indicates an unconditional Hindu influence.

The legend linking Nuruddin and Lalla is as follows. While wandering around, Lalla heard the cry of a newborn baby who refused to take its mother's breast. Then, according to Indian sources, Lalla fed him with her own breast (an incredible circumstance, considering that in 1378, when Nuruddin was born, Lalla was 58 years old and childless!). According to Muslim sources, always more chaste, she put her finger in the baby's mouth, from which milk miraculously flowed.

In any case, Lal Dead is here acting as an initiatory figure, a wet nurse, a spiritual mother, rather Nuruddin's grandmother. The Kashmiri folk tradition responds to this legend with a rather ambiguous saying: "You are not ashamed to be born (come out of the loins), but you are embarrassed to suck the breast" [Toshkhani, 2000, p. 225]. The hagiographic literature of the order, the so-called rishinama, constantly mentions Lal Arifa as its predecessor. According to a number of Muslim scholars, many of the sayings attributed to Lalla actually belong to Nuruddin and other members of the Rishi order (Toshkhani, 1985, p. 191).

The function of Lal Dead's image as a nursing mother, her name, nakedness, and appearance are all linked to a specific gender archetype. The word Lal, Lalla in Kashmiri means "saggy belly", and not "ruby" or "tulip", as it is often interpreted by Muslims who translate these words from the Farsi language. Lalla's saggy belly could, of course, indicate her advanced age (literally Lal Dead - "grandmother with a saggy belly"). However, in archetypal terms, the features of her image - her nakedness, large belly, and breast milk-rather indicate the symbolism of fertility characteristic of ancient representations of the Mother deity, one of the main archetypes of Shaivite shaktism and Tantrism [Murphy, 1999, p. 232].

Archetypal and closely related to Lalla is the image of Kashmir - the image of a lost and contested paradise claimed by many faiths, not only Hinduism and Islam, but also Buddhism and Christianity. It is enough to recall the apocrypha,

4 In Hinduism, the word "Shakti" has many meanings. Shakti refers to the divine universal energy, which is the creative power of Shiva, and Shakti is in continuous fusion with Shiva, representing with him two inseparable aspects of the same reality. Shakti is the Divine Mother, the manifested world, Mother Nature. Shakti is called the goddess, the consort of the god Shiva. Shakti is the cosmic feminine principle, the feminine principle of man, his female half.

5 Sadhana is a term used in Hinduism and Buddhism for spiritual practice and can also be translated as "a means to achieve something". Sadhanas are followed for the sake of achieving various spiritual and ritual goals, for the sake of spiritual purification and progress in spiritual life.

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They claim that Christ escaped death on the cross and took refuge in India, where he lived to a great old age and died in Kashmir near Srinagar. This version, which is absolutely unacceptable for a Christian, is found in the so-called Tibetan Gospel 6, and it is also believed by members of the Ahmadiyya Muslim sect. The founder of the Ahmadiyya sect, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad (1835 - 1908), taught that Jesus was indeed crucified on the cross, but did not die, but took refuge in Kashmir, where he lived and preached under the name of Yuz Asaf until the age of 120 [Valentine, 2008, p. 168]. The number of proponents of the theory of Christ's presence in Kashmir among the inhabitants of India increased thanks to the publication of the book "Christ in Kashmir" by Abdul Aziz Kashmiri, also a member of the Ahmadiyya sect [Abdul Aziz Kashmiri, 1968].

In the mid-1980s, the theory of the life and death of Christ in Kashmir spread beyond India and became a global sensation thanks to the popular book of the German Holger Kersten "Jesus Lived in India" (Kersten, 1986). Several years ago, authorities in the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir were forced to close the entrance to the Rosabal tomb (where Saint Yuz Asaf is buried) to foreigners, whose influx to worship the "alternative" tomb of Jesus prevented Muslim pilgrims from performing their rites [Dubious Jesus tomb in Kashmir...].

In the post-colonial era, all these archetypes are inevitably politicized, becoming quasi-arguments in the struggle for defining national identity, dividing cultural heritage, and ultimately in territorial claims. An example of the purely political controversy surrounding the figure of Lal Dead is the relatively recent story of how the Chief Minister of Jammu and Kashmir, the famous Sheikh Abdullah (1905-1982), was forced to appoint a special commission in the late 1970s in connection with protests over the name of the largest hospital in Srinagar. Initially, it was named Lal Arifa Hospital, but the Hindu intelligentsia demanded that it be renamed Lal Dead Hospital, because they saw in the first name "an attempt on the intellectual property of Hindus" [Ali, 2003, p. 202].

Lalla's death is also marked by a miracle: according to legend, when she felt her end, she hid in a large jug and covered herself with a lid. Flames burst out of the jug, and when the lid was removed, nothing perishable remained of Lalla, only the cosmic void-shunya (Sheeraza, 1979, p. 49). It is surprising that in Kashmir, where the tombs and mausoleums of Muslim saints and samadhi-places of cremation of the remains of Hindu saints-are found at every turn, the earthly stay of Lal Dead is not marked by any building or natural object, nothing but a dried-up reservoir called Lalla trag ("Lalla Pond"). By the way, this pond itself appeared as a result of a miracle. Lalla's husband, who was always bullying her, once threw a rock at her and broke the earthenware water jug she was carrying on her head. Then the drops of water seemed to freeze in the air, rose like a pillar of ice over Lalla's head, and only later spilled to the ground, filling a whole reservoir. Over time, the pond dried up, and at least the last refuge of Lal Dead did not become another bone of contention between Hindus and Muslims.

As can be seen, the academic question of whether the figure of a medieval semi - legendary poetess belongs to Hindus or Muslims turned out to be an acute one, synonymous with the question of whether Kashmir should belong to India or Pakistan. The "Lalla" concept/Kashmir " thus becomes the archetype of a very real geopolitical problem, known to us as the Kashmir problem [Ahmed, 2002, p. 155].

There is a certain historical paradox in the fact that two countries that claim Kashmir and have repeatedly resorted to destructive military actions on its territory,

6 In 1887, the Russian orientalist Nikolai Notovich announced that in a Tibetan monastery he was lucky enough to find a manuscript about the travels of the young Jesus in the East. This apocryphal text was called the "Tibetan Gospel".

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This is how they mythologize the origins of the conflict and find a spiritual background for their political claims - in the image of a preacher of the confessional world and unitarianism. The state and society in Pakistan severely restrict women's rights in the name of Islam, such as the recent death sentence of a Christian woman, Asiya Bibi, and the murder of Punjab Governor Salman Taseer, who stood up for her, events that have caused another aggravation of the political situation in Pakistan [Salman Taseer's murder]. And the fact that this society claims the legacy of a naked marginal woman who has abandoned all components of female status also causes a certain irony.

list of literature

Abdul Aziz Kashmiri. Christ in Kashmir. Srinagar: Roshni Publications, 1968.

Ahmed Durre S. (ed.) Gendering the Spirit. Women, Religion and the Post-Colonial Response. London-New York: Zed Books, 2002.

Ali Tariq. The Clash Of Fundamentalism. London: Verso Books, 2003.

Dubious Jesus tomb in Kashmir closed to visitors // http://in.christiantoday.com/articles/dubious-jesus-tomb-in-kashmir-closed-to-visitors/53 52.htm

Grierson G., Lionel D. Barnett. Lalla-Vakyani or the Wise Sayings of Lai Ded. Vol. XVII. London: Royal Asiatic Society, 1920.

Jaishree Kak Odin. Mystical Verses of Lalla. A Journey of Self Realization. New Delhi: Motilal Banarasi Dass, 2007.

Jung C. Man and His Symbols. N.Y.: Doubleday, 1964.

Kaul Jayalal. Lal Ded. New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1973.

Kersten H. Jesus Lived in India: His Unknown Life before and after Crucifixion. London: Element Books, 1986.

Lakshmi C.S. Songs of a mystic // http://www.hindu.com/lr/2005/05/01/stories/2005050100170400.htm

Murphy P. Triadic Mysticism. Delhi: Motilal Banarasi Dass, 1999.

Parmu, R.K. A History of Muslim Rule in Kashmir. New Delhi: Peoples Publishing House, 1959.

Salman Taseer's murder // Eurasia Review (http://www.eurasiareview.com/analysis/salman-taseers-mur-der-09012011/).

Sheeraza (Kashmiri). Special Number on Lai Ded. Srinagar: Jammu and Kashmir Academy of Art, Culture and Languages, 1979.

Suvorova A. Muslim Saints of South Asia: the eleventh to fifteenth century. London-New York: Routledge, 2004.

Temple R. The Word of Lalla. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1924

Toshkhani Shashi Shekhar. Kashmiri Sahitya ka Itihas (History of Kashmiri Literature). Srinagar: Jammu and Kashmir Academy of Art, Culture and Languages, 1985.

Toshkhani Shashi Shekhar (ed.) Lai Ded: The Great Kashmiri Saint-Poetess. Proceedings of the National Seminar "Remembering Lai Ded in the modern times". New Delhi: A.P.H. Publishing Corporation, 2000.

Valentine S.R. Islam and the Ahmadiyya Jama 'at'. London-New York: Hurst & Co, 2008.

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