HUG reviews: Nund Rishi: Poetry and Politics in Medieval Kashmir by Abir Bazaz. Cambridge University Press, 2023
What happens to the one who has drunk the nectar and found taste in wild vegetables? The same one is seized by the leopard that is death in life itself. And in solitude such a being can hear the rumblings of a day when the sky shall melt like molten copper and mountains look like fluffs of wool.
Abir Bazaz has crafted a tapestry of patient, utopian and life affirming possibilities by explicating the inner workings of affirmative negation that is non-dual gnosis; in this particular case, that of sahaja Islam, as felt and realized in the many utterances (especially through the shruk—a quatrain that expresses a single thought) of Nund Rishi (1378-1440)—Kashmir’s most revered saint-poet and founder of the Rishi Order.
Once he has given us a sense of what might be the contours of the sahaja vath (path) in Kashmir and what its similarities and differences are with other such traditions on the subcontinent and in wider South Asia, Bazaz delves deep into three intimate ideas and their relationship with each other in shaping such a sahaja world: the trope of ‘death before dying,’ the unity of negation-affirmation, and the apocalypse of the ‘afterworld’ which is also immediate and political.
Love is taking a Beehive into your Coat
What is syncretic in gnosis is also esoteric. The fragrant secret of the subtle knot is not to be divulged always in ecstasy. One of the finely-drawn threads in this work depicts how Nund Rishi was carefully trying to finding a way through the Shari’ah (from shara-road) and more ecstatic Sufi utterances (shath). It is not easy to place him. Indeed, for Nund Rishi, Shari’ah is the sahaja path. It is a bank to the river of human action. What is important is creating the common conditions of self transformation. The transformation is at once within selves, and also a possibility open to common humanity if it can realize the workings of such gnosis. All charlatanry in teaching and accepting knowledge must be abandoned if one has to enter such a zone of transformation. One cannot pretend to be an elder in the exchange of knowledge—Bazaz introduces a sense of radical equity right there. Decoding the hermeneutics of the shruks is not only about the pyrotechnics of kalam. The authentic faqih (jurist) and alim(scholar) must invoke the idea of amal (action) and other practices of the self.
The book is about achieving a difficult sobriety. Bazaz tells us about the ecstatic utterances and martyrdom of the Sufi saint poet— Mansur al-Hallaj. He was maimed, quartered and stoned to death. Hallaj’s divine realization is beyond doubt but his error was in divulging the inner truths of gnosis, and the fragrance of unity was thus dissipated. He could not “bear the blow of the divine flash” and got “his windpipe shattered.” Nund Rishi, by contrast to such an ecstatic Sufism, seeks a more “simple, navigable path.” The ‘way of going” is rather a patient and difficult talk, he suggests—a commitment to a universalism that has to be earned from the pain that is love and total abandonment. Only the one who is cast out turns into a sahajia. At this point Bazaz tries to tackle one of the unresolvable but productive dilemmas of such gnosis: after such knowledge, does the vath lead to a supraconscious state of void (sunyata) or to a total immersion in life’s flow and trans-religious variegatedness? At times Bazaz (with cues from the likes of Rahman Rahi) seems to suggest that the latter was the path of Lal Ded (and is she therefore more poetic?) rather than Nund Rishi. The former is sweet and ecstatic, the other, serious and heavy. But more often than not in the book, the two of them are placed as carrying forward the same tradition.
Shops after Closing Time
Death is a stealthy thief: “that which leaves nothing intact.” The shruks are aporetic knots. These are ‘touchstones’ that are often paradoxical and therefore cannot be reduced to a belief-system. Feeling the power of each shruk is a mode of living, a process of transformation. They burn down the ego. One realizes that the night is dark, and death, imminent—for death has “shattered our youth”—“the way water is absorbed by new clay channels/the way shops are abandoned at closing time.” One waits in the abandoned bazaar—for ruination and complete desolation. Since death is universal, no one will be cured without dying. Death is a sense of the passage of time, and preparing for death is such a realization. A powerful shruk tells us about the intimidating quarters of the rich, who shoo poor people away. Beautiful women singing in the palaces, until “dust is being swept with chowries,” and “people grow cotton over there.” Time elapses. It leaves its mark. Ruination is equity. Hence, death before dying is freedom—since to live in such a cataclysmic condition of the outcast leaves nothing intact. But in the process, the ruined one gains a second life in eternity: which is a process of kenotic self-emptying. Dying before death joins us to one another. The political question of fraternity is passed through the bridge of equality. This is the power of living in death—in transforming individual and common living.
Show me Your Face in the Clay
La Makan (no place) is the address of the outcast. Solitude is a form of preparation. Slow ruination gradually leads to no-place or nothingness. Ruination is therefore an invitation to poetry—which celebrates the temporal movement in and through life. The bereft is bound to all creatures and to every substance around him—“abandoning existence, I found presence/Thus have I reached the place-less place.” In this section on place-less place in the Rishi tradition, Bazaz deals most intricately and intimately with the question of what is affirming in negative theology—about the relationship between nafi and isbat (a discussion he had already initiated in the introductory pages of the work). He puts forward another powerful divergent possibility: If nothingness is a site of revelation for the egalitarian-gnostic, should the experience of the self be a site of endless kenosis or a turn towards the deepest of solitudes within the self itself? In a brilliant articulation (perhaps the most sophisticated in the book), Bazaz suggests through the utterances of Nund Rishi that the presencing of the existent being (mawjud) is as significant as existence (vajud). Kunear or unity in nothingness is then as much about temporal finitude as about transcendental unity. Bazaz concludes therefore that “being Nothing has an irreducibly political dimension.” The proximate awareness of death is also about immersion in living. The question of radical equality never departs from the work’s horizon.
Can I join Gold with Glass?
The final chapter on a vernacular apocalypse is the most politically charged in its scope, though the poetry gets richer. Here again we watch the see-saw between moderation and the thunderous drum beats of radical change. Nund Rishi says that “a single breath and the mountains will blow off like the carder’s wool off a string.” The violence involved in a cataclysm is unmistakable. Just like love, one cannot escape the living hell of fana (nihilation) and fana al-fana (annihilation). Love is a decisive battle with the oppressive ego. Its apocalyptic sword can be transformative. Here arrives another productive dilemma: between deciding on the eschatological force of traditional Islam and the apocalypse as a prayer and love. Is the apocalypse in Nund Rishi a principle of perduration and Utopia? And yet in imagining such a Utopia, the sense of violent reversal is ever present.
Bazaz lets the tautness brew: “There is a tension in the apocalyptic between political passivity and political rebellion that remains undecidable, but nonetheless a political attitude is unmistakable.” Nund Rishi calls forth for new life, and the force of apocalypse is channelled—“life is joined after all to life.” Interestingly, Bazaz is quite forthright in telling us that there is a conservatism involved in the very notion of a moral apocalypse. For him, the Sufi apocalypse of such a nature is radical precisely because it is passive. Not ecstatic. To reach such a stage is possible in this very world: the Afterworld. After the bitter chill of the winter, the paradise must light up. The afterworld shall arrive in this temporal arena.
Through his gnostic utterances, Nund Rishi, the alamdar (flag-bearer) has hinted at a direction for us, a possiblity. Are we ready and prepared enough to feel and taste the poetic rumblings of his shruks, in a severely divided world?
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