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Claimed by Two Communities

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Claimed by Two Communities

Lalleshwari is one of very few religious figures held in affection by two communities that have otherwise had a hard history in the same place. To Kashmiri Hindus she is Lalleshwari or Lalla, a Shaiva yogini. To Kashmiri Muslims she is Lal Ded, grandmother Lalla, or Lalla Arifa, Lalla the gnostic, and her sayings are quoted alongside Sufi material without any sense of trespass.

The double claim is old rather than a modern gesture of goodwill. Kashmir in her period was in the middle of a long, uneven conversion to Islam, and the Rishi order that grew up there, and the figure of Nund Rishi in the following generation, drew on local Shaiva ascetic practice as much as on anything imported. Traditional accounts have Lalla meeting the Persian preacher Sayyid Ali Hamadani, though the dates make the meeting difficult and historians treat it as legendary.

The atlas records the shared veneration as a fact about how she has been received, without adjudicating the theological question of whose she was. That question is live, it has been argued in Kashmiri scholarship in both directions, and the honest position is that a fourteenth century non dualist who denounced ritual on principle fits inside more than one later frame precisely because she refused to be placed inside any of them at the time.

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