I Lalla: The Poems of Lal Ded

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The poems of the fourteenth-century Kashmiri mystic Lal Ded, popularly known as Lalla, strike us like brief and blinding bursts of light. Epiphanic and provocative, they shuttle between the vulnerability of doubt and the assurance of an insight gained through resilience and reflection. These poems are as sensuously evocative as they are charged with an ecstatic devotion: Lalla does not surrender meekly to enlightenment but embraces it with wild passion. The poet Ranjit Hoskote’s new English translation restores the jagged, colloquial power of Lalla’s verse, stripping away a century of ornate, Victorian-inflected translations and paraphrases. In a radical break with the established convention of treating Lal Ded as a single author, Hoskote instead proposes the theory that her name stands for a contributory lineage of questors and reciters who followed in her wake. While introducing the reader to the philosophical, political and social contexts of the original poetry, Hoskote also attempts to address the troubled history of Kashmir through the figure of Lal Ded. Emotionally rich yet philosophically precise, sumptuously enigmatic yet crisply structured, Lalla’s poems in Ranjit Hoskote’s translation are glorious manifestos of illumination.

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Ranjit Hoskoté is a poet, cultural theorist and independent curator of contemporary art. He is the author of three collections of poetry: Zones of Assault (1991), The Cartographer’s Apprentice (2000) and The Sleepwalker’s Archive (2001). He has also co-translated Vasant Dahake’s Marathi poems under the title A Terrorist of the Spirit (1992) and edited the anthology, Reasons for Belonging: Fourteen Contemporary Indian Poets (Viking, 2002). He has also written a critical biography of the artist Jehangir Sabavala (Pilgrim, Exile, Sorcerer, 1998) and a monograph on the painter Sudhir Patwardhan (The Complicit Observer, 2004). As a literary organizer, Hoskoté has been associated with the Poetry Circle, Bombay, since its inception in 1986, and was its President from 1992 to 1997. Hoskote was Visiting Writer and Fellow of the International Writing Program, University of Iowa (1995) and has held a writing residency at the Villa Waldberta, Munich (2003). He received the Sanskriti Award for Literature in 1996 and the Sahitya Akademi Golden Jubilee Award in 2004. Hoskote lives and works in Bombay.