THE contestations over the meanings of Islam shaped the Muslim world in the past just as they do in the present. These debates, which revolve around the translatability of Islam’s Arabic and Qur’anic origins, have been as intense at Islam’s frontiers as they have been in Islam’s central lands. Poetry in vernacular languages, in particular, has been fundamental to these contestations, and translations, of Islam in different regions of South Asia. The vernacular poets in Kashmiri, Sindhi, Punjabi, Bengali, Urdu and other South Asian languages in the medieval period have been essential to translating, and provincializing, Islam.

In the vernaculars, Islam cannot but be more than one. This translatability of Islam appears at first to be at odds with the promise of the untranslatability of Arabic revelation as the spirit of its universality. Yet the translations of Islam at work in Kashmiri or Sindhi Sufi poetry do not merely signal a difference within the same. These translations of Islam pose nothing less than the question of Islam as the one, more than one, or the many. There is also another translation at stake in vernacular South Asian Sufi poetry: it opens up the question of the true meaning of the Qur’an beyond the original classical Arabic or its literal translation in the vernaculars. Poetry appears privileged as a site of translation of the Qur’anic revelation and Islam as a path which is perfectible but not perfect. To turn to poetry as a site of translating the Qur’an is to connect poetry to prophecy and revelation to practice.

The shruks of Nund Rishi (1378-1440), the founder of a fifteenth century regional Sufi order in Kashmir called the Rishi order, is just such a practice of poetry in the vernacular that opens up the experience of Islam as translation at the borders of Islam’s eastern lands, the threshold of al-Hind.

In the Muslim world, the battle between political theology and poetic thinking over the meanings of Islam is an old one. The centrality of poetry in public life has been a significant feature of South Asian Muslim societies and one of the key elements in the rise of an Indo-Muslim modernity (even an Indian modernity). We are dealing in medieval Kashmir with a context, as Ronit Ricci points out in her recent study of the spread of Islam in South East Asia, in which ‘orally transmitted materials as well as performative traditions complemented and enriched written literatures’ and a large number of people, which some call illiterate by contemporary standards, could recite texts for a whole number of occasions.¹

To be a Muslim poet in medieval Kashmir was to enter the realm of these contestations. Even though the forms of these contestations have changed in the postcolonial period, the politics of reading Islam must still negotiate these dichotomies.

Nowhere are the stakes as evident as in the Kashmiri shruks of Nund Rishi where mystical poetry interrupts Persian political theology dominant at the court of the new Kashmir Sultanate of the Shahmiri dynasty to reclaim Islam for an alternative thinking of the religious and the political from the standpoint of the Kashmiri subaltern. When Nund Rishi says Kan thaav shrukyen tae panj suuran (Pay attention to the shruks and the five Surahs) he clearly establishes not only a relation between poetry (shruks) and revelation (the five oft-recited Surahs of the Qur’an) but urges reading the latter in the light of the former. He offers us nothing less than a translation of Islam. It is not surprising then that the Kashmiri tradition remembers Nund Rishi’s mystical poetry as the Koshur Qu’ran, or the Kashmiri Qur’an, just as the Persians remember the poetry of Jalaluddin Rumi as the Persian Qur’an.

 

It is not that we do not find a reified Islamic God in Nund Rishi’s mystical poetry, but that there is an unsaying of such reification in translation as the shruks bring the existential structure of Islam close to the Kashmiri everyday. On the technical side, Nund Rishi is engaged in a struggle to translate traditional Islamic terms into the Kashmiri vernacular that never breaks out into open rebellion but attempts a reading of Islam that opens it out to its best possibility. Perhaps this is why the scrip-turalist Ahl-e hadith movement in Kashmir is less alarmed about Nund Rishi’s mystical poetry as it seeks recourse to a wilful reading error that transforms Nund Rishi into a heir of zuhd movements of early Islamic asceticism.

Even more significantly, the poetry composed in the vernacular languages by Sufis such as Nund Rishi made possible an inter-religious conversation at the borders of Islam. Let us take, for example, the two lines from a shruk in which Nund Rishi invokes the Saivite saint-poet, Lal Ded, as his spiritual teacher, in the form of a prayer:

Tas Padmaanpor chi laley

Yaem gale’y amrit pivo

Yus bae var mangae haiy khudaiyo

Tyuth mye var ditam divo

(That Lalla of Padmanpur

who drank the divine nectar

Please grant me God such a favour

The favour you granted to her)

 

The interesting thing about the shruk is not only that Nund Rishi is establishing here a spiritual equivalence between the mystical states (var of the shruk) of a Saivite and a Sufi but also that the divinity is addressed in the penultimate line of the shruk as khudaiyo (the Persian khuda or God) and in the last line as divo (the Sanskrit, deva; the Indo-Aryan, deiwos). In the same shruk, Nund Rishi invokes the divine in Persian as khuda and in Sanskrit as divo in an act of translation where difference is held together but not turned into a unity.

Does this suggest a different genealogy of the ‘secular’ in South Asia? By not translating the divo into the khuda and rather suggesting a relation which is not an equivalence, Nund Rishi turns translation into an act of faith where what is absolutely translatable and untranslatable at the same time is the unnamable name of God. We are here dealing with not just a politics of translation which must turn to the question of equality but also an ethics of translation which must surrender to the untranslatability of human experience as the only possibility of its translatability. Faith as belief and knowledge is neither translatable nor untranslatable but that which makes both translatability and untranslatability possible in the first place.

 

What do we mean when we call Nund Rishi’s mystical poetry the work of translating Islam? Is Islam translated from the one into many? Is Islam one or many? If Islam is translatable then it must confront its decision to insist on the untranslatability of the Arabic Qur’an which is reflected in Islamic ritual prayer throughout the Muslim world (even when the new Hindu converts to Islam in fourteenth century Kashmir insisted on ritual chanting, Mir Sayyid Ali Hamadani, the Kubrawiyya Sufi, composed Awraad al-Faatihah in Arabic for the purpose). The Islamic tradition approached translation as a complex act of interpretation as long as the foundational text of Qur’an was considered inherently untranslatable just as the God of Islam was considered inherently unknowable.

The untranslatability of the Qur’an testified to the unknowability of God which paradoxically called upon belief as an act of faith. The word for translation in Arabic, borrowed from classical Syriac and Aramaic, is tarjama (the same Arabic word for translation has passed into Urdu and Kashmiri). Both in Arabic and Urdu, tarjama also carries the meaning of interpretation and public enunciation. Philosophers such as Ibn Sina (Avicenna) consider Islam as revealed in the Qur’an as a translation of the Divine Truth. But it is indisputable that tarjama also means interpretation. Maulana Azad, for instance, called his commentary on the Qur’an Tarjamaan al-Qur’an (Interpretation of the Quran) and Ibn al-‘Arabi called his book of poems, Tarjamaan al-‘Ashwaaq (Interpretation of Loves). Perhaps Ibn al-‘Arabi’s own attempts at translating Islam reveal that the situation of translation must take into account that which remains untranslatable about the pain of loss. Why is the vernacular as love and language connected to this pain of loss?

One can never separate the act of translation from the situation of translation. Nund Rishi translates the persistent theme of Islam as an apocalyptic religion into his own situation: a time of historical and cultural transitions in which the most vulnerable and the weakest in Kashmir were also the most at risk. Nund Rishi traces his roots back to the origins of Islam to claim a new genealogy for the Kashmiri Rishis that defies historical chronology: Awwal Rishi Ahmad Rishi (The first Rishi is Muhammad). But at the same time, he retains a relation with Kashmir’s Hindu and Buddhist traditions.

 

The Sanskrit term ‘rishi’ acquires a new meaning in Nund Rishi as he turns the religio-political movement of Rishism into the site of a double translation between Islamic and Hindu-Buddhist spirituality. The Rishi order is the only regional Sufi order to have emerged in Kashmir, and it is with the Rishis that a local articulation of Kashmir gets instituted (unlike the imperial articulations of early medieval Kashmiri rulers). Most of the Rishis were Kashmiri, and Nund Rishi himself used the Kashmiri language to reach out to the Kashmiri peasantry as centres of Rishi thought and practice were gradually established all over Kashmir.² Even though the Kubrawiyya order flourished in Kashmir at around the same time, and was strongly associated in South Asia with Kashmir, it remained a Persianate Sufi order.³ Thus the Kubrawiyya, despite being fuelled by a pan-Islamic concern with the Shariah, also became intimately connected with the regional sentiment in Kashmir.⁴

 

Both Mir Sayyid Ali Hamadani and Nund Rishi were seen as Sufi exemplars, and the Kashmiri tradition gradually smoothed out any historical memory of differences between the two orders (on the question of the Shariah). Bruce Lawrence raises a question as valid for Nund Rishi as it is for Mir Sayyid Ali Hamadani: ‘Is it not possible, however, that the too focused regional loyalties of his followers might restrict a saint whose contemporary reputation, silsila affiliation and tomb-cult qualified him for pan-Indian fame?’⁵ According to Bruce Lawrence, one of the reasons that the Kubrawiyya became a regional Kashmiri phenomenon in South Asia, and the Rishis emerged as a powerful local order, is because Kashmiris ‘yield to non-indigenous cultural forms slowly, grudgingly, in most cases by transforming them into something identified as "Kashmiri".’⁶ The idea of Kashmir then is nothing less than a site of translation.

Even if one disagrees with this assessment, regional sentiment has always played a role in Kashmir’s history. Kashmir could never be assimilated to the Delhi Sultanate and it entered the Mughal Empire only after a long struggle that ended as late as 1586. As Bruce Lawrence puts it: ‘The proprietary zest of Kashmiri devotionalism is further confirmed in the Rishi order.’⁷

 

I would like to add that not only does the Rishi order confirm the proprietary zest of Kashmiri devotionalism, it exemplifies that devotionalism in its mix of Hindu, Buddhist and Islamic themes. Vegetarianism on the death anniversaries (vorus, or ‘urs) of Rishi saints, rituals such as distributing rice cooked with turmeric (taehar), offerings made at shrines (niyaaz), and loud recitations of supplications after prayers (‘awraad and manaajaat recitations), bear witness to the continuing influence of Hinduism and Buddhism on the social life of Islam in Kashmir.⁸ These developments in the field of religious culture first emerged at the same time as the intensification of a strong regional sentiment in Kashmir and the rise of a vernacular literary culture in the Kashmiri language.⁹

Even though Nund Rishi unambiguously situates himself within the Islamic tradition (this is also the fundamental argument made by the historian Muhammad Ishaq Khan in his influential but flawed Kashmir’s Transition to Islam: The Role of the Muslim Rishis), consistent with the Sunni orthodoxy which he affirms in his shruks, he also poses Islam as the community of a question. The form in which Islam appears as a question in Nund Rishi’s thinking in the Kashmiri vernacular is what makes it a distinctive moment of translation. The thinking and practice of Islam in Kashmir is distinctive as these acts of translation neither begin nor end with Nund Rishi (witness the mystical poetry of Ahad Zargar, for instance). But Nund Rishi and his work is a figure around which coheres an idea of translating Islam in Kashmir. This is what enabled Nund Rishi to found the Rishi movement as a Kashmiri Sufi order and why it endures in Kashmiri cultural memory.

 

The shruks inherit an unfolding tradition of thinking on Islam in Sufism, of its political failures and its eschatological promise, but in a language which is in a relation to its own historicality. It is quite clear from the shruks that Nund Rishi identified the Qur’an, and, therefore, Islam, with the bhakti idea of sahaja. This was made possible by Islam’s self-representation as an eternal religion which had become corrupted over time. Nund Rishi turned to the anti-ritualistic resonance of the term, sahaja, to translate the secret of Sufi Islam in a Hindu-Buddhist environment.

Hans Harder has argued that in pre-eighteenth century Bengali Islamic writings, for instance, ‘Islamic religious ideas integrating yogico-tantric practices were the rule rather than the exception…’¹⁰ The same could be said of Kashmiri Sufi poetry as late as early twentieth century. But Nund Rishi also used the term sahaja as a way of translating the universalism of early Islam at a time when the Persian Sufis articulated Sufi metaphysics largely inaccessible to the local population (no Kashmiri could head the Kubrawiyya order in its early days in Kashmir).

A more practical implication of the move was that it created space within the practice of Islam in Kashmir for forms of asceticism that had their origins in the Hindu-Buddhist yogico-tantric milieu. Sahaja had been ‘a reference point for the siddhas’ criticism of Buddhist ritualism, scholastic involvement, and excessive yogic obsession, so that it occupied a soteriological, moral high ground excluding the artificial.’¹¹ Nund Rishi, at one point, also addresses Muslim ascetics as siddhas:

Poz yod bozakh pantsh nomurakh

Nate maaz nomurakh, soe chey namaaz

Shivas tae shunyahas myul yod karakh

Sido soe chey danthra namaaz

(If you are true, you’ll bend the five senses

Or else you’ll be only bending your frame

You must unite Shiva with the Nothing

That, Siddha, is the true tantra prayer)

 

Here Nund Rishi calls ascetic practices of exercising control over the senses as the true namaaz, the Muslim prayer (salaah). The sahaja Islam of Nund Rishi made the Kubrawiyya insistence on the Shariah appear as empty scholasticism. It would be useful to remember that the Kashmiri tradition remembers Nund Rishi as Sahajananda: the one who had tasted the ecstasy of sahaja. Sahaja is the new universal in medieval North India and Nund Rishi translates Islam into this environment of the sahaja.

Nund Rishi searched for a new language and politics that could help circumvent the tension between a Shariah-oriented Persianate Sufism and Hindu-Buddhist elements in the thinking and practice of Islam in Kashmir. The political situation of the new Kashmiri Sultanate was no different from the Delhi Sultanate, where the Sultans adopted a pragmatic approach to governance but yet could not alienate the theologians demanding a strict implementation of the Shariah. It is these tensions which would force the celebrated Kubrawiyya saint, Mir Sayyid Ali Hamadani, to leave Kashmir only after a short stay of three to four years.¹² A reading of the correspondence of Mir Sayyid Ali Hamadani to the Kashmiri Sultan after his departure from Kashmir clearly reveals the differences in their approach to the question of the Shariah.¹³

 

The Kashmiri Sultans venerated Mir Sayyid Ali Hamadani but, much like Sultan Iltutmish in Delhi, they could do little about his demand to implement the Shariah. Nund Rishi complicates our understanding of the Shariah, and the meanings of the fundamentals of Islamic faith, by approaching these questions in the vernacular and from the loci of the everyday. Nund Rishi grounds his thinking in the Qur’anic technical language but almost always by first translating it into the vernacular. It is in this act of translation that Nund Rishi finds his own voice as a thinker and a poet at the cusp of the Hindu-Muslim encounter in medieval Kashmir.

 

For more than 500 years after the advent of Islam in seventh century Arabia, the Sufis of the Middle East, Central Asia and South Asia had evolved a language Qur’anic in origin but concerned with the practices of self-transformation which resembled pre-Islamic religious practice in all of these regions (Christianity in the Middle East, Buddhism in Central Asia, and Hinduism in South Asia). Nund Rishi shifts effortlessly between Islamic and Hindu-Buddhist registers in speaking of these processes of the transformation of the self. This is quite clear in a line like Nafs myon chu mad hosto (My nafs is like a mad elephant). Here Nund Rishi speaks of the condition of the desiring self (nafs al-ammaara, in Qur’anic terms) as that of the elephant in a state of must which invokes the legend of the Buddha’s encounter with a mad elephant. Nund Rishi calls the nafs the tortured, mad elephant that the Buddha tames in a single glance of compassion.

We find so many references to Buddhism in the shruks of Nund Rishi. If we turn to the Kashmiri writer, Akhtar Mohiuddin, in the late 1990s, trying to make sense of the death and destruction in Kashmir in which he lost both his son and son-in-law (a violence not unrelated to the sectarian tensions between the Hindus and the Muslims in medieval Kashmir), we see him return to this relation between Kashmiri language and Buddhism when he speaks of the word for ‘meeting’ or ‘seeing someone’ in Kashmiri as buth wuchun, or seeing the Buddha in someone.¹⁴

Translation is the experience that all tradition is an inheritance of the other. Let us, for instance, take the idea of tawhid, the fundamental tenet of a strict monotheism in Islam, which can only translate into Kashmiri as ku’near, or oneness/unity of being. But ku’near also carries the meaning of a personal, and historical, solitude. In modern Kashmiri, ku’near can also mean the unity between different family members, clans or communities. Ku’near haiy bozakh kunniy no rozakh, says Nund Rishi in one of his shruks (If you know the unity of being/you become nothing). But kunniy no rozakh can also mean that you’ll become unplugged from identity and released into the unknowable unity of being.

 

Nund Rishi boldly connects the meaning of tawhid, accessible only in a spiritual turn to solitude, to not just an ethics of relation but also to that of a unity between the different religious traditions of Kashmir. It is not just the metaphysical unity of tawhid which is at stake for Nund Rishi in his translation of the core Islamic idea but an existential unity as well as the unity between the Hindus and Muslims of Kashmir. It is this idea of a unity between the Hindus and Muslims of Kashmir, in particular, which is at stake in our reading of these acts of translation.

Balraj Sahni, the great Indian actor, had a deep love of Kashmiri language and worked hard to help produce one of the first films in Kashmiri about the life of the Kashmiri poet, Ghulam Ahmad Mahjoor. In a stunning act of translation in the film, Shayar-e Kashmir Mahjoor, the director Prabhat Mukherjee films a ghazal on Mahjoor as he is struggling with the pain of being humiliated at an Urdu musha‘irah for his Kashmiri accent. The ghazal is nonetheless in Urdu and is by Ghalib: Phir mujhe diidaa-e-tar yaad aayaa (Yet again I remember my wet eyes).

 

Footnotes:

1. Ronit Ricci, Islam Translated: Literature, Conversion and the Arabic Cosmopolis of South and Southeast Asia. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2012, p. 2. The shruk was thus widely disseminated among such audiences rather than ‘readers’.

2. Sheldon Pollock, in an essay in 1995 for a special issue of the Indian journal Social Scientist on ‘Literary History, Region and Nation in South Asia’, connects the rise of vernacular literatures in medieval India to new social movements: ‘It is particular social groups seeking a voice that create new languages, texts, and definitions of the ‘literary’, and social groups that, in writing the histories of how all this happens, are writing the histories of themselves.’ See Sheldon Pollock, ‘Literary History, Region, and Nation in South Asia’, Social Scientist 23 (269-71), Oct-Dec 1995, p. 1.

3. The historian Muhammad Ishaq Khan writes: ‘That Nur al-Din wielded greater influence than the Sufis from Persia and Central Asia is shown by the fact that Rishi folk literature remained in many ways the most significant medium of instruction in the values of Kashmiri society; it has had a deeper impact than mosques, madrasas and maktabs, where formal teaching was carried on.’ See Muhammad Ishaq Khan, ‘The Impact of Islam in the Sultanate Period (1320-1586)’, in Richard Eaton (ed.), India’s Islamic traditions 711-1750. Oxford University Press, 2003, New Delhi, p. 354.

4. The khânqâh of Mîr Sayyîd ‘Alî Hamadânî played a pivotal role in the political movement started by the Kashmiri nationalist leader, Sheikh Abdullah,in the 1930s and the 1940s.

5. Bruce Lawrence, ‘Islam in India: The Function of Institutional Sufism in the Islamization of Rajasthan, Gujarat and Kashmir’, Contributions in Asian Studies 17, 1982, p. 40.

6. Ibid.

7. Ibid., p. 41.

8. The vegetarianism of the Rishis appeared as a problem to other Kashmiri Sufi orders who considered vegetarianism against the Sunnah (the established Traditions of the Prophet Muhammad).

9. Shahzad Bashir has characterized this situation in medieval Kashmir as that of a ‘relatively open religious marketplace….’ Shahzad Bashir, Messianic Hopes and Mystical Visions: The Nûrbakhsiyâ Between Medieval and Modern Islam. University of South Carolina Press, Columbia, SC, 2003, p. 201.

10. Hans Harder, Sufism and Saint Veneration in Contemporary Bangladesh: The Maijbhandaris of Chittagong. Routledge, New York, 2011, p. 325.

11. Ronald M. Davidson, ‘Reframing Sahaja: Genre, Representation, Ritual and Lineage’, Journal of Indian Philosophy 30, p. 73.

12. Abdul Qaiyum Rafiqi, Sufism in Kashmir: Fourteenth to the Sixteenth Century. Goodword Media, Sydney, 2003, pp. 44, 49.

13. Ibid., pp. 48-49. See also Letter no. 7 addressed to Sultan Alauddin Abdul Qaiyum Rafiqi, Letters of Mir Saiyid Ali Hamadani. Gulshan Books, Srinagar, 2007, pp. 60-61.

14. See Akhtar Mohiudeen, A Fresh Approach to the Cultural History of Kashmir. Book Bank,Srinagar,1998, p. 71.