Power, gender, and the classification of a Kashmir Śaiva 'mystic'

Abstract

The hermeneutic of suspicion Grace Jantzen applies to the gendered construction of Christian 'mysticism' is a useful lens for understanding the religious authority attributed to Lalleśwarī of Kashmir. In the hagiographies and hagiographical scholarship about Lalleśwarī, three strands run parallel to Jantzen's genealogy: the exclusion of women from the institutions of religious authority, the coding of religious authority as masculine, and the association of women with the erotic. The two narratives intersect in the 20th century, when Lalleśwarī's claim to spiritual authority through her experience of 'the void' of Śiva-consciousness is cemented through appeal to western (particularly Jamesian) discourse on mysticism as an ineffable subjective state of union. At each juncture, however, the evidence of Lalleśwarī's vaakhs pushes against her interpreters' assumptions to suggest something of her own authorising strategies. © The Author 2010. Oxford University Press and The Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies. All rights reserved.