The name, though she had many – Lal Ded, Lalla Arifa, Lalleshwari, of the 14th century sage-poetess, is one that stands out in the annals of Kashmir. Meeta Vashisht’s solo act traces Lal Ded’s evolution through her various incarnations, her birth and childhood marriage to her ultimate transgression into mysticism. Vashisht manages to convey an acute spiritual sensibility in the young Lalla, through her apparently innocent yet loaded questions. She skillfully adopts the personae of the poetess, her mother-in-law, father-in-law, husband, a cloth merchant and the narrator. The whims and caprice of the formidable mother-in-law especially are convincingly depicted. However, the use of the dupatta to change personae and to depict Lalla’s disrobing seemed rather hackneyed.
Vashisht uses many of Lalla’s famous vaakhs or eternal truths, suggesting her fusion of the apparently incongruous cults of Saivism and Sufism. This she does in Hindi, Kashmiri- plausibly for authenticity- and French- for non-plausibility?
And quite predictably, she breaks into a whirling dervish dance to depict Lalla’s discovery of the life of the spirit. Yet the force of Lalla’s transgression fails to come through. Her intervention into rigid structures, the radicalism of her sayings, vis-a-vis women and marginalised sections of the rift-ridden Kashmiri society, doesn’t strike the audience as powerfully as it ought to.
However, the script manages to incorporate the events of Lal Ded’s life fairly seamlessly into a compact whole, with one topical reference to ‘a time when Kashmir shall be in turmoil’. And another one alluding to the rudeness of flash photography
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