Ashoka University is a private university located in Sonipat, Haryana, India, focusing on liberal arts and sciences. It was established in 2014.&nbsp;It is guided by an academic council of academics and scholars from around the world. The council sets the university&#39;s academic standard, advising on matters of curriculum, faculty hiring and research.&nbsp;

Ashoka University offers a full-time 3 (+ 1) year undergraduate programme. The University comprises of&nbsp;2500 plus students, with a mix of both national and international students.&nbsp; &nbsp;

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Ashoka University

Lal Ded, the fourteenth century Kashmiri female mystic, is revered as a spiritual exemplar by both the Hindus and the Muslims of Kashmir. She walked away from a difficult marriage at the young age of twenty-six to pursue the Śaiva path to spiritual liberation. Lal Ded records her long and arduous spiritual journey in a Kashmiri poetic form, vākh (a short poem of four lines with four stresses in each line), which is also one of the earliest genres of Kashmiri poetry. Even though most scholarship on Lal Ded’s vākhs does invoke her difficult life as a Kashmiri woman in a turbulent political milieu, it rarely poses the question of gender and politics in relation to her mystical poetry. My paper offers a close reading of selected vākhs to argue that the figures of loss (rāvan-tyol, loss-blister), shame (mandchhi hạ̄nkal, iron fetters of shame) and joy (nangaē natsun, dancing naked) in Lal Ded’s mystical poetry can be read not merely as stages on the path of a Śaiva liberation but also as a distinctive proto-feminist perspective on political self-transformation.&nbsp;

Department of English

South Asian Review

“Dancing Naked”: Gender, Trauma and Politics in the Mystical Poetry of Lal Ded

Nund Rishi (1378–1440), or Shaikh Nūr al-Dīn Nūrānī, revered and remembered by most Kashmiris as the ‘Alamdār (flag-bearer) of Kashmir, is one of the most significant figures in the history of religion and literature in Kashmir. The mystical poetry of Nund Rishi is not merely one among the many Muslim literary apocalypses across the Middle East and South Asia, it also constitutes an ‘apocalypse from below’—a vernacular apocalypse that questions religious and political authority in medieval Kashmir. The mystical poetry (shruk) of Nund Rishi transforms the elements of a traditional apocalyptic mode in Islamic eschatology into a vernacular literary apocalyptic. © 2021 South Asian Studies Association of Australia.