LAL DED : VAKHS IN SILENCE
(Vakhs Painted on Pashmina by Masood Hussain)
MAQAM, the People Craft Place at Rajbagh opposite Convent School in Srinagar, invites you to a first of its kind exhibition. Titled Lal Ded: Vakhs in Silence, where Lal Ded's timeless words become colour and Pashmina becomes poetry, this is an exhibition of hand painted Pashmina shawls by noted artist Masood Hussain, inspired by the Vakhs of Lal Ded, the fourteenth century saint poetess of Kashmir
The show is on view from 7 to 14 September, 11 AM to 6 PM daily at MAQAM, Rajbagh, Srinagar. Masood Hussain's paintings bring together colour, memory and the poetry of Kashmir, transforming the words of Lal Ded into a unique visual language on Pashmina. It is an exhibition celebrating Kashmir's poetry, art and living craft traditions, presented under the banner of Art Poetry Craft Kashmir.
I have perused, beheld and internalised the spirit and the philosophical profundity of the entire corpus of twenty paintings by Masood Hussain, having translated the Vakhs into English and having exegeted these remarkable works in the light of Kashmir's glorious Shaiva Darshana, the Shiva Sutras, the Upanishads and the Tantras. For this reason alone, I possess a close, comprehensive and intimate cognizance of this oeuvre, unique in all respects.
Masood Hussain, a noted artist from Kashmir whose life work has been an unwavering chronicle of the valley, its people, its loss and its resilience, has here moved from testimony to metaphysics. For years his canvases recorded grief and everyday endurance. For the first time he has painted twenty Lal Vakhs, the mystical four line verses of the fourteenth century poet Lal Ded, upon Pashmina shawls. Twenty shawls, two years of labour, as he himself has noted at the opening of this show at MAQAM.
The idea itself is radical and deeply apt. Pashmina is not a neutral support like canvas or paper. It is the very skin of Kashmiri culture, woven memory, labour, sanctity and survival. For centuries the shawl has been prized for its warmth and fine needlework. By choosing Pashmina as his pictorial field, Hussain performs an act of cultural reclamation. The Vaakh, which for six hundred years survived as voice, as oral breath before it was ever written down, is returned to cloth, to the body, to wearing. A shawl becomes a scripture. A scripture becomes wearable. The artist has rightly noted that painting on Pashmina offers a novel dimension alongside traditional weaving and embroidery, and may open new ideas to boost the local handicraft industry towards international fashion exhibitions. But the achievement here at Rajbagh is far beyond craft innovation. It is philosophical.
Masood Hussain presents Lal Ded not as an abstracted icon nor as a blurred syncretic figure, but as a Kashmiri woman in pheran and Taranga, the traditional long headgear . This is a conscious historical retrieval. Lal Ded was born near Srinagar in a Pandit family, suffered in her marital home, left at twenty six to become an itinerant mystic . Her Vakhs, from Sanskrit Vaak meaning sacred speech, are among the earliest compositions in Kashmiri and the foundation of its literary tradition. To clothe her again in the attire of her birth is to restore her to her source in Trika Shaivism while retaining her universality. In painting after painting she appears, white veiled, sometimes seated in meditative equipoise before fire, sometimes standing upon a lotus crossing the blue ocean of existence, sometimes as a solitary witness at the edge of the void. She is never decorative. She is the experiencing consciousness itself. What unifies the twenty works at MAQAM is a highly disciplined and symbolic use of colour, which never remains ornamental. Colour becomes doctrine, a chromatic theology.
Blue in its many registers, indigo, turquoise, cobalt and ultramarine, dominates the corpus as the chromatic analogue of Chit, pure consciousness. It is at once sky, lake, Bhavsagara and inner ether. In the Vaakh of the royal swan that has fallen silent, blue becomes the lake of samsara through which the soul must navigate. In the Vaakh of the burning lake of anger, blue becomes the field of containment where wakefulness dawns. In the Vaakh of the fragile boat, blue becomes the immeasurable ocean of worldly existence that the soul must cross with a thread. Red and saffron, vermilion, ochre and deep maroon, carry the energy of Shakti, of Tapas, of karmic agitation and of transformative heat. The womb mandala painting that interprets die before you die pulses with red splashes that signify mala, the first contractions of ego that must be offered in inner sacrifice. The painting of lust, anger and avarice uses sharp reds for desire that has become serpentine and must be starved not by force but by withdrawal of attention. White and gold carry the grammar of transcendence. White is the untouched Atman, the ever pure self described in the Chandogya Upanishad. Gold is Prakasha, self luminous revelation. In the painting of Onkar, where Lal Ded sets her mortal frame aflame with the fire of Om, gold traces nadis like constellations, halos and mandalas ascending from red fires of purification into cooler blues of inward stillness. In the painting of regeneration, where mind becomes ever new after the great cosmic flood, gold frames the lake of consciousness that overflows, rises to sky and empties into nothingness. Green and yellow appear as renewal after dissolution. The flower garden or bagh Vaakh, where the seeker prepares herself and enters to behold her own essential form, is rendered in emerald hills strewn with white blossoms, the rupture in indigo sky pouring white light as the veil of limitation breaks.
The strength of the exhibition lies in how each shawl sustains philosophical precision while remaining visual poetry. From the twenty Vakhs, Masood Hussain extracts a complete spiritual biography. There is forgetfulness, the royal swan that once sang in freedom and has fallen silent, the mill that has halted, the grain taken away, a meditation on death consciousness that sharpens ethics. The painting shows Lal Ded as witness beside the white swan of original splendour, a memento mori in the corner, lotus rising after ego death. We move to remembrance, the pledge made in the womb, Caitanyam Atma of Shiva Sutra, consciousness prior to identity. Here the shawl becomes a womb mandala in white gold, red marks pulsing within like karma that must be surrendered.
We ascend through Mantra Sadhana, where Om is mastered and six paths are abandoned for the seventh, the hidden way, a clear allusion to the ascent through inner centres into Prakasha Sthana, the abode of light. Hussain paints seven forms of Lal Ded before seven fires, each fire Tapas, each halo a rising state of consciousness.
We witness purification through the allegory of cotton, carding, spinning, weaving, washing and cutting, a perfect visual analogue for removal of mala until Pratyabhijna dawns. The loom sits at centre like a field of Shakti where separate threads retain individuality yet participate in one pattern. We then enter cosmology, where the Lord pervades earth, breath and unstruck sound, rendered as a yantra with a fiery orange red Bindu pulsating in infinite blue, and where measurement itself becomes bondage.
Midway, the exhibition turns ethical. Three gates of ruin, kama, krodha and lobha, are shown not as moral slogans but as contracted expressions of consciousness that must be starved by restraint, the central form gathering stillness while serpents coil at the margins. Purity is then affirmed as innate, Siva Svabhava, ever pure, crossing the ocean of existence unstained like a lotus. The celestial horse Vaakh follows, where Lal Ded rides from heaven to heaven beneath constellations and finds no end to the Lord's power, ending in neither name nor form, where fractured planes of ochre, violet and crimson show the self distributed beyond outline.
Later paintings deepen into ontology. The lake that brims three times and empties seven times, seen between Harmukh and Kounsarnag, becomes a map of Spanda, the pulse of creation, sustenance and dissolution, and of Satisara, the ancient lake of Kashmir as origin, with seven circles as seven emptyings into Shunya. The Vaakh of five, ten and eleven, the most enigmatic, is rendered with rope as metaphor for integration, where scattered powers are gathered back into unity, Lal Ded as witness formed partly from manuscript text, eye vigilant. The flower garden, the burning well of anger weighed and found weightless upon the scales of reason, the hoopoe piercing timber till all poems speak one truth, the whiff of fresh air when three gunas are crossed and meditation becomes ecstasy, the crossing of Shunya where reason falls away and the lotus blooms like Lalla pamposh, the eternal return where Shiva creates and dissolves and creates again, the paradox of colourless Lord who colours the world with many hues yet remains without attribute, and finally the fragile boat dragged by loosely spun thread across the sea while life seeps like water from an unbaked cup, tiny boat almost helpless within blue infinity.
Throughout, texture is crucial. Surfaces are distressed, torn, layered with manuscript, abraded, as if time itself has laboured upon them. This is not affectation. It enacts Sadhana, the labour of purification. The torn openings, the webbed forms, the serpentine loops, all suggest that the world is not rejected but recognised as manifestation of Shiva.
The use of Nastaliq script alongside the imagery, as noted by critics, is itself a curatorial act of bridge building. It restores Lal Ded to both Pandit and Muslim memory, reaffirming her as the great mother of Kashmiris , the composite consciousness of the Valley. It is perhaps the first time a contemporary painter has attempted to translate the philosophical nuance of Kashmir's Shaiva Darshana into textile art.
Masood Hussain has therefore achieved something rare in contemporary Indian art. He has not illustrated Lal Ded. He has transcreated her. In giving her Vakhs a home on Pashmina at MAQAM, Rajbagh, from 7 to 14 September, he has given Kashmir back a portable shrine, where word becomes image, image becomes textile, and textile becomes contemplation. For a region often defined externally by militancy , this exhibition at Rajbagh offers a profound counter memory, that Kashmir was and remains a seat of luminous Shaiva thought, where a woman mystic could declare herself Shiva and be embraced by all.
I happen to be in the US these days and miss this great event. My best wishes to the team especially Mujtaba Qadri and Masood Hussain . Friends, do visit this exhibition. The shawls at MAQAM are not merely to be seen. They are to be circumambulated.
( Avtar Mota )
