The Mind Is Its Own Place: Of Lalla’s Comparative Poetics

Abstract

What is comparative poetics, and where is it to be found? The tradition of verses in Kashmiri ascribed to the fourteenth-century female ascetic Lalla might seem a strange place to look for answers to these questions, given that the customary parameters of comparative poetics trace disciplinary origins to no earlier than the twentieth century (Earl Miner) and tend to favour a large sample size (the greater the variety of poetic traditions brought under analysis, the likelier the discovery of poetic “universals”). In this article, we offer an account of comparative poetics at work on a much smaller scale and within a distinctive matrix of pressures and principles. Building on the close analysis of Lalla’s verses, we show how her corpus generates multiform “environments” – environments that afford the conceptual and aesthetic alignment of two pre-modern cosmopolitan literary and religious imaginaires, Sanskrit and Persian. In doing so, we call attention to what a comparative poetic endeavour could look like in a pre-modern world by presenting Lalla’s verses as an example of a literary corpus – importantly, not an extra-literary theoretical tradition – that is configured by immanent comparative poetics.