Reimagining Laal Ded: Mysticism, Peace, and Women's Agency in Kashmir

Abstract

The traditional manner of theorising peace diplomacy has generally been a very androcentric practice. Theoretical paradigms that privilege state sovereignty, strategic rationality and militarised performance, and are products of masculinised processes have always been central to imagining the cartography of peace diplomacy. Feminist epistemological interventions in the spaces of International Relations (IR) and decolonial scholarship expose how these existing androcentric frameworks silence the vernacular epistemologies of reconciliation which are grounded in affect, ethics and spirituality. This paper re-reads Laal Ded (Lalleshwari), the fourteenth-century Kashmiri mystic-philosopher, as an early practitioner of what may be termed affective diplomacy-a mode of peace-making that operates through moral suasion, empathy, and relational ethics. Situated at the confluence of Shaivite and Sufi thought, Laal Ded's vakhs 1 constitute a non-hegemonic discourse of coexistence that continues to animate women's peace initiatives in contemporary, militarised Kashmir.