How Women Poets Share Their Commonalities With Bhakti Poet Mirabai

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Lal Ded and Habba Khatoon are two Kashmiri women poets who share commonalities with Bhakti poet Mirabai. Within the comparative framework, the paper would try to explore these commonalities in their poetry. The selection of these three women poets would throw some light on the syncretism in the Sufi and Bhakti tradition as upheld by LalDed and Mirabai respectively in their poetry. Sisir Kumar Das argues in his essay, The Idea of Literary History that there are the various “‘facts’ of literary history” which increase the “possibility of its multiplicity as well” (42). The multiplicity of literary history makes it possible to trace the literary history of these three different poets also. Sisir Kumar Das further argues in third section of the same essay that “Changes can be ‘internal’, i.e. certain rearrangements of items or innovations within the system leading to a noticeable difference, and thus opening up the possibilities of introducing something that did not exist before” (Das 44). The paper would try to explore the “‘internal’ changes and innovations within” the poetry of HabbaKhatoon …show more content…

Kabir advocated a slow and steady effacement of the physical body to attain union with the eternal spiritual being. Lalla advocated a full bodied life. It was only through the body and bodily sense perception that one can experience anything at all. As such the body had to be protected and nourished. The Supreme Being in Lalla’s philosophy approximates to the idea of the Hindu god Lord Shiva but in so far as he is formless, he could as easily be the God of the Holy Quran. Human sense perception in her opinion could access divinity only when it learns to unlearn the various ways of the world and look within. As he was the part of all things animate and inanimate, he was also a part of every human being. We need only turn our gaze from the outside to the inside. RanjitHoskote in his pioneering work on LalDed captures these essential elements of the

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