The Kashmir Recovery and Lakshmanjoo

Alexis Sanderson studied with Swami Lakshman Joo in Srinagar for six years, and he has written down what he thinks was actually there. The Trika, he says, “had died out in all but its doctrinal superstructure.” The Krama appears to have gone the same way. No Kashmirian manuscript preserves a Trika manual of worship or of initiation. And the last remnants of the initiated Saiva ritual current in Abhinavagupta’s day, as distinct from the Smarta-model devotion of the uninitiated, had stopped in the valley, on his reckoning, at about the time Lakshman Joo was born.

He was born on 9 May 1907.

So the chapter that follows is not the story of a tradition coming back. It is the story of what can be carried when half a system has already gone.

The press came first

The recovery that can be dated begins with a printing programme, not with a teacher.

In 1911 the Research Department of the Kashmir State, in Srinagar, published the first volume of the Kashmir Series of Texts and Studies: Ksemaraja’s Sivasutravimarsini, edited by J. C. Chatterji, a Cambridge-trained Bengali Sanskritist who was the Department’s first director. Maharaja Pratap Singh was on the throne, as he had been since 1885 and would be until 1925. Chatterji edited the first seven volumes. Mukund Ram Shastri became the Department’s head pandit in 1912 and took over from volume eight in 1917. Madhusudan Kaul Shastri carried it through the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s. The series ran to at least eighty-nine numbers; the latest volumes in the large library holdings are dated 1959 to 1962.

That is a princely state publishing its own religious heritage. The historian Mridu Rai has argued that colonial archaeology in Jammu and Kashmir was taken up there for its political uses more than for the discipline’s own sake, with the Dogra rulers reshaping the past to support their sovereignty and their mostly Muslim subjects taking up the same tools to contest it. The Kashmir Series was not her subject, but it was born in the same princely-state project, whatever else it was.

For this treatise the series matters for a reason its own editors may not have weighed. It printed Srividya. The Kamakalavilasa appeared as number 12 in 1918, and the Vamakesvarimata, the root tantra of the cult of Tripurasundari, with Jayaratha’s commentary, as number 66 in 1945. The Maharthamanjari, number 11 in 1918, is a Krama work on Sanderson’s classification, though it was read in Srividya circles in the South. Whatever the lineage relationship between Kashmir and the South, the publication history of the Srividya corpus runs partly through Srinagar.

The boy at Fateh Kadal

Lakshman Raina was born at Fateh Kadal in Srinagar to Pandit Narayan Dass Raina, a merchant who had introduced houseboats to Kashmir, and his wife Arnyamali.

The guru-lineage behind him is given by the institutions that carry his teaching and by little else. His training in the texts is better attested: Sanderson names his teacher as Rajanaka Maheshvara, one of the Sanskrit pandits of the Research Department whose help is acknowledged in the prefaces of many Kashmir Series editions between 1911 and 1930, and reports that the pupilage lasted seven years, ending in or shortly before 1934. Swami Manas Ram, called Manakak, initiated Swami Ram. Swami Ram established an ashram at Fateh Kadal in a three-storey house that Narayan Dass Raina gave him, a few hundred metres from the family’s own home. Swami Mahtab Kak was Swami Ram’s chief disciple, and when Swami Ram died he entrusted the boy, then about seven, to him.

The dates will not hold still, and this chapter will not pretend otherwise. Swami Ram’s dates appear as 1852 to 1914 on the Lakshmanjoo Academy’s page and as 1854 to 1915 on every other source consulted, including the Ishwar Ashram Trust’s own and a detailed Kashmiri biographical article that gives 16 December 1854 and 14 January 1915, Makara Sankranti. Mahtab Kak is 1880 to 1947 on one Trust page and 1870 to 1942 on Wikipedia. The ashram’s founding year, 1885, rests on a single sentence on a single page; the fuller biographies give the house, the donor and the street, and no year. One commonly repeated detail is a misreading: the figure of 1860 belongs to Manakak being recognised as a master, not to Swami Ram’s initiation, which on any of his attested birth years would have made him a child of five to eight.

He first lived at Ishber, above the Gupta Ganga spring, in 1934, on land his father had bought. The larger ashram there was built in 1962. It is called Ishwar Ashram because his disciples held him to be Ishwar swarup, a form of the Lord.

What was left to recover

Here the chapter’s best witness undercuts the story usually told about it.

Sanderson’s essay on Lakshman Joo, published in 2007 in a volume edited by Bettina Baumer and Sarla Kumar, is the fullest account this chapter found of what the tradition in Kashmir still had. His finding is that the ritual had gone. The Svacchanda and Netra tradition of worship lasted longest, but it too had ceased. What survived was the exegesis: the philosophical and contemplative superstructure of a system whose ritual floor had fallen away before the twentieth century began.

He is explicit about the consequence for his own teacher. Lakshman Joo’s expertise, great though it was, could not be expected to extend, he writes, to the parts of the literature given over to the Trika’s rituals, which in the Tantraloka are about half the whole.

Sanderson does not treat this as a failure, and neither should this chapter. He argues that doing without those rituals is defensible within the terms of Abhinavagupta’s own Trika, and he reads Lakshman Joo’s departures from the texts as the creative exegesis by which a living tradition keeps moving. But a tradition half of whose ritual is unrecoverable from its own manuscripts is not the most fully reconstructed of anything, and this chapter found no source making that comparative claim. The field’s own survey literature describes tantric Saivism as a domain of active and incomplete recovery whose social history is still largely unwritten.

Six years

Alexis Sanderson arrived in Kashmir in February 1972, aged twenty-three, with a Sanskrit degree from Oxford taken the year before, and was accepted as a pupil. He has written that Lakshman Joo “taught me for six years and for no reason other than the urge to propagate understanding that is the mark of the true teacher in any discipline,” and that “the purpose of my pupilage was to attempt to understand his understanding of the texts of Abhinavagupta and those texts themselves.” Sanderson read on his own and brought his questions for discussion, rather than being taken through text after text line by line. Between them they covered most of what the Kashmir Series had put into print, with particular attention to Abhinavagupta’s Tantraloka, his compendious analysis of the Malinivijayottaratantra.

That is a first-person, dated, published, self-critical account of being taught by the man, and this chapter found nothing comparable in the record.

The other names usually listed around the ashram need sorting, because the evidence for them is uneven. Mark Dyczkowski went to Kashmir in 1976 and received initiation; he returned for six months a year. Bettina Baumer’s own site says her study of Abhinavagupta deepened after initiation by Lakshman Joo in 1987, while a reviewer of her memoir gives 1986. Jaideva Singh, who translated a large part of the Kashmiri corpus into English, was a sustained student; Sanderson records that he went through every sentence of those texts with Lakshman Joo. Jankinath Kaul, who wrote as Kamal, was a Kashmiri Pandit scholar and disciple, and translated the Pancastavi. Nilkanth Gurtoo studied particular texts with him over three decades. For Giuseppe Tucci and Raniero Gnoli this chapter found no documented personal connection at all, and so makes no claim about one.

The name is younger than the man

Kashmir Shaivism sounds like the name of something ancient. It is not. The earliest use in print that this chapter could date is the title of J. C. Chatterji’s own book, Kashmir Shaivaism, published as volume two of the Kashmir Series in 1914. An earlier coinage has been attributed to the nineteenth-century Bengali scholar Gangadhara Kaviratna, and this chapter has not been able to confirm it or rule it out. The name was made by the same programme that printed the texts.

Two people who know the material well now argue it should be dropped. Christopher Wallis says that “this Shaivism in not [sic] the product of Kashmir, it was a pan-Indian tradition,” and that the label properly refers only to the writings of the Kashmiri masters; the Trika was practised in Tamil Nadu and in Maharashtra too. He prefers Saiva Tantra, and insists the tradition is a Sakta-Saiva one whose centre of gravity in Abhinavagupta is the Goddess. The scholar D. E. Osto reaches the same conclusion from the academy, reserving Kashmiri Saivism for the living religion of the Pandits and treating “Kashmir Saivism” as a modern appropriation.

Osto’s book is also the fullest outside study of the modern revival that this chapter located. He dates it to the 1970s, argues it was driven largely by people of European descent, and says the teaching was repackaged for an Anglo-European market in the 1970s and 1980s with much of its Hindu context stripped out. That is an uncomfortable account and it belongs here.

What this has to do with Sri Vidya

A treatise on Srividya has to be honest about why a Kashmir chapter is in it, and the honest answer is narrower than the usual one.

Sanderson places the cult of Tripurasundari late. It is, he writes, certainly the latest of the Mantramarga traditions he surveys, and its root scripture clings to the edge of the Saiva canon. The six-centre yoga it shares with the Kubjika cult sets both apart from the earlier Kaula traditions of the Trika and the Kali cult. Jayaratha’s evidence, he writes, lets us conclude no more than that the cult entered Kashmir at some time between 900 and 1100. South Indian Saivas thought it was Kashmiri in origin, and Sanderson suggests they confused the scriptural tradition with the Kashmirian exegetical system through which it reached them. As late as the nineteenth century, Buhler reported that in Kashmir “a few families only are Saktas.”

So the traffic runs the other way from the story usually told. The Yoginihrdaya, the metaphysical gloss on the Tripura ritual that Srividya reads, Sanderson dates after about 1050, when Kashmirian non-dualism had become the standard way of reading Kaula cults in the South, and he notes that it frequently echoes Ksemaraja’s Pratyabhijnahrdaya. The single firmest link is a person: Jayaratha, Abhinavagupta’s great commentator, wrote the Kashmirian commentary on the Vamakesvarimata, and Sanderson suggests his own practice may have followed that later Sakta system rather than the Trika.

Three bridges, then: a thirteenth-century commentator, an eleventh-century borrowing of metaphysics, and a twentieth-century printing press. That is a real relationship and it is worth the chapter. What it is not is a shared lineage. This chapter found nothing showing Abhinavagupta expounding the Sri Chakra, and nothing showing Lakshman Joo teaching Srividya. Sanderson’s list of what they read does not include it, and neither the Trust’s text lists nor the Academy’s carry it.

Nineteen ninety

Lakshman Joo died in September 1991. In January 1990 the Kashmiri Pandits left the valley.

The chapter that tells the first fact without the second is telling half a story, and this one did for two years.

The figures are contested and the contest is part of the record. In the academic literature the figures run from about ninety thousand to about a hundred and sixty thousand, with higher estimates reported inside it. Sumantra Bose gives ninety to a hundred thousand out of a community of around a hundred and twenty thousand. Mridu Rai gives nearly a hundred thousand out of a hundred and forty. Alexander Evans gives over a hundred thousand in a few months and about a hundred and sixty thousand since. Talbot and Singh give about a hundred and fifty thousand. T. N. Madan, surveying the estimates rather than making one, reports figures running as high as a hundred and ninety thousand out of a total population of two hundred thousand. Community organisations and some reference works give substantially higher numbers. Haley Duschinski, who has studied the displaced community, states plainly that groups with a stake in the conflict dispute the count.

The causes are disputed in the same way. Many Kashmiri Muslims believed the governor, Jagmohan, encouraged the Pandits to leave; Martin Sokefeld notes that whether he did is still disputed. Evans concludes that many left in fear without receiving explicit threats, and that the administration did nothing to keep them. The community’s own account is that it was driven out by militants. This chapter reports the disagreement and settles none of it.

What can be said without taking a side is institutional. The Ishwar Ashram Trust is based in New Delhi, and describes itself as established to spread the teachings of Kashmir Shaivism outside the Kashmir valley. Its Jammu branch is the Winter Capital Branch and its Delhi branch the National Capital Center. Lakshman Joo had wintered in Jammu since 1970, so that presence predates the exodus. When the Delhi centre was established this chapter could not determine, and the Trust’s own founding date is given variously as in his lifetime and as shortly after his death. The Ishber ashram survived, is still in use, and still holds its Sunday puja. He himself went to America in March 1991, fourteen months after the exodus, and died on 27 September 1991, at eighty-four. The Trust places his mahasamadhi at Ishber; Wikipedia gives Noida in Uttar Pradesh, near the Delhi hospital where the Trust says he had been treated. This chapter does not adjudicate between them. The Trust attributes the Delhi stay before that to failing health and treatment at a Delhi hospital, and this chapter does not assert that he was displaced, because no source says so.

And here is a silence worth naming. On every page of the Trust’s and the Academy’s account of his life that this chapter was able to read, 1990, the militancy and the exodus go unmentioned. So does Sanderson’s essay, which traces the condition of the Kashmirian brahmins under Muslim rule from 1320 and the repeated persecutions after it, follows the decline of Saiva ritual to about 1900, reaches his own years in the valley in the 1970s, and stops. The omission this chapter made for two years is the tradition’s own.

What is carried, and by whom

The Universal Shaiva Trust was sanctioned at the Srinagar ashram in 1982, not in 1991 as this chapter previously said, and its first book appeared that year. What happened on the American trip of 1991 was that the Universal Shaiva Fellowship was established in the United States, and John and Denise Hughes were designated to continue publishing his recorded teaching. The Lakshmanjoo Academy, the Fellowship’s educational subsidiary, has published the edited transcriptions, including Kashmir Shaivism: The Secret Supreme and Self Realization in Kashmir Shaivism. In India the Ishwar Ashram Trust runs the centres, the Sunday puja and the journal Malini.

The scholarship went on without him. Sanderson held the Spalding Chair at Oxford from 1992 until 2015. Chapter 7 surveys the generation that came out of this, Dyczkowski and Baumer and Muller-Ortega and the rest.

One correction belongs here, because this chapter carried the error. Dyczkowski’s edition and translation of the Manthanabhairavatantra was published in 2009 by the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts with D. K. Printworld, and the libraries catalogue it as fourteen volumes. The publisher’s own listing is inconsistent, describing it in one field as six volumes in fourteen bindings and in another as fourteen volumes, which is part of why counts of twelve and fourteen both circulate. This chapter previously said twelve, following Wikipedia, which says twelve while listing the 2009 edition in its own bibliography; at least one bookseller sells the same ISBN under both counts. Dyczkowski’s own curriculum vitae, hosted on the Ishwar Ashram Trust’s website, says fourteen.

What a recovery is

The medieval collapse has not been reversed, and it was never going to be. The temples are not back. The social fabric that carried the rites is not back. The rites themselves are, on the best authority available, gone past recovering from the Kashmirian manuscripts.

What came back is a library and a way of reading it. That is less than the word recovery promises and more than anyone in 1900 had a right to expect. The printing programme that started it belonged to a princely state with its own reasons. The man at the centre of it taught the half of the system that survived, to a handful of people, in a valley his community left the year before he died.

The next chapter goes south, to the mathas, and to an institution that never had to be recovered because it never stopped.

The texts are in print and the readings are recorded. The valley is another matter.