Reimagining Laal Ded: Mysticism, Peace, and Women’s Agency in Kashmir
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 constitute a non-hegemonic discourse of coexistence that continues to animate women’s peace initiatives in contemporary, militarised Kashmir. This paper draws upon feminist IR (Tickner 1992; Enloe 2014), decolonial epistemology (Mignolo 2011; de Sousa Santos 2014), and phenomenologies of mysticism (Irigaray 2001; Braidotti 2011), to argue that Laal Ded’s philosophy innately performs an epistemic disobedience to both patriarchy and the colonial knowledge production. Laal Ded’s re-conceptualisation of truth as an embodied awareness anticipates the decolonial frameworks of conflict transformation that privileges care over coercion. This analysis demonstrates that her legacy endures not just as cultural memory but as an operative philosophy guiding women in their attempts at vernacular peacebuilding across contemporary Kashmir. Acknowledging Laal Ded as a theorist of peace expands the geography of diplomatic thought beyond the confines of State and State defined boundaries and reiterates the relevance of the feminine, mystical and local as the legitimate terrains of international ethics.
