Conclusion

Summary

We have so far in this book witnessed Nund Rishi's poetic thinking irrupt into a form of negative theology – a negative theology that not only posed a challenge to positive Islamic theology championed by immigrant Persian Sufis but also questioned the political structure of the new Muslim sultanate. From Maná¹£ūr al-Ḥallāj in Caliphate Baghdad to Sarmad in Mughal South Asia, Sufi poets often had to pay the ultimate price of their life for questioning the proximity between positive Islamic theology and political power. It is, therefore, no coincidence that Islamic negative theology (in Kashmir and elsewhere) emerged in moments of political crises. The themes of Islam, death, the Nothing, and the apocalyptic in Nund Rishi's poetry – the negative theology of Nund Rishi – reveal a situation of deep political crisis in medieval Kashmir over the question of the relations of the past to the present, of the Hindus to the Muslims, of upper castes to lower castes, and of peasants to the ruling elites. The emergence of negative theology in vernacular South Asian Sufi poetry more generally signals a contestation over the very idea of Islam precisely at a time when Muslim imperial powers turned to a positive, albeit Sufi, theology for political legitimation.

One of the more significant stakes of the negative theology of Nund Rishi is that its turn to an unknowable God makes possible a conversation across religious traditions in Kashmir. The transformations, and translations, such an interreligious conversation made possible open out to a thinking of new universals such as the idea of sahaja that reconcile singularity with difference (one example of this is the phenomenon we sometimes approach with the academic shorthand of the Sufi–bhaktī movement). It is to be regretted that these movements have largely been studied only in the framework of the history of religions or literary studies and not as significant milestones in the history of thought in South Asia. We can go so far as to say that the Sufis of South Asia achieve for Islam in the region what St. Paul achieved for Christianity: the universalization of its message of salvation. If this possibility appears around the figure of Guru Nanak or Kabir in one region, it bears the name of Nund Rishi in another.