The Nothing That Speaks: Mystical Negation, Vernacular Politics and the Shruks of Nund Rishi

This review examines Abir Bazaz's Poetry and Politics in Kashmir: Nund Rishi (Cambridge University Press, 2023), the first sustained critical study of the mystical poetry of Nund Rishi (1378 to 1440), the founder of the Rishi Order of Kashmiri Sufism and the most revered figure in the vernacular literary and spiritual imagination of Kashmir. Bazaz argues that the shruks of Nund Rishi, short aphoristic mystical poems composed in medieval Kashmiri, instantiate a negative theology that is simultaneously a negative political theology: a mode of thinking death, nothingness and the apocalyptic that opens onto an existential politics of radical equality and interreligious co‐existence in the turbulent Kashmir of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The book is organised into four chapters, devoted respectively to the Sahaja Islam of Nund Rishi, the theme of death, the theme of the Nothing and the theme of vernacular apocalypse. Throughout, Bazaz situates Nund Rishi within the Indo‐Persian world of medieval Sufi thought and within the broader comparative context of negative theology across monotheistic and non‐monotheistic traditions. The book is a work of considerable philological and philosophical range, and it constitutes a major contribution to the study of Kashmiri literature, South Asian Sufism and the intersections of mysticism and politics in the subcontinent. Its sustained attention to the Kashmiri text, its rigorous deployment of continental philosophy and its urgent awareness of the contemporary political stakes of recovering this inheritance make it an indispensable contribution to the field.