Ecospiritual Refusals: Ontological Resistance and Decolonial Memory in Kashmiri Mystical Verse

Modernity’s ecological crises arise from deeper epistemic ruptures—chief among them, the disavowal of relational ontologies embedded in indigenous and non-Western cosmologies. These frameworks, often erased, articulate the world not as inert matter but as a field of sacred immanence, where knowledge is inseparable from being. Within this context, the poetry of Nund Rishi and Lal Ded—rooted in Kashmir’s mystical tradition—offers a sustained intervention. Emerging from Islamic Sufism and Kashmiri Shaivism, their respective invocations of Wahdat al-Wujūd and Pratyabhijñā constitute a non-dual metaphysics that resists colonial modernity’s ontological separations: between human and nonhuman, spirit and matter, self and world. Their verses call forth an ethics rooted in restraint, remembrance, and inner discipline—forms of ecological attention irreducible to managerial or instrumental paradigms. Rather than treating mysticism as retreat, this paper reads their poetics as decolonial acts of world-making. In recovering sacred relation as the ground of ethical life, Nund Rishi and Lal Ded offer not only spiritual insight but a philosophical resource for reimagining ecology, responsibility, and being otherwise. Their poetry invites a reconsideration of how ethical presence emerges—not through mastery or intervention, but through attunement, humility, and a deepened sense of participation in the more-than-human order of being.