Death is the fundamental theme of Nund Rishi's poetry. I take up this insight in this chapter from the Kashmiri poet and critic Rahman Rahi's seminal essay “Shaikh al ‘Ālam sạnz shạ̄‘irānā ḥạsiyath” (The Poetic Personality of Shaikh al-‘Ālam) in relation to Rahi's extended reading of Nund Rishi as well as my own reading of the thinking of death in the Islamic tradition and certain strands of existential–phenomenological thought. The reason I develop this reading of death in Nund Rishi's mystical poetry comparatively across different traditions is to better approach the stakes involved in reading Nund Rishi's negative theology as a powerful discourse on death. The moments of negative theology in Islamic mystical poetry often take the form of a discourse on death and infuse a crisis in positive Islamic theology. To borrow Rahman Rahi's title for the critical collection in which the essay on the thinking of death in Nund Rishi appears, death is the true kahavạt (touchstone) for Nund Rishi's thinking.

Let us recall Nund Rishi's prayer from one of his shruks: Yiman padan me vẏtsār gotshiy (These verses call to thinking). Nund Rishi calls his readers to a thinking (vẏetsār) on his padas (verses). Much has remained unthought in Nund Rishi's padas (or shruks), but what remains inescapable for any reader of Nund Rishi is the sudden encounter that the shruks set up with death. Nund Rishi hurls his reader on a collision course with the inevitability of death that reaches out from everywhere on earth: the way the dry clay vessels instantaneously absorb water, shops are abandoned at closing time, or the suddenness with which lightning descends down the sky (as the domes that shudder or the thunder that strikes) reducing human being(s) to nothing. I invoke Rahman Rahi's reading right at the outset because his 1978 essay is the first to trace the path of an interpretation I develop here: the fundamental theme, the arche-theme, of Nund Rishi's poetry, is death.