Journey
Vachana movement at Kalyana
Twelfth-century Kalyāna, where Basava's Anubhava Mantapa gathered men and women of every caste to argue in Kannada and write vachanas — short free-verse utterances, each signed with the writer's own name for god. It ended in violence within a generation; the poems outlived the movement by eight hundred years. Akka Mahadevi's vachanas are the earliest substantial body of writing by an Indian woman in any language.
Stops (4)
- Basavanna · Basavanna — the treasurer who wrote vachanas
Chief minister to the Kalachuri king Bijjala and founder of the Anubhava Mantapa, the hall of experience, where washermen, cobblers and Brahmins argued theology together. He rejected temple and caste for the ishtalinga worn on the body: the rich will build temples, he wrote, but what shall I, a poor man, do.
- Akka Mahādevi · Akka Mahādevi — the poet who walked out
She left a royal marriage in her teens, gave up clothing, and walked to Kalyāna to be interrogated by Basava's assembly about her nakedness and her right to be there. Her vachanas are signed Chennamallikārjuna, the lord white as jasmine, and are the most unguarded erotic religious poetry in Kannada.
- Basavakalyan · Basavakalyāna — the Anubhava Mantapa
The Kalachuri capital where the movement had its few years. The assembly's tolerance ended over a marriage between a Brahmin's daughter and an untouchable's son; the king had the fathers killed, the city rose, and the sharanas scattered carrying their manuscripts.
- Kudalasangama · Kūdalasangama — where Basava ended
The confluence of the Krishna and the Malaprabhā, where Basava spent his childhood and where tradition says he returned to die after the Kalyāna collapse. His aikya mantapa stands there, and the Lingāyat tradition treats it as its principal seat.