Person · Shaiva reformer · India

Basavanna

/bɐsɐʋɐɳːɐ/

Also known as Basava, Basaveshwara, Basavesvara, Jagajyoti Basavanna

Date

c. 1105 to 1167 CE

Function

Social reform & movement

Confidence

Qualified / contested

Worth knowing

Basavanna is among medieval India's most radical religious reformers, rejecting caste, priestcraft and gender hierarchy in favour of direct devotional relationship with Shiva through personal ishtalinga worship and honest labour (kayaka). His vachanas, short prose-poems in Kannada, established a vernacular philosophical literature centuries before comparable movements in the north. The Lingayat community he founded numbers roughly 20 million today, mostly in Karnataka.

Connections (6)

• Teaching lineageSrisailam/ Sri Shailam

  Kalamukha Shaiva ascetics were established at Srisailam, and Basavanna's Virashaiva movement grew partly out of that milieu before turning against much of it — against temple worship itself, in favour of the linga carried on the body. Srisailam nevertheless remained an important Virashaiva pilgrimage centre, which ties the Andhra hill to Basavakalyan in Karnataka, the movement's political base under the Kalachuris, three hundred kilometres west.

• Script and cultureAkka Mahādevi

  Akka Mahadevi and Basavanna both belong to the 12th century vachana movement centred at Kalyana under the Kalachuri king Bijjala II. She joined the Anubhava Mantapa as a young woman renunciate wholly devoted to Chennamallikarjuna, and her radical unclothed asceticism marks the movement's most striking gender-crossing figure. Their linked biographies are partly hagiographic.

• Life routeChidambaram

  Basavanna is traditionally said to have visited Chidambaram, and vachanas refer to the Nataraja shrine. The link matters because it puts the Kannada Virashaiva reform — which rejected temples in favour of the linga worn on the body — in direct contact with the Tamil Shaiva Siddhanta establishment centred on exactly such a temple. The two movements share a theology of Shiva and disagree completely about what a building is for.

• Monastic foundationBasavakalyan

  Basava ran the Kalachuri treasury at Kalyāna and used the position to fund the Anubhava Mantapa, an assembly open to anyone regardless of caste or sex. It is the closest thing in medieval India to a deliberative body constituted against the social order that produced it, and it lasted perhaps a generation.

• Canonised by textVachana sāhitya

  Basava's vachanas set the form: short, unmetred, spoken, and signed Kūdalasangamadeva after his childhood confluence. Writing theology in Kannada rather than Sanskrit was the point — it meant a washerman could argue with a Brahmin in the same language and be understood by the onlookers. Some three hundred sharanas wrote vachanas, including about thirty women and many from artisan and untouchable castes — the first large body of Indian religious writing by people outside the literate elite.

• Samadhi atKudalasangama

  Kūdalasangama is where Basava grew up and, by tradition, where he returned to die after Kalyāna fell. His ankita — the signature in every vachana — is the name of this confluence's deity, so his entire body of work is signed with the place he came back to. The Anubhava Mantapa he founded ended in violence within a generation, over a marriage between a Brahmin's daughter and an untouchable's son, and the sharanas scattered carrying their manuscripts.

On these journeys

• Vachana movement at Kalyana

Sources

Wikipedia, “Basava”. The subject’s own writings where they survive, and the standard biographical literature.

• Wikipedia — Basava