Place · Chalukya capital town · India
Basavakalyan
/bɐsɐʋɐkɐlːjaːɳɐ/
Also known as Basava Kalyana, Kalyana, Kalyani, Kalyanapura
Basavakalyan is a town in Bidar district of northern Karnataka, historically the capital of the Western Chalukyas of Kalyani from around 1050 to 1189 and subsequently of the Kalachuris of Kalyani. Under the Kalachuri king Bijjala II in the 12th century, it hosted Basavanna's Anubhava Mantapa, the democratic assembly of sharanas that gave rise to the Virashaiva or Lingayat movement. The town was renamed from Kalyana to Basavakalyan in 1956 in honour of Basavanna. Basavakalyan is the political and spiritual cradle of the Lingayat movement, one of medieval India's most radical religious reforms. Its Anubhava Mantapa gathered vachana poets across caste and gender, including Basavanna, Akka Mahadevi, Allama Prabhu and Madivala Machayya. The town also served as the imperial capital of the Kalyani Chalukyas, a major Deccan power patronising Kannada literature, mathematics and Chalukya-style temple architecture.
- Date
- c. 1050 CE onward
- Periods
- Regional Flourishing, Islamic Age and Bhakti Traditions, Republic and Living Practice
- Function
- Authority & administration
- Patron dynasty
- Western Chalukyas of Kalyani
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 17.871, 76.942
Worth knowing
The Anubhava Mantapa, sometimes called the world's first religious parliament, has been reconstructed as a monumental modern memorial complex at the site. The town was violently disrupted around 1167 when King Bijjala was assassinated after an inter-caste Lingayat marriage, forcing Basavanna to flee to Kudalasangama. Bhaskara II, the great 12th century mathematician who authored the Lilavati and Siddhanta Shiromani, lived and worked at the Kalyani court, tying Basavakalyan into the medieval Deccan scientific tradition.
The precise physical location of the original Anubhava Mantapa is not archaeologically fixed, and the present memorial is a modern commemorative reconstruction rather than an excavated medieval structure.
Connections (4)
- TransmissionWarangal Fort
Basavakalyan's Kalachuris and the Kakatiyas of Warangal were contemporary Deccan powers with a common frontier, and Kakatiya inscriptions record Lingayat presence at Warangal — so the Virashaiva movement that began at Kalyana in the 1160s had reached the Telugu country within a generation. Both states were broken by the Delhi Sultanate's Deccan campaigns within a few decades of each other.
- Sent scholars toShringeri Śāradā Pīṭham
Sringeri, the southern amnaya matha of the Advaita tradition, and Basavakalyan, where Basavanna's Virashaiva movement took shape in the twelfth century, are two Karnataka centres that stood against each other doctrinally — orthodox Vedantic Brahminism against a movement that rejected caste, temple worship and Vedic authority outright. The vachana poets wrote in Kannada against a Sanskrit establishment, and the argument between those two positions runs through Karnataka intellectual life to this day.
- Power passed toBidar
Bidar, eighty kilometres from Basavakalyan, became the Bahmani capital in 1425 and then the seat of the Barid Shahis. Its rise displaced the old Chalukya centrality of Kalyana but kept the region politically important, and Mahmud Gawan's madrasa there — Persian in plan, tiled, with a library of three thousand manuscripts — is the clearest single piece of evidence for how completely the Deccan was plugged into the Persianate world.
- Monastic foundationBasavanna
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.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Basavakalyan”. Archaeological Survey of India and State Archaeology monument records, and the standard regional literature.
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