Tradition · devotional literary form

Vachana sāhitya

Also known as Vachana, Vachana literature, Sharana movement, Lingayat vachanas

Date

11th–12th century

Function

Religious institution & practice

Tradition

Vachana corpus; Sunyasampadane

Confidence

Established / referenced

Worth knowing

The vachanas were nearly lost: they survived the collapse of Kalyāna as bundles carried out by fleeing sharanas, and were only systematically collected and printed in the twentieth century. A. K. Ramanujan's Speaking of Siva in 1973 put them into English.

Connections (3)

• Canonised by textBasavanna

  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.

• Canonised by textAkka Mahādevi

  Akka Mahādevi's vachanas are signed Chennamallikārjuna and are the most direct of the corpus: she writes about the body she has renounced, about hunger, and about being questioned by men who assume her right to speak is in doubt. About thirty of the three hundred known sharanas were women. She left a royal marriage in her teens, gave up clothing, and walked to Kalyāna to be interrogated by the assembly about both, which the corpus records from her side.

• Teaching lineageMīrābāī

  Akka Mahādevi in twelfth-century Kannada and Mīrābāī in sixteenth-century Braj made the same move three hundred years and fifteen hundred kilometres apart: a woman of rank leaves a marriage, declares herself god's, and writes about it in the vernacular. Both traditions preserve the objections raised against them. The vachanas were nearly lost as a result and survived as bundles carried out of a burning city; they were only systematically collected and printed in the twentieth century.

Sources

Wikipedia, “Vachana sahitya”. Sangeet Natak Akademi and Ministry of Textiles documentation, and the standard field studies.

• Wikipedia — Vachana sahitya