Virashaiva/Lingayat

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Virashaiva (“heroic Śaivism”) and Lingayat (“wearer of the linga”) are the two names — on some accounts of one tradition, on others of two — for a devotional movement of Shiva that took shape in the Kannada-speaking country of southern India in the twelfth century. The names do not merely label; they argue. Virashaiva points back through five primordial teachers to an antiquity older than any founder, a heroic Śaivism that was always there to be revived. Lingayat points to a single thing a person does: receive a small emblem of Shiva at initiation and wear it on the body until death. The first name describes a lineage, the second a practice, and the question of whether they name the same community or two communities that overlap has run, unresolved, from the medieval monasteries into twenty-first-century courtrooms. The dispute is genuine, and it is best left standing where the tradition itself leaves it: as a live disagreement among the faithful about their own origin.

The 108-foot statue of Basava at Basavakalyan, Karnataka, marking the medieval Kalyana where the movement gathered. — Sscheral, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

What both names share is the linga on the person. Its wearers carry the distinguishing mark not in a building but on the skin: the ishtalinga, a small aniconic emblem of Shiva — a dark ovoid coated in fine ash-paste, bound in a casket and worn at the throat or on the chest — received at initiation and kept for life. Where temple Shaivism housed the god in stone and approached him through priests and through the ranked purity of those allowed near the sanctum, here the shrine was made portable and personal, and the god went where the devotee went. The ishtalinga is not understood as a token or reminder of Shiva. It is held to be his real presence, given into the keeping of the individual, so that the worshipper carries the whole of the sacred on the body and owes nothing to a priesthood for access to it. The consequence is radical and was meant to be: a religion with no indispensable temple, because every adherent is one.

Basava at the court of Kalyana

The movement’s gathering point was Basava — also Basavanna, “elder brother Basava” — a Brahmin-born minister who served as treasurer (bhandari) at the court of the Kalachuri king Bijjala II, who held Kalyana and ruled the Deccan from roughly 1157 to 1167 after detaching the region from his declining Chalukya overlords. Basava is remembered as the man who turned the king’s treasury and the king’s capital into the seedbed of a new devotion, spending royal revenue on the feeding of devotees and drawing to the city a gathering it had not seen before.

Around him collected the sharanas — “those who have taken refuge” — women as well as men, and many from castes the temple system kept at a distance: a cobbler, a boatman, a washerman, an untouchable, alongside Brahmins who had walked away from their birth-rank. Tradition remembers their meeting place as the Anubhava Mantapa, the “hall of experience,” convened at Kalyana in the mid-1160s and presided over, in the community’s memory, by the enigmatic mystic Allama Prabhu rather than by Basava himself — an assembly where men and women of every origin sat together to argue out the experience of God in the open. The hall is the institutional heart of the movement’s claim: that spiritual standing is taken, not inherited, and that the place to take it is a room where caste does not enter at the door.

The community remembers, too, how the experiment ended. Among the sharanas, a marriage was arranged across the deepest line caste drew — the son of Haralayya, of an untouchable cobbler family, to the daughter of Madhuvarasa, a Brahmin-born devotee. Both fathers were sharanas; in the logic of the Anubhava Mantapa there was no obstacle. To the court and the orthodox there was nothing but obstacle. The reprisal was savage: the tradition recalls the two fathers blinded and dragged to death, the king Bijjala dead soon after amid the upheaval, and the sharanas scattered out of Kalyana into the surrounding country in the violence of 1167–68, carrying the vachanas with them. Basava himself is remembered withdrawing from the ministry to the river-confluence of Kudalasangama, where the legend places his death. The scattering dispersed the movement but did not end it; it seeded Karnataka with sharana communities and carried the poems into the collections that preserve them.

The vachanas

What survives most vividly is the poetry. The vachanas — “sayings,” free-verse utterances in Kannada — were composed by hundreds of hands, in a plain spoken idiom deliberately set against the Sanskrit learning of the Brahmins, each poet sealing the verse with a personal signature-phrase naming the form of Shiva to whom it is addressed. Basava signs to the lord of the meeting rivers (Kudala Sangama Deva, the god of the confluence at Kudalasangama); Allama Prabhu to the lord of caves (Guheshvara), in riddling, paradoxical “twilight” verses that fold doctrine back on itself; Akka Mahadevi — the great woman poet, who is said to have cast off clothing and rank alike and to have spoken of Shiva as her only husband — to the lord white as jasmine (Chennamallikarjuna).

Statue of the vachana poet Akka Mahadevi at Udutadi, her birthplace near Shivamogga, Karnataka. — Amarrg, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

The poems are by turns tender and scathing. They mock temple-building, Vedic ritual, animal sacrifice, caste, and the whole apparatus of pollution and purity. Basava’s best-known vachana sets the rich man’s temple against the poor man’s body: the rich can build temples for Shiva, but what can a poor man do — his legs are the pillars, the body itself the shrine, the head its dome of gold; and it ends on the turn that what stands will fall, while what moves does not. The standing thing is the stone temple; the moving thing is the living body that carries its god. The image is the movement in miniature: the rejection of the monumental in favor of the portable, the inherited in favor of the taken, the priest in favor of the person. This register — vernacular, anti-ritualist, addressed to a personal god under a chosen name — places the vachana poets within the long bhakti movement and alongside the later north-Indian nirguna sants, Kabir among them, who likewise sang a god beyond image and temple in the common tongue. Yet the Kannada poets keep their own grammar: their god is not formless but borne as a form on the body, and their dissent is welded to a specific emblem and a specific ethic.

Kayaka, dasoha, and the buried dead

The ethic that goes with the poetry is concrete. Kayaka holds that one’s daily labor — any honest work, the cobbler’s awl as much as the scholar’s page — is itself worship, that there is no sacred labor and no degraded labor, and that to work is to serve Shiva. Dasoha is the sharing of that labor’s fruits: what the work yields is held in trust for the community, and the giving of it back, especially in the feeding of fellow devotees, is the completion of the worship. Together they make a religion in which the ordinary economy of a working life is the whole of the rite, and in which the dignity of labor cancels the hierarchy of birth — a direct refusal of a system that ranked persons by the purity or pollution of their work.

The refusal extends past death. The dead are not cremated, as the surrounding tradition cremates, but buried — seated upright in a meditative posture, the ishtalinga still in the hand. Cremation belongs to the cycle of rebirth and the rites the Brahmin priest performs over the fire; the Lingayat grave declares that the wearer of the linga is already united with Shiva and has no further rounds to run. The body that carried the god in life is set into the earth still carrying him, and the death-rite, like the labor-rite, is taken out of priestly hands.

Later theology organized the devotee’s whole course as the shatsthala, a ladder of six stages (sthala) rising to union: bhakta, the stage of devotion; maheshvara, of steadfast service; prasadi, of receiving the god’s grace; pranalingi, in which the linga worn on the body is recognized as the linga of the life-breath within; sharana, of egoless surrender; and aikya, oneness, the union in which worshipper and Shiva are no longer told apart. The scheme reads the outward emblem inward: the ishtalinga on the chest, the pranalinga of the breath, and the bhavalinga of pure being are one linga seen at three depths, and the ascent is the dissolving of the distance between them — at its end the devotee does not visit Shiva but is Shiva, without ceasing to be the one who climbed.

Five teachers or one founder

Two questions remain genuinely contested within the tradition, and a third has carried them out of it. The first is the relation of the two names. The second is the question of origin. Virashaiva orthodoxy, gathered around five ancient monastic seats — the panchacharya lineage of five primordial teachers (Renukacharya, Darukacharya, Ekorama, Panditaradhya, Vishwaradhya), each enthroned at one of five peethas at Rambhapuri, Ujjaini, Kedar, Srisailam, and Kashi — holds the faith to be timeless, emanated from the five faces of Shiva, with Basava not its founder but its great twelfth-century reviver. A rival modern reading, gathered around the vachanas and the Anubhava Mantapa, takes Basava himself as the founder of a religion in its own right — a faith born in the twelfth century, defined by the ishtalinga and the rejection of caste and Veda, and on this account distinct from Hinduism altogether rather than a sect within it.

The disagreement is not merely antiquarian. In the twenty-first century it moved from the monasteries into state politics. In 2018 the Karnataka government, after a campaign by Lingayat leaders and several ministers, forwarded to the central government a recommendation that Lingayats be accorded the status of a separate religion and a religious minority — a claim that turns on reading Basava as a founder and the faith as non-Hindu; the central government declined it in November 2018, citing the long classification of Lingayats as a Hindu community. The contest set the Akhila Bharatha Veerashaiva Mahasabha, which holds Veerashaiva and Lingayat to be one community within the broader Hindu fold, against the Jagathika Lingayat Mahasabha, which holds Veerashaivas to be a sub-current of a distinct Lingayat religion. Scholarship generally places the movement’s self-conscious formation in the twelfth century while noting the older Śaiva orders already rooted in the region, and treats the relation between “Virashaiva” and “Lingayat” — and the relation of both to the wider Hindu world — as living disputes rather than settled facts. They are the community’s own questions about itself, and the community has not finished asking them.

The faith is today among the largest in Karnataka, with millions of adherents and a network of monasteries led by the jangama order — the wandering and settled teacher-priests who, unlike the Brahmin, derive their authority not from birth but from the linga and from learning, and who serve the community in place of the priesthood the movement refused. The vachanas are read, recited, and sung; the maths run schools and hostels and feed the poor in the old idiom of dasoha. The linga is still tied on in childhood, and it goes with its wearer to the grave.

The texts and their study

The vachanas are medieval Kannada works, public domain by their age, and the modern study of the movement rests on a small set of editions and translations whose registers must be kept distinct — the poets’ own utterance, the orthodox theology that systematized it, and the modern scholarship and politics that have made it a contested heritage. The movement first entered Anglophone scholarship through the missionary-planned Heritage of India Series, in F. Kingsbury and G. E. Phillips’s Hymns of the Tamil Śaivite Saints (Calcutta: Association Press, 1921), which set the Kannada and Tamil Śaiva hymnodies side by side for English readers; the volume is public domain in the United States and circulates in digital facsimile. The landmark modern translation is A. K. Ramanujan’s Speaking of Śiva (Penguin, 1973), which rendered Basava, Allama Prabhu, Akka Mahadevi, and Dasimayya into a spare modern English and, in its long introduction, gave the vachana its standard critical framing as a poetry of protest and immediacy; it carried the movement into world literature and has had a cult readership ever since. Jan Peter Schouten’s Revolution of the Mystics: On the Social Aspects of Vīraśaivism (Kampen: Kok Pharos, 1991) is the major study of the movement’s social program — kayaka, dasoha, and the assault on caste — read as a coherent ethic rather than a scatter of protests; Robert Zydenbos’s extended review essay weighs its central claim that Vīraśaivism amounts to a social revolution and sharpens the very Veerashaiva-versus-Lingayat distinction at issue here. The standard compact reference account is the Encyclopedia of Religion entry on the Lingayats, which lays out the shatsthala, the jangama order, the burial of the dead, and the Veerashaiva–Lingayat question in brief.

A vachana of Akka Mahadevi rendered as a Kannada inscription, the medieval free-verse form at the heart of the movement’s literature. — Amarrg, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

The Kannada movement is the Śaiva sibling of the Tamil bhakti south but is not to be assimilated to it. The Nāyaṉārs and their hymns sang Shiva at named temples along the Kāveri and produced, downstream, the realist-pluralist theology of Tamil Śaiva Siddhānta, in which soul and Shiva remain forever distinct even in union; the Kannada vachana poets sang against the temple and aimed at an aikya in which the distinction is dissolved. Neither is this the affirmative non-dualism of the north’s Kashmir Śaivism, the recognition-philosophy of Abhinavagupta in which the world is the self-display of a single consciousness; the vachana world keeps a personal, addressed god and a devotee who loves and labors toward him on the body. Three Śaivisms, three grammars of the same god — temple-bound and pluralist in the Tamil country, non-dual and scholastic in Kashmir, portable and anti-caste in the Kannada land — and the linga worn on the chest is what makes the third unmistakably itself.

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