Basava and the sharanas of Kalyana: the Lingayat movement

Bijjala II, a Kalachuri chief who had served the Western Chalukyas as a feudatory, seized the sovereignty of the Deccan in 1156 and occupied the Chalukya capital, Kalyana, before 1160. According to the History and Culture of the Indian People, Basava was born about 1125 into a Brahmin family at Ingaleshwar-Bagevadi, refused to undergo the sacred-thread ceremony, embraced the Virashaiva faith and succeeded his uncle as Bijjala’s chief minister; other estimates place his birth in 1131 or 1134. At Kalyana he founded the Anubhava Mantapa, the ‘hall of spiritual experience’, an assembly of mystics and poets presided over by Allama Prabhu, with Channabasava and the woman poet Akka Mahadevi among its leading members. Their vachanas — Basava alone left about seven hundred, all addressed to Shiva as Kudala Sangama — are rhythmic sayings in the colloquial Kannada of the day; they teach that the body itself is the god’s temple, demand the abolition of caste, extol the dignity of labour and give women an equal place. The devotee wears a small personal linga, the ishtalinga, instead of worshipping in temples served by Brahmins.

Whether Basava founded the Lingayat religion or reorganised an existing Virashaiva tradition is debated: S. C. Nandimath held that Basava reorganised the faith rather than founded it, and modern scholarship relying on the Kalachuri inscriptions sees him as reviving and energising an existing tradition. The earliest account of his life, Harihara’s Basavarajadevara Ragale, was written about 1180; the Basava Purana of Palkuriki Somanatha followed in the 13th century. The end of the movement at Kalyana is known mainly from such later works. They relate that Bijjala, a patron of the Jains, quarrelled with his minister, the sharanas were persecuted and left the city, and the king was murdered — by Basava’s agents, in the version summarised by D. C. Ganguly. Ganguly doubted the story, because an inscription records that Bijjala abdicated in favour of his son Someshvara in 1168; other historians, such as P. B. Desai, accept that radical sharanas killed Bijjala in 1167 or 1168 but hold that Basava himself was not responsible. Basava died at Kudalasangama, at the confluence of the Krishna and the Malaprabha; many modern accounts give the year as 1196.