Basavanna: The Moving Will Always Stay

What a vachana is

Vachana means: a saying, an utterance, a thing said.

Its features:

• Free verse. No fixed metre, no rhyme scheme, no prosodic requirement
• In spoken Kannada, not Sanskrit and not literary Kannada
• Short, usually four to twenty lines
• Ends with an ankita, a signature phrase naming the poet's chosen form of Shiva
• Frequently structured as an argument, with a turn at the end

Why the form matters

This is not a stylistic detail. It is the movement's central decision.

Classical Kannada poetry at the time was champu: a demanding mixed verse and prose form, with Sanskrit vocabulary, strict metre, and a body of conventions that required years of training to use. It was court literature and it was closed.

The vachana requires nothing. No metre to learn, no vocabulary to acquire, no training.

Which means a washerman could write one, and a washerman did.

Who wrote vachanas

This is the list that makes the movement what it is:

• Basavanna, a brahmana and state treasurer
• Allama Prabhu, a wandering teacher, whose vachanas are the most difficult
• Akka Mahadevi, a woman who left her marriage
• Channabasavanna, Basavanna's nephew
• Siddharama of Sonnalige, a builder of tanks and temples
• Madivala Machideva, a washerman
• Haralayya, a cobbler
• Madara Chennaiah, a cobbler, whom Basavanna calls his elder
• Dohara Kakkayya, a tanner
• Ambigara Chowdayya, a boatman, whose vachanas are famously abusive toward hypocrites
• Aydakki Marayya and Lakkamma, who lived by gleaning grain
• Nuliya Chandayya, a rope maker
• Urilinga Peddi, an untouchable
• Kalavve, Satyakka, Muktayakka, Remmavve, Gangambike, Neelambike and around thirty other women

Over two hundred named vachanakaras, of whom around thirty three are women, from every occupation including the ones the society treated as polluting.

That is unmatched anywhere in medieval Indian literature.

Basavanna's own vachanas: around 1,400 survive under the ankita Kudala Sangama Deva.

The most famous one

It is quoted everywhere, and in A. K. Ramanujan's translation it runs roughly:

The rich will make temples for Shiva. What shall I, a poor man, do? My legs are pillars, the body the shrine, the head a cupola of gold. Listen, O lord of the meeting rivers: things standing shall fall, but the moving ever shall stay.

The last line is the movement's whole doctrine: sthavara, the standing thing, the immovable, the built temple, versus jangama, the moving thing, the living person.

And the claim is that the jangama outranks the sthavara.

Written by the treasurer of a kingdom, who could have built as many temples as he wanted, and who is the one saying he is a poor man with no temple to build.

What it was: an assembly at Kalyana, and the most remarkable institution in twelfth century India.

Anubhava Mantapa means the hall of experience. It is sometimes called the Sunyasimhasana, the throne of the void.

How it worked:

• It met to discuss spiritual and social questions
• Anybody could attend and anybody could speak
• Caste was not a qualification and not a bar
• Women attended and spoke, and their vachanas are part of the record
• The presiding figure was Allama Prabhu, not Basavanna, and Basavanna is described as its organiser rather than its head
• The proceedings produced vachanas, which were recorded

Who was in the room: a treasurer, a cobbler, a washerman, a boatman, a tanner, a rope maker, a woman who had walked out of her marriage, and a wandering teacher who answered questions with paradoxes.

And the cobbler was not there as a beneficiary. Madara Chennaiah and Dohara Kakkayya are addressed by Basavanna as his seniors, repeatedly, in his own vachanas. He calls Chennaiah his elder brother and describes himself as the child of these men.

The core doctrines

One. Ishtalinga.

At initiation, every member received a small linga, worn on the body in a casket around the neck, and worshipped daily by holding it in the palm.

What that abolishes:

• The need for a temple
• The need for a priest
• The whole question of temple entry, which is the mechanism by which caste exclusion operated
• The distinction between people who have access and people who do not

If the linga is on your body, nobody can keep you from it. The ishtalinga is a device for making exclusion impossible, and it is still worn today.

Two. Kayaka.

Kayaka is work, and the principle is that every member must do productive labour, and that the labour is itself the worship.

• No begging
• No living off others
• No exemption for anybody, including teachers
• The famous formulation: kayakave kailasa, work itself is Kailasa

Three. Dasoha.

What is earned beyond need is returned to the community. Not charity from above, but a standing obligation, and the movement's economics rested on it.

Four. What was rejected.

The Sharanas rejected, explicitly and in writing:

• Caste and untouchability
• The sacred thread
• Temple worship as necessary
• Sanskrit as the required language of religion
• Pilgrimage
• Animal sacrifice
• Astrology and omens
• The distinction between pure and impure occupations
• Ritual pollution attached to menstruation and childbirth
• Child marriage

And they approved of widow remarriage and of marriage across caste, which is what eventually destroyed them.

A note on Basavanna's own vachanas on caste. They are blunt.

One of the most quoted says that the person who has the linga is a devotee regardless of birth, that birth does not make anybody higher or lower, and asks what is left of caste once you accept that Shiva made everybody.

Another says: do not call one a low caste and another a high caste, since the same substance is in both, and adds that the arrogance of the twice born is worse than any impurity they claim to avoid.

How the movement ended. It is not a gentle story.

The marriage

Two families in the Sharana community arranged a marriage between their children:

• The bridegroom was the son of Haralayya, a cobbler, of an untouchable caste
• The bride was the daughter of Madhuvarasa or Madhuvayya, a brahmana who had joined the movement

By the movement's own principles this was unremarkable. Caste had been rejected. Both families were Sharanas. The marriage followed from the doctrine.

By the surrounding society's standards it was intolerable, and it was the point at which the movement's ideas stopped being words.

What the state did

King Bijjala acted, under pressure from the orthodox party at court.

The two fathers, Haralayya and Madhuvarasa, were arrested.

What was done to them: they were blinded, and then dragged through the streets behind elephants until they died. Some accounts say their eyes were put out and they were then executed; the details differ and all of them are appalling.

What followed

• Rioting at Kalyana
• Bijjala was assassinated, and the sources disagree about by whom and about whether any Sharana was responsible. Basavanna's own involvement is disputed and there is no good evidence he ordered or approved it
• The Sharana community was attacked and dispersed
• Members fled in several directions, carrying the vachana manuscripts, which is how the literature survived at all
• Channabasavanna led one group; the manuscripts were hidden and moved for generations
• Basavanna had already left Kalyana for Kudalasangama, where he died

On Basavanna's own end: he is said to have merged into the linga at Kudalasangama. The date is disputed along with everything else.

How to state this honestly

What is certain: an inter caste marriage in the Sharana community provoked a violent state response, two men were killed in a way designed to terrorise, the community was broken up, and the vachana corpus survived only because people carried manuscripts while fleeing.

What is disputed: the sequence, the extent of Basavanna's involvement in the aftermath, the responsibility for Bijjala's death, and the dates.

What is not disputed: that people were killed for a wedding.

And the thing worth saying

Honour crimes over inter caste marriage did not end in the twelfth century.

• In India, an adult of eighteen or above, for a woman, and twenty one for a man, has the legal right to marry any adult of their choice, and no family, caste panchayat or community body has any authority over that
• The Special Marriage Act 1954 allows marriage without either party changing religion
• The Supreme Court, in Shakti Vahini v. Union of India (2018), held that khap panchayats interfering in the marriage of consenting adults are acting illegally and directed the states to protect such couples
• Couples facing threats can approach the police for protection, and every state has a procedure; police 112
• Free legal aid is a statutory right, national number 15100
• Women's helpline 181; Tele MANAS 14416 for the mental health side

Basavanna's movement was destroyed over exactly this, and stating that plainly is the only useful way to tell the story.

What survived

• The vachana manuscripts, carried out of Kalyana and preserved in mathas for centuries
• The Lingayat or Veerashaiva community, now numbering many millions, mainly in Karnataka and adjoining states
• The ishtalinga, still worn
• Kayaka and dasoha as living principles, and the dasoha kitchens attached to Lingayat mathas feed very large numbers of students and travellers daily
• A large network of mathas running schools, colleges and hostels, which is one of the reasons for the community's educational standing

A note on nomenclature. There is a live and sometimes heated debate about the relationship between Lingayat and Veerashaiva and about whether the tradition should be classified as a distinct religion or as part of Shaivism. That is a contemporary legal and political question and this app does not take a side in it. What is not disputed is that the tradition begins with Basavanna and the Sharanas in the twelfth century and is centred on Shiva.

Places

• Kudalasangama, at the confluence of the Krishna and the Malaprabha in Bagalkot district: the Sangameshwara temple, Basavanna's aikya mantapa, and the site is now beside the Almatti backwaters
• Basavana Bagewadi, Vijayapura district: his birthplace
• Basavakalyan, Bidar district: the site of the Anubhava Mantapa, with a modern Anubhava Mantapa building and the caves associated with the Sharanas
• Ulavi, in Uttara Kannada: where Channabasavanna and the fleeing Sharanas took the manuscripts, a major pilgrimage
• Sonnalige, now Solapur, associated with Siddharama

Basava Jayanti: Vaishakha Shukla Tritiya, the same day as Akshaya Tritiya, generally in April or May. It is a public holiday in Karnataka.

Reading the vachanas

Start with A. K. Ramanujan's Speaking of Siva, a Penguin Classics volume of translations of Basavanna, Allama, Akka Mahadevi and Devara Dasimayya. It is the standard English entry point and the translations are famous in their own right.

Then: collections of the wider vachanakaras, including the women and the artisan poets. Kannada editions are extensive, and Hindi translations exist.

What to notice when reading:

• They are short and can be read one at a time
• Almost every one contains an argument, usually with a turn or reversal at the end
• The imagery is domestic and occupational: pots, cloth, water, animals, tools, the body
• The ankita at the end tells you who wrote it
• They are frequently rude about hypocrisy, and Ambigara Chowdayya in particular is not polite

One. Things standing shall fall, but the moving ever shall stay.

The living person outranks the built structure. That is the whole doctrine in one line and it is a working test: when a building, an institution or a custom is being defended against a person, the person is the more sacred of the two.

Two. Kayakave kailasa. Work itself is Kailasa.

Not work as a preliminary to worship. Not work offered up afterwards. The work, done properly, is the thing.

And it came with a rule that nobody is exempt, including the teacher, which is a stricter position than most traditions take.

Three. The linga on the body.

The ishtalinga was a technology for making exclusion impossible. Whatever your caste, the object of your worship is on your person and no gatekeeper stands between you and it.

The general form of that idea is usable by anybody: a practice that requires no building, no official and no permission cannot be taken away from you.

Four. Dasoha.

What is beyond your need goes back. Not as generosity but as a standing arrangement.

Five. He called the cobbler his elder.

Basavanna was a brahmana by birth and a treasurer by office, and in his own vachanas he addresses Madara Chennaiah and Dohara Kakkayya, both of untouchable castes, as his seniors and describes himself as their child.

That is not condescension and it is not charity. It is a man with everything the society valued saying, in writing, that the hierarchy was upside down.

Six. And the warning the movement's end contains.

They rejected caste in words for years and nothing happened. They arranged one marriage across it and the state killed two men and broke the community.

The lesson is not that they should not have done it. The lesson is about where the actual line is, and it is worth knowing that the line is still there and that the law is now on the side of the couple: Special Marriage Act 1954, the Supreme Court's 2018 direction in Shakti Vahini, police protection on request, 112, free legal aid 15100, women's helpline 181.

A daily practice from this entry:

• Om Namah Shivaya, or the vachana practice, which is to read one vachana and sit with it
• The test: things standing shall fall, but the moving ever shall stay
• On Basava Jayanti, Vaishakha Shukla Tritiya, which is also Akshaya Tritiya
• And the kayaka rule, applied literally: do your work well today, and treat that as the practice rather than as what is stopping you from practising

A closing thought

A brahmana boy refused the sacred thread at eight because his sister had not been given one.

He grew up to run the treasury of a kingdom, and used the position to build an assembly where a cobbler, a washerman, a boatman and a woman who had left her marriage sat and argued about the nature of god in the language everybody actually spoke.

He gave every one of them a linga to wear on the body, so that no temple door could ever be closed to them again.

And then two of those families married their children to each other, and the king had both fathers blinded and dragged behind elephants, and the community scattered in every direction carrying the poems.

And the poems are still here.