Devara Dasimayya: Is the Fire Male or Female

His single most famous vachana, and one of the most quoted things in Kannada.

In A. K. Ramanujan's translation it runs roughly:

Suppose you cut a tall bamboo in two; make the bottom piece a woman, the headpiece a man; rub them together till they kindle: tell me now, the fire that's born, is it male or female, O Ramanatha?

What it is doing

The argument is compressed and complete, and it works as follows.

The two pieces of bamboo are from one bamboo. The division into a bottom and a top is arbitrary; you made the cut.

Calling one a man and the other a woman is a further arbitrary act. Nothing about either piece requires the label.

Then you rub them together and get fire.

And the fire has no sex at all, because the categories you applied were applied by you, to material that did not have them, and what emerges from the material does not carry them.

Which is a complete argument about gender, made in the tenth century, by a weaver, in about forty words.

What it is being used for

In context, it is about who may practise.

The standard position of the time was that women were excluded from the formal paths, that the female body was an obstacle, and that a woman's spiritual prospects depended on rebirth as a man. Bahinabai in Maharashtra quotes that position, accurately and bitterly, five hundred years later.

Dasimayya's answer is that the distinction does not go all the way down. It is applied to a body. What the body produces, and what the practice is aimed at, is not the kind of thing that has a sex.

And another of his vachanas puts it more directly still, saying in substance that if a person's mind has reached that state, the world's names for them, man or woman, are simply the world's names, and Ramanatha does not use them.

Why he could say it

It is worth noting that his household included Duggale, who is a saint in her own right and who in the stories has the better judgement of the two.

This is not an abstract position taken by a man about women in general. It is written by somebody whose wife gave away his cloth and was correct.

And the movement acted on it. Two centuries later, the Anubhava Mantapa seated women in the assembly, around thirty three of them left vachanas, and one of them was made the elder sister of the whole gathering.

A note on the corresponding modern point, since this app is practical:

Nothing in Hindu practice requires a woman's exclusion from devotion. Menstruation taboos, exclusion from recitation, and the idea that a woman's practice is secondary are customs, they differ enormously by region and community, and the tradition contains its own most forceful arguments against them, of which this vachana is the oldest and the sharpest.

Around 150 to 175 vachanas survive under the ankita Ramanatha.

What they are like: plainer than Allama, less argumentative than Basavanna, and built almost entirely out of ordinary observation.

The recurring subjects

One. Fire.

Besides the bamboo, fire runs through his work. One well known vachana observes that there is a fire in every act, in every look, in every word, in the space between a husband and a wife, in food, and asks how anybody manages to live in the middle of all of it without being consumed, and answers that the one who does is the one who is at one with Ramanatha.

Two. Cloth and thread.

The weaver's images. The cloth is thread and nothing else, and yet you cannot point to the cloth in the thread. The pattern is not a substance.

Three. The uselessness of external observance.

He is blunt. Several vachanas ask what is achieved by bathing, by fasting, by counting, by pilgrimage, and by the visible marks of piety, and give the same answer.

Four. The body and hunger.

He writes about the body as a demanding thing that must be fed, that betrays you, and that is not the enemy. Given that his household frequently had nothing, the hunger is not metaphorical.

Five. Time.

One of his best known says roughly that for the one who is completely at one with Shiva there is no dawn and no new moon, no fasting day and no feast day, no auspicious hour and no inauspicious one, because those are divisions of a thing that is not divided.

That is also a practical statement, and it is worth noticing what it rules out: the entire apparatus of auspicious timings, muhurtas, planetary hours and the anxiety attached to them.

Six. Simplicity about his own capacity.

One famous vachana says that he does not know about beats and metres, that he cannot recite what the learned recite, and that he only knows how to keep saying what he keeps saying.

Reading him

A. K. Ramanujan's Speaking of Siva includes him as one of its four poets, alongside Basavanna, Allama and Akka Mahadevi, and his selection of Dasimayya is where most English readers meet him.

Kannada editions carry the full corpus.

Where he sits in the tradition: the Lingayat tradition regards him as the adya vachanakara, the first vachana poet, and he is honoured as the beginning of the form that Basavanna's movement later used for everything.

The Chalukya court

The tradition holds that Dasimayya went to the court of Jayasimha I, a Western Chalukya ruler, and that the king and his queen Suggaladevi became devotees.

The accounts describe debates at the court, in which Dasimayya argued against the Jain scholars present and prevailed, and after which the king's allegiance changed.

How to hold this. Court conversion narratives are a standard genre in every Indian tradition, they are usually written long after the fact, and they usually flatten what were slow social changes into a single decisive debate.

What can be said: the Deccan in the tenth and eleventh centuries saw a real and often contentious shift in royal and popular patronage between Jain and Shaiva institutions, this is visible in inscriptions and in temple building, and Dasimayya belongs to that period.

And what this app will not do: present a debate that ends in somebody's tradition losing as a devotional triumph. The historical shift happened, it involved real communities and real losses on the Jain side including the conversion of Jain temples, and a guide is better for saying so.

Mudanuru

• In Yadgir district, Karnataka, in the Kalyana Karnataka region
• The Ramanatha temple, from which his ankita comes, held locally to be an ancient foundation
• Sites associated with Dasimayya and Duggale
• Not a large pilgrimage centre, and quiet compared with Kudalasangama or Basavakalyan

His place in the wider picture

Dasimayya belongs to a specific and important group: the weaver saints of India.

• Devara Dasimayya, Kannada, tenth century, weaver
• Kabir, Hindi, fifteenth century, of a weaver family
• Tiruppan and the Tamil weaver devotees
• Bhagat Namdev, whose family were tailors, and the many julaha figures in the north Indian sant tradition
• The Devanga and Padmasali weaver communities of the south, who hold their own saints

Why weaving keeps producing poets is not mysterious.

• It is rhythmic, so verse fits it
• It is solitary and repetitive, so the mind is free
• The imagery is inherently philosophical: cloth from thread, whole from part, pattern from nothing but arrangement, and the fact that when you unpick the cloth there is no cloth left
• And weaver communities across India sat at the edge of the caste order, close enough to see it and outside enough to say so

Kabir's cloth poems and Dasimayya's are doing recognisably the same thing, five hundred years and two languages apart.

One. The bamboo.

It is worth memorising, and it applies far beyond its original target.

The procedure it describes is: notice that a distinction you are treating as real was applied by somebody, to material that did not carry it, and then check whether the thing you care about actually has that property.

Applied to sex, which is what he wrote it for.

Applied to caste, which the whole vachana movement did.

And applied generally: to the categories you use about yourself and other people, most of which were cut into the bamboo by somebody else.

Two. No auspicious hour and no inauspicious one.

His vachana on time removes the whole apparatus of good and bad moments for the person who has arrived, and softens it for everybody else.

Practically: if you are anxious about timings, muhurtas, and whether a thing was begun at a bad hour, this is the tradition's own answer, from the tenth century. Do the thing well. There is no hour in which sincerity does not work.

Three. The fire in everything.

His observation that there is a fire in every act, every look, every word and in the space between husband and wife is not a warning to withdraw. It is a description of what ordinary life is, and his question is how anybody survives being in the middle of it.

Four. He kept weaving.

He was the first poet of the tradition and he stayed a working weaver, and his household was frequently without food because he and Duggale gave away what they had.

And note the second half of that sentence. The generosity in his story is a household decision, made by two people, and Duggale is the one who makes it in most of the stories.

Five. He said he did not know metre.

The first poet of a five hundred year literary tradition wrote that he did not know beats and metres and could not recite what the learned recite, and that he only knew how to keep saying what he kept saying.

The form he was inventing required none of it, which is why everybody after him could use it.

A daily practice from this entry:

• Om Namah Shivaya
• The bamboo question, applied once a week to a distinction you are treating as given
• If you work with your hands and there is a rhythm to it, the name goes there
• And his line about time, kept for the days when you are worried about whether the moment is right

A closing thought

A weaver in a village in the tenth century, whose wife gave away the cloth he had just finished and the rice they were going to eat, wrote about a hundred and fifty short poems in the language people spoke, ending each of them by saying the name of the Shiva in the local temple.

One of them says: cut a bamboo in two, call the bottom half a woman and the top half a man, rub them together until they catch, and then tell me what sex the fire is.

A hundred and fifty years later, a treasurer at Kalyana built an assembly where a cobbler and a queen argued as equals, using the poetic form this weaver had invented, and the arguments they made were the ones he had already made.

Who: Devara Dasimayya, also Jedara Dasimayya, tenth century, roughly 950 to 1000, a weaver of Mudanuru in Yadgir district, Karnataka. Jedara means weaver.

Why he matters: he is the first vachana poet, around a hundred and fifty years before Basavanna, and the form is already fully worked out in his hands. The Lingayat tradition calls him the adya vachanakara.

His ankita: Ramanatha, the Shiva of the temple at Mudanuru, held locally to have been installed by Rama.

His famous vachana: cut a tall bamboo in two, make the bottom piece a woman and the headpiece a man, rub them together until they kindle, and then say whether the fire that is born is male or female. It is a complete argument about gender in about forty words, written in the tenth century by a weaver, and it is aimed at the position that women were excluded from the formal paths.

His wife: Duggale, also Duggalavve, a saint in her own right, who in most of the stories is the one giving away the household's cloth and food and being right to.

His works: around 150 to 175 vachanas, plainer than Allama and less argumentative than Basavanna, built out of fire, cloth and thread, the uselessness of external observance, hunger, and time. One says that for the one at one with Shiva there is no auspicious hour and no inauspicious one.

Where he sits: among the weaver saints of India, with Kabir five centuries later doing recognisably the same thing with the same images.

What to keep: the bamboo question, applied to any distinction you are treating as given.