Yediyur: The Saint Who Revived the Vachana Movement

The Vachana movement of twelfth century Karnataka is worth understanding on its own terms, because there is very little like it anywhere.

What a vachana is:

• A short composition in Kannada, in free verse, not in Sanskrit and not in fixed metre
• Direct, conversational, frequently addressed to the writer's own ishtalinga
• Each writer signs off with a distinctive ankita, a signature phrase naming the deity as they address him
• They are argumentative, personal, often angry, sometimes very funny

Who wrote them. This is the part that has no real parallel.

• Basavanna, a minister at the Kalachuri court at Kalyana, who is the movement's central organising figure
• Allama Prabhu, the most philosophically radical
• Akka Mahadevi, a woman who left her marriage, wrote some of the finest poetry in Kannada, and is said to have travelled clothed only in her hair
• Channabasavanna, Siddharama, and a very large number of others
• Crucially, writers from every community, including a boatman, a cobbler, a tanner, a woodcutter, a washerman. Madara Chennaiah the cobbler and Dohara Kakkayya the tanner are among them

What the movement held:

• Kayaka, that one's own labour is worship, whatever the labour is
• Dasoha, that the fruit of that labour is to be shared
• The ishtalinga, a personal linga worn on the body, so that worship needs no temple, no priest and no image in a sanctum
• Rejection of caste distinction, of Vedic ritual authority and of the pilgrimage economy
• Rejection of the exclusion of women from religious life

The Anubhava Mantapa at Kalyana, the hall of experience, was where these people met and argued. A gathering in the twelfth century in which a minister, a cobbler, a woman ascetic and a tanner debated theology as equals, in the spoken language, is not something that happened very often anywhere in the world.

The movement did not simply continue. It was broken, and its literature was very nearly lost, which is what makes Siddhalinga's work significant.

What happened at Kalyana:

• The movement's social positions were genuinely radical, and they had consequences
• A marriage arranged between the families of two devotees from communities that convention forbade to intermarry brought matters to a head
• The reaction was violent, the community at Kalyana was dispersed, and Basavanna's own position at court ended
• Devotees scattered across the region, carrying manuscripts of the vachanas with them

What that meant for the literature:

• The vachanas existed as scattered manuscripts in the hands of dispersed families
• There was no central institution holding them and no authoritative collection
• Over three centuries, much could have been lost, and some was

What Siddhalinga's line did:

• Collected vachanas from wherever they survived
• Compiled them, and the compilation work associated with his tradition, including the Shunyasampadane collections, is how a great deal of this literature reached later readers
• Established a network of mathas through his disciples, which gave the tradition institutions it had previously refused to build
• Wrote his own work, the Shatsthala Jnanasaramrita, systematising the tradition's teaching

The irony is worth stating. A movement that rejected temples, institutions and priestly authority survived because somebody eventually built it temples, institutions and an ordained line.

This is not unique to the Lingayats. It is what happens to almost every anti institutional religious movement that lasts more than two generations. The alternative, generally, is not surviving.

The single most distinctive practice of this tradition is worth explaining, because it is visible on the street and most people outside Karnataka do not know what they are looking at.

What it is:

• A small linga, given at initiation, worn on the body in a container hung around the neck
• It is personal. It belongs to that individual and is not shared
• Worship is performed to it directly, by the wearer, wherever they are
• It is not to be set down or separated from the person

What that arrangement does. It is a complete restructuring of how worship works, and every consequence follows from it.

• No temple is required, because the deity is on the devotee
• No priest is required, because the devotee performs the worship
• No sanctum access can be denied, because there is no sanctum in the arrangement
• No purity ranking can govern access, because nobody stands between the worshipper and the linga

That last point is the movement's whole social argument compressed into an object. Exclusion from temples was the mechanism by which the caste order was religiously enforced. A tradition that gives every initiate their own linga to wear has removed the mechanism rather than argued against it.

The shatsthala, the six stages. The tradition maps spiritual progress in six stages, from bhakta through to aikya, union, and Siddhalinga's own major work systematises this scheme. It is a full theological structure, not simply a set of social positions.

On the current question of religious status. Whether Lingayats constitute a distinct religion or a tradition within the Shaiva fold has been debated for a long time and is a live political and legal question in Karnataka, with strongly held positions on both sides and internal disagreement over whether Lingayat and Veerashaiva are the same thing.

It is not a question an outside account can settle, and this piece does not attempt to. What can be said is that the tradition's founding literature is unambiguous about rejecting caste, Vedic ritual authority and temple centred worship, and that people continue to disagree about what follows from that.

Yediyur's annual car festival is one of the larger gatherings in this part of Karnataka.

What happens:

• The jatra is held annually, with the temple car drawn through the town
• Very large numbers attend over the festival days
• Devotees come from across Tumakuru, Mandya, Hassan and the surrounding districts, and from Bengaluru
• A full fair runs alongside, with trade, entertainment and food

On temple cars generally. The ratha or ther is a feature of south Indian temple practice that visitors should understand.

• A large wooden chariot, sometimes very large, carrying the processional image
• Drawn by devotees on ropes through the streets, not by animals or machinery
• The pulling is itself the devotional act, and large numbers take a turn on the rope
• The car is housed in a shed for the rest of the year

Why the form matters. A deity in a sanctum is approached by devotees who come to him. A deity on a car goes out to the town, along the streets, past the houses.

For communities historically denied entry to sanctums, a deity who comes out into the street was frequently the only darshan available, and that history is part of why car festivals matter as much as they do across south India.

Safety at a car festival. Rathotsavas involve very heavy crowds around a massive moving object on ropes.

• Do not get between the ropes and the car
• Do not push forward to touch the rope in a dense crowd. There are enough turns for everyone
• Keep children held, and agree a meeting point
• Follow the organisers. Car festivals in India have had serious accidents, and the arrangements exist because of them

If you want to see a rathotsava and are not used to Indian crowds, watch from a distance for the first one. You will see more of it and be safer doing so.

Getting there

• Yediyur, Kunigal taluk, Tumakuru district, Karnataka
• On the Bengaluru to Mangaluru highway, about 100 km from Bengaluru, which makes it one of the easiest of these shrines to reach
• Tumakuru and Bengaluru are the nearest railway stations, and Bengaluru is the airport
• Buses on the highway route stop here. Most visitors come by car

Timings

• The temple keeps daily hours with a midday closure. Check locally
• Weekends are busy, since it is an easy drive from Bengaluru

When to go

• October to February for comfortable weather
• The annual jatra, if you want the town at its fullest, accepting heavy crowds
• Mondays and Shivaratri, given the Shaiva connection
• Ordinary weekdays for a quiet visit

Practical notes

• Dress conservatively and follow the shrine's rules
• Leave footwear at the counters
• The temple provides prasad and there are arrangements for meals
• Carry water in warmer months

Reading, if you want to go further

• The vachanas are available in English translation, and A K Ramanujan's Speaking of Siva is the best known introduction and is genuinely excellent
• Reading twenty vachanas before you visit will change the shrine from a building into something you have a relationship with
• They are short, direct and eight hundred years old, and they do not read like eight hundred year old religious literature

Combining the visit

• Shravanabelagola, the great Jain site, is roughly 60 km away
• Kunigal and the surrounding country
• Tumakuru and the Siddhaganga matha, an institution of this same tradition known for the enormous free education and feeding operation it has run for decades
• The highway continues to Hassan, Belur and Halebidu, so Yediyur fits naturally into that route

A closing thought. Basavanna wrote a vachana asking what the point of building a temple is when the body is already one, the legs its pillars and the head its gold dome, and observing that what is built will fall and what moves will not. The tradition that produced that line now has a temple at Yediyur with a car festival. Both things are true, and the vachana is still in print.