M M KALBURGI’S LIFE AND LEGACY IN THE CROSSHAIRS OF HISTORY
Srikar Raghavan
If you happen to be familiar with even some of the Kannada scholar M M Kalburgi’s output – his collected works round out to 27,000 pages and 68 kilograms – it might not surprise you that this piece begins from the 12th century and gets into a fair bit of mediaeval history. These historical times (and the troubles taken to recreate them) form the backdrop against which Kalburgi’s own life unfolded.
It has not been easy to pin a date on the mediaeval Sanskrit text known as the Srikara Bhashya, composed by an elusive figure named Sripati Pandita (and not somebody named Srikara, as I’d presumed). For our present purposes, we may see it as an evolving text of sometime around the 12th and 13th centuries CE, a theological response to the Vedanta school, one of the most prominent streams of Hindu philosophical thought. The Srikara Bhashya does not subscribe to the (illusory) non-dualism of Adi Shankara, perhaps Vedanta’s most famous exponent, and though these centuries witnessed a serious social gulf between worshippers of Shiva and Vishnu, the Shaiva theology of the Srikara Bhashya bears some similarity to the philosophy of the 11th-century Sri Vaishnavite saint Ramanuja. Both espouse a “qualified non-dualism” that seeks to separate the Self and the Godhead (Atman and Brahman) even as they suggest a potential union. The Srikara Bhashya evidences no engagement with the 12th-century Virashaiva (or Lingayat) leader Basavanna, and the references it carries to the 13th-century dualist theologian Madhva are most likely to be later additions. (The terms Virashaiva and Lingayat are often used interchangeably today, but they carry interpretive differences, which we will return to.)
The subsequent centuries in the Subcontinent witnessed a plurality of devotional renewals, with an increased emphasis on questioning entrenched social hierarchies. We commonly know this as the Bhakti Movement, though this phrase hardly captures the diversity of expressions (or geographies) clubbed under it. Not long after the Srikara Bhashya was composed, in the region of the Deccan presently called Kalyana-Karnataka, a transformative cohort of seekers (both men and women) known as the Sharanas reimagined the Shaiva tradition into a radical new idiom of democratised spirituality. We now know the Sharanas’ creations as the vachanas – a constantly evolving body of over 20,000 Kannada verses, animated by a remarkable diversity of voices. Basavanna is usually seen as the most vital rejuvenator of the Virashaiva tradition, a towering leader of the Sharanas, remembered for his staunch anti-Brahminical stance – a firm if gentle castigator, a leveller of hierarchies, a threat to power and pretension.
But what did being anti-Brahminical really mean in this era? The 13th-century Telugu writer Palkuriki Somanatha, author of the Basava Purana – one of the first hagiographies dedicated to Basavanna – asserts himself to be a master of the Vedas and Puranas (key Brahminical texts), which he deploys to buttress claims of Virashaivism’s ancient roots even as he denigrates and mocks Brahmins in his work. Historical continuity is important for Somanatha even as he engages in some serious anti-establishment venting, whose crux seems to lie in the contestation between the “left-hand” and “right-hand” castes. This was a clash of values between wandering tradespeople and an entrenched landed class, between mercurial dynamism and rooted conservatism. As Velcheru Narayana Rao, translator of the Basava Purana, writes:
The bhaktas [devotees] associated with the stories and legends of BP [Basava Purana] come predominantly from the left-hand castes—artisans, merchants, washermen, potters, tanners, and the like; or they come from such socially marginal groups as burglars, hunters, prostitutes, and pimps. There is not one story related to landed peasants or their lowcaste mala (untouchable) farmhands. As a religious text of the lefthanded castes, then, the BP carries a good bit of ideological baggage.
In the centuries that followed, Somanatha’s working-caste ideology would become tamed by the Andhra Brahmins who came to dominate Shaiva scholarly circles. Narayana Rao writes that “in their hands, the Virashaiva texts composed by Somanatha underwent a process of significant brahminization, and the original compositions of Somanatha became less popular than the later brahminized versions.” This would be accompanied by a re-normalisation of the landed-caste hierarchy – a subject that Somanatha and many of his contemporaries had grappled with vigorously, if not in full measure.
Apart from this, what characterise the Basava Purana are Somanatha’s depictions of intense zealousness, which really put the “Vira”, or valour, in Virashaivism: murder, (self)destruction and spontaneous outrage are all admissible and pardonable in the Basava Purana’s tales of steadfast devotees willing to do anything to punish Shiva’s detractors. One encounters a similar intensity of devotion in the works of the 13th-century Kannada poet Harihara, whose documentary-hagiography Ragalegalu is the closest literary source we have on the Sharanas’ immediate afterlife. Inspired fairly by the Tamil Shaiva tradition, Harihara seems to have avoided Somanatha’s “left-handed” bias, and we see in his work several assertive “untouchable” protagonists too.
Which brings us to our primary subject.
In a nutshell, it was this – the mediaeval consolidation of religious high ground, the dilution of the era’s anti-establishment ideas, as well as their unfortunate devolution into a zealous 20th-century fundamentalism – that gripped the life and work of the rationalist and scholar Malleshappa Madivalappa Kalburgi. Shot dead by right-wing fanatics exactly ten years ago, Kalburgi was an indelible figure in the world of Kannada scholarship. He faced censure and controversy for the better part of his life, especially from an orthodoxy that did not enjoy his challenges to traditional hagiography or care much for the deep humanism that drove him to try and rescue the Sharanas’ (subverted) dreams of a brighter world. While a spate of books about Kalburgi have been published in Kannada after his killing, the English-language sphere has seen only little engagement with his intellectual and political convictions, in spite of his valorisation as a kind of martyr in the battle against India’s Hindu Right.
Why did they kill Gauri Lankesh?
In the end, it was the Sanatan Sanstha, a crackpot cult from whose premises police have recovered weapons as well as assorted psychotropic substances, that supplied the means to snuff out Kalburgi’s life, in the form of two gun-wielding youths who showed up one morning at his Dharwad home (in northwest Karnataka) pretending to be students. The same species of indoctrination has also claimed the lives of three other iconoclastic minds in Karnataka and the neighbouring state of Maharashtra: Gauri Lankesh, Narendra Dabholkar and Govind Pansare, all killed in the two years on either side of Kalburgi’s assassination. The proximate cause in Kalburgi’s case was his appearance on a Kannada television programme where he quoted another writer – the novelist U R Ananthamurthy – who had once written of his childhood attempts to verify the power of sacred stones by peeing on them. Instant outrage followed in the Kannada media, with claims that Kalburgi himself had committed such deeds. The vultures had sensed blood.
I travelled to Dharwad in mid-2025 to speak with Shashidhar Todkar – a scholar and teacher, and a long-term student of Kalburgi’s. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Srikara Bhashya came up in our conversation. Todkar produced a musty copy of a recent commentary on the text, written by a contemporary swami, that viewed Basavanna as merely one more name in a long and ancient line of Virashaiva gurus. It also actively denounced the anti-Brahminical sentiments associated with the transgressive tradition.
Within Virashaivism, “there are two strains, the Virakta Tradition and the Guru Tradition,” Todkar elucidated. “The former aligns itself with Basavanna’s ideals, and is more progressive and society-facing, while the latter is more orthodox, interested mostly in Vedas and Upanishads and imagined pasts.” The former stream is alive and well, he said, “at least in theory.”
The Viraktas – or the 101 Viraktas, as they were called in their time – were a roving group of monks and intellectuals who compiled vachana-digests and anthologies in the 14th and 15th centuries, during the heyday of the Vijayanagara Empire, ensuring their continued remembrance, but also imbuing the vachanas with their own ascetic ideologies. The Guru Tradition, which reveres (five) Virashaiva gurus besides Basavanna, evinces a parallel tradition that is historically associated with monasteries in southern Karnataka and their Sanskritic heritage.
Todkar’s classification is helpful (and common enough that Kannada newspapers deploy it too), but it shouldn’t let us lose sight of a complex history spanning many centuries of competing ideas and ideologies. Even in the 20th century, not all Virakta mathas, or monasteries, were attracted to the progressive anti-caste ideals that Virashaiva reformists were rooting for. The historian Manu V Devadevan uses slightly different nomenclature to speak of the same divide:
The division between the Virakta and Aradhya mathas made its appearance after the 15th century and was representative of a new divide between northern and southern Karnataka. The Virakta followers, or Sharanas, were stronger in the north, while the Aradhya followers, called Jangamas, wielded greater power and influence in the south. Between 1500 and 1900, both groups established hundreds of mathas that held land and enjoyed varying degrees of patronage from the state, landed elites and mercantile groups.
Todkar explained to me how Kalburgi, who had used the terms Virashaiva and Lingayat quite synonymously through much of his career, eventually began to privilege the latter over the former, finding them increasingly incompatible. Kalburgi held that the Aradhyas had brought the term Virashaiva into currency, after migrating to southern Karnataka from Andhra. This stemmed mostly from his reformist desire to establish Basavanna as an independent originator of a distinct Lingayat faith, a thesis that carries some merit but that has also been critiqued (by Devadevan) for “reading contemporary prejudices back in time without producing evidence to the effect that the relationships between the Aradhyas and the Viraktas were fraught with friction.”
Beginning from the early 2000s, this tonal shift also came to signify Kalburgi’s political response to the ascent of Hindu Right. Since the 1990s, the electoral ambitions of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in Karnataka have forced it to adapt uneasily to Lingayat exceptionalism, and to focus its Hindu-only rhetoric elsewhere. In 2017, the state government under the Indian National Congress (the BJP’s resolute rival in Karnataka), with Siddaramaiah as the chief minister, said that it would recognise Veerashaiva-Lingayats as an independent religious community, which the BJP criticised as “divisive”. However, the BJP in Karnataka continues to be riven by differences over this question, with some leaders preferring to maintain a strategic silence.
For Kalburgi, Basavanna had to be recognised as the inaugurator of a unique tradition that could not be confused with the Panchacharya school (associated with the Aradhya mathas), whose canon includes the Srikara Bhashya. “Lingayats are not Hindus,” Kalburgi once asserted, “they are Bharateeyas” – an emotional cry for vernacular pluralism, since “Bharat” is how regional languages (including Kannada) refer to India. Collapsed into this distinction was all the pregnant potential of the vachanas – their critique of the lottery of birth, their emphasis on sincere hard work, their takedown of hierarchy and clerical domination – all of which Kalburgi hoped might yet prove re-ignitable in our own times.
Shashidhar Todkar presently works as the principal of Hiremallur Ishwaran Pre-University College in Dharwad, where students can choose to study either science or commerce. It was an assignment specially bestowed upon him by Kalburgi, he said, which reminded me of the famous tale of Basavanna handing out individual duties and occupations to his diverse cohort of followers. Todkar first saw Kalburgi guest-lecturing at a university in Gadag (a two-hour drive from Dharwad) in 1994, and the impression it had on him was profound. Within a couple of years, he enrolled for his MA in Dharwad with the express purpose of studying under Kalburgi’s tutelage.
By the early 1990s, M M Kalburgi was a well-recognised name in the Kannada academic scene. In 1988, around the same time The Satanic Verses was roiling the global literary firmament, Kalburgi’s first collection of research essays, titled Marga, was published, attracting instant controversy. This had to do with Kalburgi’s suggestion that Basavanna’s nephew Chennabasava, also a creator of vachanas, had been born outside of wedlock. Speculations over the romantic interiorities of Gangambike and Neelambike – Basavanna’s wives – also proved flammable. A colleague in Kalburgi’s own university department in Dharwad turned whistleblower, and a couple of Virashaiva mathas in Hubli and Chitradurga amplified the issue. After mobs had been roused by the orthodoxy with hate on their lips, a terrified Kalburgi was forced to recant his work in public.
But Kalburgi’s career as a public-facing man had begun much earlier, and not all Virashaiva mathas held his views to be blasphemous. In fact, the 1970s had seen a wave of collaborative efforts in bringing out vachana literature, especially with the Tontadarya Matha in Gadag, whose pontiff had been Kalburgi’s student during his MA and was himself a learned figure with interests in Kannada literature. After he became pontiff in 1974 and assumed the title Siddalinga Mahaswami, the dutiful student (now a Jagadguru, or Universal Guru) wrote to Kalburgi requesting guidance and ideas for rejuvenating the matha.
Frenetic publishing followed, including fresh digests detailing the lives of Virashaiva gurus, as well as new compilations of vachanas. Tens of books emerged from this initial publishing spurt, bringing Kalburgi’s research credentials to the homes and hearths of the broader Virashaiva community. The Tontadarya Matha and its pontiff gained much respect and admiration thanks to these endeavours. In his essays, Kalburgi wrote admiringly of the matha’s hallowed past, arguing that it was the one true link to the legacy of Allama Prabhu, the Sharana poet (and Basavanna’s contemporary). Interestingly, Allama’s pluralistic legacy – and historical connections to Sufism – had proven to be inconvenient for some early-20th-century Lingayat revivalists. Recently, a young seer of a year-old matha in southern Karnataka was forced to leave the position after a local discovered that he had been born a Muslim.
Kalburgi’s work with the Tontadarya Matha inspired other mathas in Karnataka (from Mysore and Malnad to Chitradurga and Belgaum) to draw from his intellectual resources, and they too started publishing his writings on Virashaiva history and culture. Naturally, the mathas were only interested in their own sectarian slants, and over the next few decades Kalburgi also helped establish various other civil-society institutions and research projects that excavated other aspects of Karnataka history. These included translations into Kannada of 16th-century poetry from the Adil Shahi period, originally in Urdu, Arabic and Persian, that were completed only after his assassination. He is remembered fondly as an institution-builder, and it is remarkable that he was able to oversee so many projects, guide so many students and PhDs and take charge of Kannada University (Hampi) as its vice-chancellor, all while producing a relentless output of papers and books.
But resentments brewed within the very institutions Kalburgi worked in. I heard from Todkar that “there was an entire posse of detractors in Dharwad, beginning with his university department. There were many who were simply unable to keep up with his energy and dynamism … They started speaking of him with acid and sarcasm. They would pick on Kalburgi’s students too, in the manner of rankling a child so that one may get at its mother. This tendency is there in Dharwad even today.” The health of public universities across Karnataka (and the rest of India) has declined drastically over the last few decades, a trend that Kalburgi saw coming. Todkar said he believes the situation will improve only when political calculations of caste and money are abolished from the education sphere. There is a serious paucity of funds in state universities today, and temporary positions proliferate.
Kalburgi’s dedication to a life of teaching and learning was legendary. His interests were vast. Though primarily a scholar of Old Kannada, Kalburgi fostered a great love for contemporary literature too. Before delivering lectures on Govinda Pai’s famous poem Golgotha, a meditation on the last days of Jesus Christ, he conducted an exhaustive study of the Bible. His lectures would often carry on for hours, and be peppered with spontaneous verse, for he was also a spirited singer. Todkar recalled Kalburgi’s rendition of ‘Bhagyada Lakshmi Baramma’ – a composition of the 16th-century singer and philosopher Purandara Dasa – which (for Todkar at least) surpassed even the legendary vocalist Bhimsen Joshi’s famous version. Many students recall his mastery of the 10th-century poet Pampa (and Pampa’s Mahabharata) as being unmatched by any contemporary scholar.
The Kannada scholar M S Ashadevi remembers how Kalburgi, when aged 76, read closely through her thesis on feminist voices in the vachanas and jotted down three pages of extensive feedback, with a conclusion that there were exactly 29 errors in her proofs. When she pointed out that there were strains of male chauvinism in poems attributed to Basavanna, Kalburgi had turned to further private study as a silent response.
It is no coincidence that the vocabulary often used to describe Kalburgi’s life idealises the pastoral work ethic. By several accounts, Kalburgi slept not upwards of three or four hours a day. The root of this might well lie in the philosophy of kayakave kailasa – roughly, work is heaven – which pervades the philosophy of the “protestant” Sharana movement. His biographer Siddanagowda Patil writes:
Kalburgi was born in a Lingayat household seeped in Shaivist tradition. Here, even though Lingayat is a marker of caste, it is also a marker of Sharana culture, which held sway over more than just the one caste. Malleshappa Kalburgi’s father was a hardworking farmer who toiled on the fields. This had an impact on the son. Since the home-environment was conducive to studies, Malleshappa began to blossom as a bright hardworking boy right from primary school.
This was in the village of Yargal, in Gulbarga district – later Kalaburagi – which gave Kalburgi his toponymic surname. Another biographer, Ramakrishna Marathe, highlights the multiple significances of the syncretic Gulbarga culture into which Kalburgi was born:
This place was home to that great sharana – Basavanna. These were the meditating grounds of the Sufi saint Bande Navaz. This is also the sacred spot of the saint Kusunur Siddevappa.
The Kalyana-Karnataka region was, all in all, an environment suited for the pursuit of truth and (self)knowledge. The village raised the boy, his precocity shown encouragement at every step. When Kalburgi scored a first-class result in his matriculation exams, his father ushered him home by showering leaves and grass over a beaming Kalburgi’s head.
There were other influences too, like the writer and scholar Pha Gu Halakatti, whose periodical Shivaanubhava, started in 1927, was a staple of Kalburgi’s early reading. Halakatti himself is a veritable legend in the history of vachana literature, known for single-handedly kickstarting the first wave of manuscript-collection that introduced the vachanas to Kannadigas around the turn of the 19th century. Having collected palm-leaf manuscripts from homes and mathas in the Bijapur region (south-west of Gulbarga), Halakatti brought them all together into a single corpus, intervening where parts were missing and giving them a touch of modern editing. Entire centuries of creative thought were jammed into new conversations with each other.
Halakatti turned his pen towards matters of brawn too. He wrote articles extolling the lives of mediaeval Lingayat kings and queens, infusing them with a nationalistic warrior spirit. The scholar Vijayakumar M Boratti reminds us that Halakatti saw the Lingayat faith as a part of Hinduism, and that, in the late 1930s, as the regional head in Bijapur district for the Hindu Mahasabha (an early Hindu nationalist political party), he had “constantly highlighted the contribution of the Vachanakaras” – the Vachanas’ creators – “to the reformation of the Hindu religion.” Halakatti also expended much effort to push for a Lingayat regiment in the British army. This had been created at the fag end of the First World War but was soon disbanded, and the same would be repeated during the Second World War because of low enrolment.
It is worth noting that this military push from a small section of Lingayat elites was an attempt to secure for the community a sheen of valour denied to them by the British colonial censuses – and racial theories – which classed them as Shudras, two steps below the ostensibly martial Kshatriyas in the four varnas of the caste system. Ever since the census of 1881, Lingayat elites had grown deeply distraught over their classification, even threatening to boycott the census unless it was performed on their terms.
As we’ve seen, the relationship between Lingayats and Brahminism has always been contested and complicated. In the early 19th century, the colonial travellers Mark Wilks and Murray Hammick noted this about the Jangamas, or ascetic Lingayats: “the Jungums condemn as useless and unmeaning the incessant detail of external ceremonies, which among the Brahmins of every persuasion occupies the largest portion of their time and forms the great business of their lives.” In the 1870s, the census official A W C Lindsay noted this about the Banajigas, another prominent Lingayat caste: “They are as rigorous as Brahmans in their abstinence from eating meat and drinking liquor, and more bigoted in the strict observance of the customs and rules … Their priests will not permit themselves to be touched by anyone who does not wear the Linga.”
Over the next few decades, the censuses had created a situation so existential that, in 1909, a Virashaiva organisation set out to establish rigid varna categories within the community. This plan proposed, as Boratti writes, that “Jangamas and Aradhyas constituted Virasaiva Brahmana; Desai, Deshpande and other chieftains formed Virasaiva Kshatriya; industrialists and merchants came under Virasaiva Vyshyas and the remaining castes were Virasaiva Shudras.” This proposal faced strong criticism from the anti-caste stream within the Lingayats, spawning more radical articulations of reform and even calls for conversion. In the 1910s, the marginalised Chalevadi community began converting to Christianity in significant numbers, and a Swiss protestant missionary named Jakob Urner (who was much taken by Halakatti’s literary efforts) would write about them in the following decade:
The Chelavadis, among which our mission is working in and around Motebennur, are considered as belonging to a lower caste by the Lingayats, even if they are also Lingayats. The orthodox Lingayats are all in the caste system. In more recent times, the spirit of reform is gaining ground in small, English-educated, circles. It has, however, to fight against a fierce resistance. Its cornerstones are particularly vachanas of the religion’s founders that speak against caste.
The subject of caste within the Lingayats remains a fractious political issue. From the 1990s onwards, a community known as the Panchamasali Lingayats has been arguing for inclusion among the Other Backward Classes, an official category for disadvantaged castes, claiming that they form 60 percent of the Lingayats and face socio-economic exploitation – thereby underpinning their demand for reserved seats in public education and employment that such inclusion would secure. Their true number is officially unverifiable, because the findings of a caste census for Karnataka, carried out in 2015, were never formally released, following objections from Vokkaliga and Lingayat elites who figured that their hegemony might be questioned if other groups got a sense of their statistical strength. A fresh caste census for the state is now in the works.
India needs a caste census – and Southasia does too
Recently, a Karnataka state minister announced that there was a worrying trend of “Veerashaiva-Lingayats” masquerading as Beda Jangamas – a Scheduled Caste, part of another official category of disadvantaged communities – to avail reservation benefits, citing an abnormal rise in the latter group’s numbers in a very short time. Siddaramaiah, the state’s chief minister, said that “only the Telugu-speaking nomadic Beda Jangamas should be counted in the survey,” referring to a very particular priestly community that caters to the Holeyas and Madigas, both Scheduled Castes. This quarrel isn’t new, and Kalburgi himself had once castigated the “Veerashaiva-Lingayats” who were jumping caste in this manner.
Kalburgi had always hoped that caste might be annihilated rather than amplified. If the powers that be could not deliver on universal dignity and equality, they would have to be called out for their malignance and hypocrisy. Kalburgi grew up in the decades on either side of India’s independence, an age of patriotism and reform, and his formative years never recommended the silent swallowing of grievances. When the lanky teenager moved to Bijapur for college in the 1950s, it took a while for him to feel at ease and come into his own, but he had enough spunk to beat down a bully (with connections to the college principal) who would regularly pick on students from rural backgrounds.
“He was always outspoken,” Todkar confirmed, his eyes betraying a slight glint of pride. This was quickly followed by a recognition of human flaws: “one of Kalburgi’s weaknesses was that he would say, in no uncertain terms, whatever he meant. Regarding a person’s capabilities … if somebody was occupying a high post at a university, Kalburgi would expect them to work as hard as the position demanded. This would lead him to utter some unfortunately bitter words … Many failed to understand him and took things too personally.”
Nor was Kalburgi coy about taking a political stance in public. Todkar recalled how once, at an event in the town of Koppal (near Hampi), Kalburgi opined quite openly that the Vidhana Soudha, the seat of the Karnataka state legislature, was being run from Keshava Krupa, the state headquarters of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) – the BJP’s mothership and ideological parent.
Opposition to the Sangh was a key theme that underwrote the assertion of an independent Lingayat identity, and Kalburgi was hardly the only prominent voice in this fray. Not many know that two years before his assassination, Linganna Satyampet, another Kannada writer and a good friend of Kalburgi’s, had been found dead under suspicious circumstances: in a ditch, stripped of almost all clothes, not more than a hundred feet from Gulbarga’s Channabasaveshwara Temple – one of the most important Lingayat shrines in Karnataka – where he had reportedly been slated to deliver a speech. At the time of his death, Satyampet was working as the editor of a Kannada fortnightly, Agni Ankura, whose archives reveal a history of strident anti-RSS rhetoric.
A 2008 issue of Agni Ankura leads with the headline “Chaddi ideagala Yeddy Lingayatane?”, mocking the BJP politician B S Yediyurappa, soon to be Karnataka’s chief minister, over his association with the RSS. The tone and tenor are entirely reminiscent of Lankesh Patrike, the landmark Kannada weekly that had birthed the tradition of such adversarial, no-holds-barred journalism in Karnataka back in the 1980s, and was latterly run by Gauri Lankesh after the death of her father, the paper’s founder, in 2000.
Not unconnected to these ideological convictions was the fact that Kalburgi often compared Basavanna to Gandhi. In his eyes, their projects were comparable because they had both transformed older traditions into fresh political and moral vocabularies. And Kalburgi too belonged to that distinct line of Kannada thinkers that doesn’t pit Gandhi and B R Ambedkar against each other as antithetic personalities. The importance of renewing traditions – in the face of looming fundamentalism – was not lost on Kalburgi. He viewed the various health and educational institutions set up by the Virashaiva mathas as a modern form of daasoha – the charitable distribution of food to all worshippers, regardless of caste, enshrined in Virashaiva belief and practice – which he had identified as a core contribution of the 12th-century movement.
These were strains of thought that pitted Kalburgi against another giant of Kannada historiography, M Chidananda Murthy, who too had turned politically vociferous in the last quarter of his life. An emotional crusader for the Kannada language, Chidananda Murthy had once attempted to drown himself in the Tungabhadra River because Kannada had not yet been given the official status of a classical language. He was also an acclaimed researcher and scholar, which Kalburgi always respected. “They would have two-hour long fights on the phone,” Todkar told me, “and even if Kalburgi was loud and combative, Chidananda Murthy would never cut the call. Neither did Kalburgi allow political differences to ever colour their personal relationship, which was always cordial.”
The crux of the fissure here too seems to have been Chidananda Murthy’s sympathy for the Sangh, and for the Panchacharya tradition. These antagonisms tell us something about the process (anthropologists call it “schismogenesis”) by which binary oppositions can lead (unwittingly) to see-sawing worldviews of mutual creation.
The extensive historical excavations conducted by Kalburgi and Chidananda Murthy’s generation paved the way towards more nuanced and specialised studies. It was as late as in 2014 that the historian S Settar published his monumental study of over two thousand Old Kannada inscriptions, Halagannada: Lipi, Lipikaara, Lipi Vyavasaya, challenging many conceptions of what society looked like in the early centuries of the first millennium CE. This is the largest store of ancient inscriptions found in South India, and Settar points out that the profusion of Tamil inscriptions during the Chola era – often considered to be the most substantial such corpus – occurred only in the second millennium. These Old Kannada inscriptions, therefore, provide a glimpse into the ancient history of peninsular India unafforded by other sources.
Settar’s primary discovery was the heterogeneity of the scribes who carved these inscriptions, which Kalburgi affirms in his preface to Settar’s book:
During the early centuries of the first millennium (4th – 5th century CE), with the exception of a few going by surnames like Sharma or Varma, the majority of scribes were non-Brahmins. These individuals, who distinguished themselves by the term ‘tvashta’, amongst others, were most adept at etching copperplates, and were learned enough to write prose and poetry in both Sanskrit and Kannada. Hence, the prevailing notion that it was only Brahmins who wrote inscriptions will have to be abandoned. To further elucidate this, Professor Settar has chosen well the example of Madhusudana, a scribe belonging to the Kammara clan, writer of the Kolagal inscription … By expanding history out of Brahmin-Kshatriya centred narratives, Settar has granted a place in history to Gowdas, Madigas, Charmakaras, and other Shudra communities.
Settar and Kalburgi collaborated on many papers and projects, but they too shared temperamental differences, if not political ones. Todkar told me how “Settar would sometimes tease Kalburgi’s leaps of faith … He would compare Kalburgi to a man possessed by a spirit in a village festival, saying this is what Kalburgi sometimes did when confronted by evidence-less pasts … He didn’t like Kalburgi’s attempts at guesswork.”
The vachana scholar and novelist P V Narayana once expressed a similar sentiment:
In my view, hard historical details about Basavanna do not exist. The Arjunavad inscription, which Kalburgi ascribed great importance to, is from a century after Basavanna’s time. I have still not understood how Kalburgi connected the ‘Sangana Basava’ [a name from the Arjunavad inscription] to Basavanna. What we know about Basavanna comes to us only from the many Puranas composed in his honour from the 13th century onwards.
In my own readings of Kalburgi, I did find some instances of emotion overriding historical scepticism, as in his assertion that the Battle of Talikota, which ended the Vijayanagara Empire, could be chalked up to Kannada–Telugu antagonism. Indeed, he wrote with (historical) angst of the waves of Telugu and Tamil migration that the rulers of Vijayanagara or Mysore welcomed across pre-modern times, which Kalburgi saw as a defeat for Kannada exclusivity.
Of course, all these idiosyncrasies can only endear us to Kalburgi the human, Kalburgi the sentimental Kannada spokesman, Kalburgi who wore his history on his sleeve.
Sometime around the 15th or 16th century, a poet and writer named Nijaguna Shivayogi – a small chieftain from what is today Mysore district – attempted to reconcile Virashaivism with Adi Shankara’s Vedic non-dualism. In an interview given towards the end of his life, Kalburgi once described his own Lingayat faith as non-dualist, and Virashaivism at large as dualist. It would seem that he had been won over by the idea of marrying intellect with (self)devotion, where both are prized equally in favour of pluralistic interpretations by society at large. The writer(s) of the Srikara Bhashya might not have approved of this kind of revisionism.
Apart from his mystic poetry, Nijaguna Shivayogi also composed an encyclopaedic text, the Viveka Chintamani, which contains paragraph-length entries on hundreds of subjects, ranging from astrology and physiology to sociology, divination, the performing arts and theology. Just as today’s aspiring scholars must quote the academic canon for entry into the establishment, the writer (or future editors) of the Viveka Chintamani found it necessary to invoke the Vedas, Upanishads, Smritis and Puranas. By no means is the work devoid of Brahminical ideology. The text carries ad hominem dismissals of Buddhists and Charvakas – the “hedonists” of ancient Indian philosophy – while also reinforcing the varna hierarchy. It performs the latter in an interesting way though, by claiming that “Kamme, Kannadiga, Andhra, Dravida are the four Jatis; Brahmin, Kshatriya, Vaishya, and Shudra are the four Varnas.” Kamme is an old word for the Vengi region of Andhra, and it is interesting that immigrants from there were thought of as a distinct people.
Uniting this (partial) South Indian cosmology was the desire to conglomerate a wide variety of Shaiva norms and practices into a handy compendium. We also get a glimpse here of why the British found Brahminical categorisations to be so useful to their own project. There is a similar push to demarcate and divide, to privilege order over ambiguity, as is always necessary for the ruling classes. But wisdom perhaps lies in allowing oneself the freedom to move towards open terrain, towards a more transient understanding of the world, captured most famously in Basavanna’s lines (as translated by A K Ramanujan): “things standing shall fall, but the moving ever shall stay”.
So we are back to Basavanna and his immediate successors. What did they really make of his ideas? Did they contract or dilate his legacy? In his very first Marga volume, Kalburgi argued that Harihara – the closest source on the Sharanas – had managed to capture Basavanna’s spirit fairly well, and he called Harihara’s Ragalegalu the first “social-struggle Kannada text”. Basavanna is said to have been the treasurer at the court of Bijjala, a prominent ruler from the Kalachuri dynasty that ruled much of the Deccan at the time, and Kalburgi was happy with how Harihara, an accountant-poet who served the 13th-century Hoysala court, captures the socialist tendencies of Basavanna’s professional arc. What he meant by “socialist” was simply generous spending and people-centred policies, ideas that proponents of neo-liberalism scoff at today.
What of the Telugu narratives, like the Basava Purana and its successive revisions? According to the scholar Gil Ben-Herut, the answer to this might be somewhere in the grey, and we must try and see the tradition as being accommodative for its own times. About the Telugu Brahmins who came to dominate this school, Ben-Herut writes:
The Telugu Aradhyas, who are historically and ideologically connected with the Kannada Shivabhakti tradition, present a syncretic vision (one that has been woefully understudied) to affirm both Brahminical values and practices and social openness based on devotional principles.
Kalburgi himself didn’t have any kind words for the Aradhyas, and he saw their legacy as merely one of priestly consolidation. In this vein, he repeatedly emphasised that the Sharanas had rallied for individual emancipation, achieved wholly without mediation, through private discovery of means and ends. This, of course, is an argument designed to strike at the very heart of organised religion.
While Brahminical (and organisational) shifts accrued as traditions evolved – this involved both necessity and chicanery – they could never fully mask the radical elements, which continued to run as undercurrents. For instance, Nijaguna Shivayogi is popularly remembered more for his poetry than his (Brahminical) prose compilations, and his verse was quite different from the devotional poetry dominant during his time. As the scholar Rahamath Tarikere has noted, “the mysticism that begins with Nijaguna Shivayogi continues [over the centuries] among talented poets like Madivalappa, Kaivara Narayana, Koodluru Basavalingappa and Shishunala Sharif.” The latter, for instance, is a celebrated 19th-century bard who has been immortalised in Kannada music by various artists, most recently in the rock songs of Raghu Dixit.
Surveying all this diverse interplay of ideas, influences and compromises, we may safely draw at least one conclusion. Similar to how the Levellers, Diggers, Quakers, Ranters and other assorted radicals of the English Revolution in the 17th century sought to turn the world upside down, here too, within the Virashaiva (and broader Kannada) corpus, we find powerful urges to upend the social hierarchy, often by jamming extremes into forceful juxtaposition, by insisting on the absurdity of essentialised identities. In Harihara’s Ragalegalu, there is a story where Basavanna performs the miracle of drawing milk from the toe of an Untouchable. As Ben-Herut notes: “The miracle is a graphic illustration of the inversion of untouchability: the blood and the maggots that issue from the body of the Brahmin are cultural marks of extreme pollution; the milk that flows from the toe of the so-called Untouchable is a symbol of purity.”
Despite rigorously documenting these radical, anti-hierarchical articulations, scholars like Ben-Herut find themselves obligated to repeatedly point out that the social egalitarianism of the Virashaiva movement was restricted to its religious sect, that one must be wary of conflating these ideas with modern “Enlightenment” rhetoric, and so on.
While the perils of imposing present-day notions onto sectarian mediaeval times must certainly be avoided, this particular strain of argument still comes off as a bit strange and unnecessary – especially because what we call the European Enlightenment has itself long co-existed with religious bigotry, race hatred and all manner of virulent supremacist projects, exemplified in the 20th century by Martin Heidegger, the philosopher and Nazi.
Perhaps what we call modernity is simply the vantage point from which all these multifarious philosophical traditions can be looked upon with equal sympathy, warts and all. If a line of influence can be drawn from Schopenhauer to the Upanishads, from Borges to Dante, from Ambedkar to the Buddha, from Judith Butler to Sappho, from Shishunala Sharifa to Nijaguna Shivayogi, surely one may be safely stretched between Kalburgi and Basavanna without fear of grave anachronism? Complex genealogies of ideas also end up tempering the notions of teleology and progress often woven into the language of academic history. In their book The Dawn of Everything, for instance, the anthropologists David Graeber and David Wengrow demonstrate how European thinkers in the 17th century adopted ideas of equality and liberty and freedom from the Native Americans they were colonising. The complex trajectories of “civilisations” demand humility from historians of all colours. To recognise the fallibility of history is also to recognise the possibility of futures different to our own times.
Hopes and dreams for a better world have always been around, but they have also had to confront the reactionary politics of their times, and it is surely unusual that a mediaeval court poet like Harihara was engaging in such radical questioning of social identities. The vachanas themselves were remembered orally for over two centuries until they were standardised and compiled into digests during the 14th and 15th centuries – in all likelihood, the non-courtly masses who carried these verses on their lips would have endorsed even more unorthodox worldviews. The clash between conservatism and progress isn’t a problem to be solved as much as it is an immediate reality constantly in need of negotiation. For Kalburgi, it had become imperative to discard the more regressive strains of traditionalism he saw resurging around him – indeed, nobody faced their wrath more than him.
Kalburgi was certainly not the only one to claim that the truly transgressive (and liberatory) elements of the vachanas had been thoroughly misunderstood by their inheritors. The late-20th-century revivalist (and first female Jagadguru) Maathe Mahadevi endorsed a similar view, and courted vigorous public debate. Once, she critiqued Kalburgi for editing a volume of vachanas where he (supposedly) passed off a composition by Gabbi Devaiah, a “low-caste” devotee, as Basavanna’s. Maathe Mahadevi’s followers believe that Basavanna’s tradition was systematically hijacked after his time, and that the staunch individualism embodied in the vachanas has to be revived again.
What the 20th century witnessed, therefore, was an unprecedented, self-conscious revitalisation of the vachanas. For the anti-caste movement, the discovery of a radical social upsurgence blasting the orthodoxy 800 years in the past was a thing almost too good to be true. The extraordinary influence of the vachanas over Kannada culture was ultimately achieved by all those who remembered them, sang them and passed them on, by poets and dreamers who adapted them to their own historical times. Even in our times, the influence of Allama Prabhu (say) on the Kannada intelligentsia is palpable. In his study Allamaprabhu Mattu Shaiva Pratibhe, the scholar D R Nagaraj made a valiant attempt to situate Allama’s tradition within the larger context of Kashmiri Shaivism and other heterodox philosophical traditions of the Subcontinent. For the historian Manu Devadevan, Allama’s verses were so outrageously radical that they were completely misunderstood by all his (dim) successors. In his introduction to a translated collection of Allama’s poems titled God is Dead, There is No God, Devadevan writes:
Allama’s thought was anti-systemic to the last letter, so much so that it perfected a metaphysics that had room only for awareness as an immanent experiential reality … Allama is now regarded as one of the greatest yogis of all times, and his indecipherably cryptic poems seen as symbolic or coded representations of his yogic experience. These are not fully modern views. They have persisted since the 15th century, when attempts were made to domesticate Allama’s vachanas, through exegesis produced on them, and his obscure imageries interpreted as signifying ideas and aspects of ascetic practices … The rest is a travesty of his life and works. We call it history.
Devadevan’s translation of Allama’s poems was published in 2019, and the collection is dedicated to Kalburgi, whom he knew well and whose work he has engaged with deeply. He once observed that it was perhaps only Kalburgi, of all the 20th-century historians who studied mediaeval Karnataka, that had a real “method” to their madness. One of the many things that uniformly impressed Kalburgi’s students and colleagues was his extraordinary linguistic acuity, which dovetailed with his wide knowledge of Old Kannada literature to produce razor-like studies of words and place-names and their genealogies.
While Devadevan does pull down some of the more fanciful reconstructions of the 12th century and the hagiographical speculations on what really happened in Kalyana, he is certain that “what cannot be called into question … is the revolutionary attitude towards religion that the sharanas brought into effect.” After expounding on some of Allama’s most blazing verses, which explore the Death of God, Devadevan writes ruefully: “It is not hard to guess what would have become of Allama for uttering these words, had he lived in our times. He would have met the very fate that met the old man to whom we have dedicated this book.”
Note: This text has been amended to reflect that the findings of Karnataka’s 2015 caste census, although not officially released, were widely leaked.?
Srikar is an independent writer and researcher from Mysore. His debut non-fiction work, Rama Bhima Soma: Cultural Investigations into Modern Karnataka, was published earlier this year.