Attitudes toward the Subaltern in the Early Kannada Śiva Bhakti Tradition

Using twelfth/thirteenth-century hagiographic accounts, this presentation seeks to examine the social attitudes of the Śiva *bhakti* tradition, known today as Vīraśaivism and Liṅgāyatism, in the Kannada-speaking region of India. The tradition developed during the last nine centuries in the form of multiple communities affiliated with *maṭhas* (religious institutions), constituting about 20 percent of the population in Karnataka today. Although it wields significant political and economic power in the state’s public sphere, its positions toward marginalized groups in society, here referred to using the term “subaltern,” remain highly contested and undetermined, spanning from accusations of an elitism that mirrors conservative brahminism to social activism that rejects the legitimacy of the same assumed elitism (among the communities and in relation to the general society).

The roots of this conundrum can be found in the earliest written accounts in Kannada of the twelfth-century progenitors of the local movement, which are their adulatory life stories written by Hampeya Harihara only a few decades after their deaths, in the late twelfth or early thirteenth centuries. These hagiographies, called “Ragaḷes” after the dominant meter used in them, portray a complicated social picture in which one can find both stark rejections of conservative attitudes and excluding practices toward subaltern groups as well as support for religious elitism and exclusion. This presentation will address the complexities of social discrimination, equity, and mobility as treated by Harihara in several of his Ragaḷe stories, seeking to develop a deeper understanding of these issues and their roles in shaping debates about *bhakti* communities and the subaltern in Karnataka today.

The presentation will utilize the first-ever English translations of stories from Harihara’s Ragaḷes, forthcoming by the end of 2024 from Oxford University Press and the AAR’s “Religion in Translation” book series. By surveying the eighteen stories Harihara composed about the exemplary Kannada-speaking devotees, this presentation probes into specific stories that highlight social issues, shedding light on some of the complex factors involved in conversations about the subaltern.

Several stories about the Kannada devotees (twelve out of the eighteen) deal with various areas pertaining to the subaltern in South Asia. The presentation highlights five specific stories dealing with issues of Brahmanical elitism and the exclusion of marginalized groups. In this cluster of stories, two Śiva devotees, Basava and Bhōgaṇṇa, who are also Brahmins, enter the houses of those considered “untouchables” and share food with them. The Śiva devotees openly reject allegations of breaching untouchability made by Vaiṣṇava brahmins and argue instead that it is the Vaiṣṇavas who are the true untouchables. These stories communicate a complicated argument against the untouchability episteme, seeking not to cancel but to invert it against those who are not Śaivas (here Vaiṣṇavas, but in other stories Jains as well).

Some of the stories betray the inherent difficulty Śaiva brahmins face in consuming food traditionally considered by brahmins as polluted. The brahmin devotee Kēśirāja sits to eat with a hunter devotee (Jommayya, to whom Harihara dedicates a separate Ragaḷe). But the brahmin cannot bring himself to consume the consecrated game meat Jommayya places in front of him. Similarly, in a different episode in Basava’s story, the Brahmin protagonist is disgusted when another devotee cooks ritual food using onion, only to repent his instinctive response by organizing a public onion festival.

The story of Kallayya, the goldsmith who becomes an expert in the Vedas and scriptural knowledge, conveys a complex message about Brahminism. It adopts the same inversion of untouchability against Brahmins as that found in the previous stories. While Kallayya enjoys the social prestige of Vedic knowledge, he dismisses it at the same time (by demonstrating that even his dog can recite Vedic chants).

Another aspect of subaltern concern dealt with in Harihara’s stories is about the professions at the economic margins of society or considered polluted. Several of the stories exhibit the author’s sense of appreciation of the devotee’s devotional impulse, regardless of the lowly status of one’s profession. For example, Guṇḍayya, who is a simple potter, is paid a visit by Śiva himself and gains entry to Kailāsa because of his focused meditation on the god while making pots. Similarly, Jommayya’s occupation as a hunter is legitimized by Śiva. The goldsmith Kallayya refuses to engage in his profession and instead becomes an expert in scriptural knowledge. After a personal tragedy, Allama, a temple drummer, starts a second career as a roaming mystic. Financial affluence is not a value in itself: Jēḍara Dāsimayya, a simple weaver who becomes rich, receives a lesson in humility from a devotee who is poor, Śaṅkara Dāsimayya. These stories legitimize any profession as valid for devotional life but, at the same time, show little interest in social mobility, allowing escape from one’s inherited social role and profession only by choosing a life of renunciation.

This paper also analyzes four narratives dealing with women’s role in society, where special attention is given to their profession and labor. In two stories, the arduous task of pounding huge amounts of rice is relegated to Māri and Masaṇi, two women (with names of village goddesses) who live at cremation grounds. In the third, Nimbavve, a poor orphan, resorts to offering her body to Śiva devotees as a service to the god. Her story narrates the life of a bold female protagonist from the margins of society but can also be read, along with the stories about the female rice pounders, as a tale of male subjugation of females. Similarly multilayered is the Ragaḷe story of the famous poetess Akka Mahādēvi, who masters a confident voice but then is forced by patriarchy into marriage and then into a life of seclusion.

The presentation will conclude with a consideration of contemporary disagreements about subaltern attitudes in the Vīraśaiva/Liṅgāyat communities in light of the early tradition as depicted in the narratives discussed above.