The vacanas, short devotional poems in the Kannada language that started to be composed in the twelfth century, are central for the modern identity of the “Vīraśaiva” or “Liṅgāyat” religious tradition and are also popular among the Kannada-speaking public and, through translations, global audience. But there is an ongoing interpretive controversy of what the vacanas are “really” about, and this partly rests on the “authenticity” of the poems themselves. While most uncritically attribute the vacanas we have at hand today to the twelfth century, some reject this attribution by pointing to the vacanas’ complex history of transmission and dissemination over roughly eight centuries, and specifically to the fact that written collections of vacanas only started to appear during the fifteenth century, three hundred years after their purported composition. This article adds nuance to the above controversy by tracing quotations of vacanas in a written hagiographical text that was created around the turn of the twelfth century. While disproving the claim that no written evidence for vacanas exists before the fifteenth century, the article also complicates assumptions about their content and other textual features in the early period by pointing to the relative marginality of the vacanas in the early hagiographical material, the absence of the term “vacana” and a concomitant appreciation of their outstanding poetic features in it. Lastly, the article suggests several options for explaining the difference in how the vacanas were understood in the early period and today.

Early Traces of Vacanas in Kannada Literature

If Udbhaṭa (c. 800) is one of the unsung heroes of South Asia's intellectual history, this is epitomized by his Kumārasambhava. Not a single study of this work exists, and it is doubtful whether any modern scholar has even read his illustration verses as a continuous poem, let alone examined them as such. The purpose of the current essay is therefore simple: to begin the process of thinking about Udbhaṭa’s forgotten poem. Thus, the paper offers a first complete English translation of the 94 verses that we have of it, independently of the figurative phenomena they illustrate (references to and explanations of the relevant alaṅkāras are relegated to the footnotes). The final sections of the paper are dedicated to an initial analysis of some aspects of the poem, primarily its subversive presentation of its protagonist, Śiva, and to speculations about the reasons for its cold reception.

Reading Udbhaṭa’s Kumārasambhava

God Upside Down

One of the earliest authors of Vīraśaiva vernacular literature, Pālkuriki Somanātha, author of the thirteenth-century Basavapurāṇamu, crafts a hagiographical vision for his emerging community that relies heavily on narrative accounts of violence against religious others, particularly Buddhists and Jains. This article revisits the question of narrative violence in Śaiva and Vīraśaiva literature by way of an unstudied episode of the Telugu Exploits of Paṇḍitārādhya (Paṇḍitārādhyacaritramu). Through a close reading of Somanātha’s account of the murder of a Buddhist monk, I argue that the upsurge of narrative violence attested in Somanātha’s works and adjacent Śaiva vernacular literature must be read in the context of contemporary epigraphical and multilingual prescriptive literature. I suggest that discursive commonalities between these genres—in particular, the use of the term śivadrōha(mbu), “treachery against Śiva”—shed new light on the relationship between religion, law, and violence at the end of the Śaiva Age in south India.

A Perspective on Religious Diversity from Thirteenth-century India

The Murder of a Buddhist Monk

This is a translation of a 1990 article by the renowned epigraphist G. S. Gai (1917–1995) on the oldest inscription in Kannada discovered to date. The Halmiḍi inscription, discovered at a village by that name, is inscribed on a stone pillar and records the donation of the village to someone name Vija Arasa. It is the earliest datum in the linguistic history of Kannada and an important record of the Kadamba dynasty.

A Study

The Halmiḍi Inscription

NESAR is a new, open-access, online-only journal that publishes the most exciting and highest-quality research in South Asian Studies. This editorial lays out the motivation for and vision behind NESAR.

Introducing NESAR

This paper examines the textual and juridical history of Vyāsantōḷ, a once-popular Vīraśaiva procession in which the severed arm of Vyāsa — the storied author of the Mahābhārata — was paraded through villages and cities throughout the Deccan. As a sacred figure for some, Vyāsa’s desecration provoked ire and occasional violence until 1945, when the Bombay High Court outlawed the practice. This paper examines Vyāsantōḷ across three turning points. The first is a polemical praise-poem (stōtra) titled Praising Vyāsa, Condemning the Apostates (Pāṣaṇḍakhaṇḍanavyāsastōtra) written by Vādirāja Tīrtha (ca. 1550–1610), a popular intellectual and proselyte of Madhva’s realist Vedānta and the first known writer to weigh in on the question of Vyāsa’s arm. The second is a genealogy of Vyāsantōḷ in the Mahābhārata, Purāṇas, and Śaiva didactic writings. And the third is the circuitous course that Vyāsantōḷ cut through courts in British India. Collectively, these turning points provide not only a provisional genealogy of a religious controversy; they also remind us that figures like Vyāsa belong not to epic antiquity, but to a present in which gods and epic heroes are refigured (or disfigured) according to the interests of historical communities.

Vyāsa’s Body between Polemic and Procession

Desecrating the Divine

This paper investigates the historical construction and political positioning of Liṅgāyat identity within the context of the Mysore court, emphasizing the influence of political expediency in shaping religious boundaries. Through an analysis of two key narratives about rebellion—one set in the seventeenth century and the other in the nineteenth—the paper explores how Vīraśaiva-Liṅgāyats navigated the shifting allegiances and socio-political structures of colonial Mysore. This study argues that Liṅgāyat identity was not solely a product of theological differentiation but was significantly shaped by external political forces. This analysis highlights the intricate relationship between religious identity, state power, and historical memory, offering insights into the broader mechanisms by which religious communities are situated within political frameworks.

Rebellions and the Boundaries of Religion in the History of Royal Mysore

Positioning Liṅgāyatism

In this article, I explore the processes through which Tamil-based Śaivism came to be conceptually equated with the maintenance of a vegetarian diet, a development reflected in the modern Tamil word caivam (Skt. śaiva), which in colloquial speech primarily signifies lacto-vegetarian cuisine. I contend that although Tamil Śaiva literary sources have long articulated the normativity of vegetarianism, the conflation of Śaiva praxis with plant-based dietary habits likely dates to the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Such, at least, is the picture that emerges from a consideration of the Kolaimaṟuttal (Rejecting Killing), a brief polemic against animal slaughter likely composed in the then-frontier region of what is now the suburbs of Coimbatore, which emphasizes dietary nonviolence as the quintessential Śaiva virtue and the principal basis for demarcating Śaivism from other religions. A close reading of this hitherto unstudied text suggests that early modern Tamil Śaiva food discourse transformed, at least in part, in response to the emergence of new notions of “self” and “other” in this period, which prompted a corresponding need to rethink the contour and configuration of community boundaries.

Kolaimaṟuttal and the Genealogy of Tamil Śaiva Vegetarianism

Meat Matters

The Tamil poems of the twelve āḻvār are embedded within a well-established commentarial tradition in Sanskrit, Tamil and Manipravala that traces itself to at least the twelfth century. To read these poems and to translate them, is to reckon with this legacy: in the case of J.S.M. Hooper, who offered the first English translation of all twelve poets in his Hymns of the Alvar (1929), this debt expressed itself in heavy annotations and an explicit expression of reliance on the commentaries as a way to make sense of the world of the āḻvār; for A.K. Ramanujan, the commentaries were but a useful aid to be rejected or utilized depending on how it served his own finely honed aesthetic sensibility. But unlike either Hooper or Ramanujan, the Śrīvaiṣṇavas do not approach commentary as a way to make sense of esoteric, theologically demanding poems. Rather, commentary is a path of enjoyment, and its goal is relish (anubhava). The purpose of a commentary is not simply to elucidate meaning, but through its practice, to induce in its audience the āḻvār poet’s enjoyment (anubhava) of god. Framed as anubhava, commentary for the Śrīvaiṣṇavas therefore is not only located in a written (printed) text, but lives and is refreshed through oral discourse, performance, and gesture. In such commentarial practices, the poem has no fixity and instead becomes a fluid, malleable thing of permeable boundaries, shaped into a conduit for the undammed emotion of anubhava. In this paper, I frame translation itself as anubhava, to explore the implications of working within the religo-aesthetic imperatives of the commentarial traditions of the Śrīvaiṣṇava saṁpradāyas.

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On Poetry, Experience, and Experiments in Translation

Fluid Text and Open Boundaries

This is a collection of five articles that address religious controversies in South India, from roughly the twelfth to the nineteenth centuries.

Debating Religion

This is the second issue of NESAR, and the first that is not a special issue. This issue has two articles: Archana Venkatesan’s thoughtful experiments with translating the religious poetry recited in festivals in Tamil Nadu and interpreted by a long tradition of scholars, and Yigal Bronner’s recovery of a Sanskrit poem, a direct response to Kālidāsa’s masterpiece, by the renegade poetician Udbhaṭa.

Andrew Ollett

Andrew Ollett

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