Lingayatism, also called Veerashaivism, is a Shiva devotional tradition that took shape in twelfth century Karnataka around the teaching of the poet-reformer Basava, who rejected caste hierarchy, Vedic ritualism and temple worship in favor of direct personal devotion expressed by wearing a small linga, called an ishtalinga, on the body at all times rather than visiting a fixed temple to encounter the divine. Basava's Kannada devotional poems, called vachanas, remain central to Lingayat scripture and practice today, composed in plain, direct language rather than classical Sanskrit specifically so that ordinary people without elite education could engage with them directly.
The movement's social teaching was as radical as its theology: Basava's explicit rejection of caste distinctions, along with a degree of gender equality in religious participation unusual for the period, made Lingayatism one of medieval India's most socially transformative religious reform movements, attracting followers across social strata that conventional Hindu religious practice at the time kept firmly separated. A. K. Ramanujan's translations and study of vachana poetry, Speaking of Siva, remains the standard English language introduction to this literature and to the movement's founding period.
The Anubhava Mantapa, an assembly of mystics and reformers in twelfth century Kalyana presided over by the mystic Allama Prabhu and attended by Basava and hundreds of other Sharanas, functioned as the movement's early center of doctrinal debate and communal vachana composition, a genuinely participatory religious forum that historians treat as one of the more remarkable institutions of medieval Indian religious history.