Akka Mahadevi

The vachana is a short prose poem in spoken Kannada, unrhymed, unmetered, ending in a signature line that names the poet's chosen form of Shiva. It was the literary instrument of the Virashaiva movement of the twelfth century, and the movement used it to say things that could not be said in Sanskrit verse: that the temple is unnecessary, that the priest is unnecessary, that caste is a fiction, and that the body itself is the shrine.

Akka Mahadevi's vachanas are the ones that go furthest into the interior. They are addressed to Chennamallikarjuna, the lord white as jasmine, and they move between erotic longing, contempt for householding, and a cold clarity about the uselessness of religious performance. One recurring figure is that of an illicit affair: she is married to a mortal husband and in love with another, and the other is God, and the poems treat the conventional life as the adultery rather than the reverse.

The movement she belonged to did not survive intact as a reform within Shaivism; it became a distinct community with its own scripture and its own social organisation, and the vachanas became its canon. What survives in ordinary Kannada literary memory, though, is not the doctrine but the voice, and hers is the one most often quoted, in translation as well as in Kannada.

The accounts agree that Akka Mahadevi left a marriage. In the fuller versions she was pressed into marrying a local ruler on conditions he broke, and she walked out, discarding everything including her clothes, covering herself with her hair. She then travelled to Kalyana, where Basava and the Virashaiva leadership held the assembly called the Anubhava Mantapa, the hall of experience, a gathering that debated spiritual questions openly and admitted women and people of every caste to speak.

What happened there is the most striking episode in her tradition. She was questioned, and the questioning was hostile: Allama Prabhu, the assembly's presiding figure, challenged her nakedness directly and asked, in effect, whose she was and why a woman who claimed to have renounced everything still had a husband to renounce. Her recorded answers turn each challenge back, and she was accepted into the assembly on the strength of them. The exchange is preserved as a dialogue and is read as an examination she passed rather than an ordeal she suffered.

She is said to have ended her life at Srisailam, the great Shaiva site whose deity gives her signature its name, going into the mountains and not returning. The tradition presents her nakedness throughout as a doctrinal position and not as madness or as scandal, which is a considerable thing for a twelfth century movement to have committed to writing about a woman.