Brahmin or Vīraśaiva? The Kannada Poet Rāghavāṅka between Idioms of Power and Devotion

Abstract

Abstract Rāghavāṅka lived in the first half of the thirteenth century, when the Kannada devotional tradition we now call ‘Vīraśaivism’ or ‘Liṅgāyatism’ was at a nascent phase; the use of these labels was tenuous and the social boundaries of the local devotional movement less rigidly defined.1 Unlike a simplistic but common perception of early devotional movement in the Kannada region as being anti-Brahmanical, egalitarian, quasi-democratic, anti-ritualistic, and so on,2 texts by Rāghavāṅka and others, which are the earliest we have, present a more complex picture of cultural negotiations and religious diversity, not only in relation to entities external to the local Śaiva tradition but also among Śaivas. This divergence is reflected even within the literary production of a single author: while most of Rāghavāṅka’s works can be easily read as primarily promoting devotional values that correspond to an inclusive, non-elite, and anti-court agenda, his most celebrated literary work, the Life of Hariścandra (Hariścandra Cāritra), presents a more complex mixture of conservative values associated with Brahmanical orthodoxy and royal power combined with the emerging devotional idiom of the Kannada-speaking region. This article pays attention to ethical complications in the Life of Hariścandra and to how the later tradition negotiated these against a clear set of inclusive, anti-Brahmanical, and anti-court ideals. With this analysis, I wish to suggest a more dynamic understanding of how Vīraśaivism positioned itself in relation to Brahmanical orthodoxy and royal power. As recent studies show, religious identities in the premodern, which today we think of using labels such as ‘Vīraśaivism’ and ‘Brahmanical orthodoxy’, were not static but rather a product of a dialectical and historically dynamic process, a process that involved refashioning and self-repositioning in relation to other emergent religious actors.3 This article reconstructs such a negotiation about social values and religious identity as it unfolded in Vīraśaiva devotional narratives.