How literary critic DR Nagaraj engaged with 12th-century philosopher-poet Allama Prabhu in his work

The 12th-century Shaiva mystic and vachanakara Allama Prabhu has been a massive presence in the Kannada, and more recently, in the Indian, cultural imagination. Apart from a couple of inscriptions that mention Allama in the premodern world, we access his life and thought as narrativised in several texts, beginning from 13th-century Harihara’s Allamaprabhudevara Ragalegalu through Chamarasa’s Prabhulinga Lile to 15th and 16th centuries five-volume Shunyasampadanes and other Virashaiva puranas.

Modern engagement with Allama and the entire vachana tradition, however, has been predominantly scholarly. Chief among the different forms of modern engagement with the vachana tradition has meant textualizing vachanas – collecting, editing, and printing them. Vachanas were performative practices but became objects of study, research, and translation in English during the modern period: so we have interpretations of vachanas in anthologies, doctoral theses, monographs, and articles among others.

Yet, Kannada scholarship produced no substantial work theorising vachanas in a hermeneutic mode until DR Nagaraj’s Allamaprabhu mattu Shaiva Pratibhe, published in 1999. No work before his put forward theoretical propositions and bold hypotheses on vachanas and vachanakaras. Known to the Anglophone world for his insightful writings on the Dalit Movement, literature, and culture, compiled into the volumes The Flaming Feet and Other Essays and Listening to the Loom, the Kannada cultural critic Nagaraj has transformed the social and intellectual meaning of vachanakaras and their trajectory by exploring Allama.

While Nagaraj’s work on Allama shows how significantly this Kannada critical tradition has contributed to Indian intellectual history, it is undeniably challenging and complex, and therefore not an easy text to read. This could be partly explained by Nagaraj’s untimely death, which meant that the Kannada manuscript did not benefit from his editing, revision, or polishing; in fact, he left it relatively raw, with many repetitions and unconnected thoughts that he would have addressed otherwise.

Nagaraj chooses a single vachanakara, Allama, and attempts to situate him in three intellectual contexts: the medieval Shaiva intellectual world, the bhakti tradition, and the mystical tradition. This expansion in framing enables him to reconstruct an Allama who can be related not merely to his fellow vachana poets but also to the Kashmir Shaiva philosopher Abhinavagupta and the poet-mystic Gorakhnath. And his close reading of Allama’s vachanas presents Shaiva bhakti as not solely lodged in shringara rasa, but also as a mode of expression seeking to explore the limits of language when attempting to communicate an understanding of the divine. He takes 90-odd vachanas of Allama and a couple of life narratives but does not merely explicate them and reconstruct Allama’s life story. What he does is problematise the historiography of Indian philosophy by showing how figures like Sarahapada, Allama, and Bhima Bhoi have been kept outside the Indian philosophical tradition because they practised their philosophy through metaphors and images in local languages (bhashas).

In some ways, Nagaraj’s enterprise is comparable to the work of British Marxist historians such as Raymond Williams, Christopher Hill, and EP Thompson, who saw culture and thought as composite, being practised in different yet closely linked ways by thinkers, poets, and writers unnecessarily separated by categories such as “literature”, “political history”, and “social thought”. Nagaraj’s dissolution of such boundaries happens by trying to build an alternative literary theory with the help of Shaiva poets, showing how the vachanakaras, particularly Allama, put forward their own poetics. In this sense, his reading of the vachanas, in making intertextual references in particular to the Kashmir Shaivism of Abhinavagupta and other tantric sects, though perhaps contestable, is a landmark in the history of Vachana Studies. Additionally, his unravelling of the cultural politics of Allama’s life narratives – the Shunyasampadanes and the Manteswamy Kavya – provides deep insights into Virashaiva/Lingayat religion and the formation of Kannada literary culture.

Of the major themes that Nagaraj explores in seven chapters, I shall focus on three. The work begins with “A Historical Survey of Shaiva Darshanas”, in which Nagaraj demonstrates how, in History of Indian Philosophy, Surendranath Dasgupta gets vernacular traditions such as the Sharana movement and figures like Basavanna wrong. For Nagaraj, the root cause of this kind of misunderstanding lies in translating desi: when dissenting desi religious traditions like the Virashaiva movement – which happen to be recorded in desha bhashas (regional languages) – are accessed through Sanskrit translation, they are likely to be misunderstood because a radical change has taken place in their meaning. Nagaraj’s important assumption is that religious dissent and rebellions do not emerge from nowhere but from the very womb of the originary matrix (mulamatruke) against which they have rebelled: the Virashaiva movement emerged from inside Shaivism. As he notes later, it was because the Shaiva philosophy of Uttarapatha degenerated that the Virashaiva movement emerged from within that locus. This leads Nagaraj to distinguish between Desi Advayavadis like Allama, Narayana Guru, and Shishunala Sharifa (among others), and Marga Advaitins like Shankaracharya. They differ not only in their methods of articulation but also in their engagement with social power structures. While the former resort to figurative language (laghu) and narrative modes, the latter use rigorous concepts (ghana) and stuti kavya (eulogy). While Marga Advaitins take a conservative stance on caste and varnashrama, Desi Advayavadis adopt a rebellious stance. And Allama’s innovation, in Nagaraj’s assessment, is in the unconventional mixing of laghu and ghana, of desi and marga.

Further, while drawing our attention to the complex relationship between Brahminical sects and Shramana sects – how they share certain common elements, learn from and influence each other – Nagaraj explains the process of Brahminical darshanas undergoing self-constriction (atma sankochikarana) by leaning towards rigid conventionalism; at the same time dissenting philosophical streams, not only from Shramana traditions but also from within the Brahminical fold, resisted this rigidification. In this respect, Nagaraj’s Allama, who has mastered Buddhist thought, does not consider sansara and nirvana different: he differs from Advaitins and, in line with Buddhist pratityasamutpada (interdependence), views everything as connected. And like the Buddhists, Allama believes that the mind creates maya (illusion).

A comparative study of Allama’s life narratives, and what we could call a practical criticism of his vachanas are also among the high points of the book. Nagaraj offers a comparative analysis of Allama’s life narratives through three models – literary, spiritual, and folk – and provides deep insights into the politics of narrativisation, the institutionalisation of religion, the formation of textual communities, and the nuances of an oral epic as a counternarrative. In his estimate, while Harihara’s work devotes time to the Allama–Kamalate affair, the Shunyasampadanes are narratives of the institutional imagination produced under the pressures of Virashaivism’s dire need to develop into an institutionalised religion. Nagaraj also reads the Shunyasampadanes as playing a decisive role in shaping Virashaivas as a textual community. Accordingly, they try hard to reconcile their protagonist Allama (who is against any sort of institutionalisation) with the institutional demands of restoring Shivachara on earth. Here Nagaraj employs the Foucauldian idea of intellectual genealogies to trace the transformation of concepts such as ishtalinga and jangama from the twelfth century to the time of the Shunyasampadanes.

Another perspective is to read a folk-narrative, the Manteswamy Kavya, as a counternarrative to the Shunyasampadanes. Nagaraj suggests that the character of Allama has been grafted onto Manteswamy and that the two blend into a composite. A comparative analysis of the two texts sees in the Manteswamy Kavya a critique of Virashaivism, the city of Kalyana, and sharana figures like Basavanna and others as portrayed in the Shunyasampadanes. Nagaraj’s sympathy is with the Manteswamy Kavya, for despite its literary merit, the politics of literary history keep it outside the literary canon.

This entire section is significant in another way. Whereas cultural studies formulate rigid binaries between the Western and the non-Western, or the Semitic and the non-Semitic, by arguing the politics of cultural difference, Nagaraj draws our attention to cultural similarities and the fluid nature of religious identities. While the “revealed word” in Semitic religions forms the laws that guide the everyday social life of the community, Vedic religion has apaurusheya shruti, which functions as the “revealed word”, and the accompanying shastras provide the laws.

Further on, via a reading of 38-odd vachanas of Allama, he discusses the major themes and motifs in them. Examining one of Allama’s vachanas (number 50), for example, he demonstrates Allama turning the social hierarchy upside down by attributing a superior position to outcastes and an inferior one to upper castes. Likewise, by discussing a vachana (number 1004) that deals with the theme of linga falling, Nagaraj reads in it the history of symbol-centric violence in India, from the historical bloodshed of Jainas and Shaivas to the communal violence of Babri Masjid/Ramjanmabhumi. Thus, God’s death, community discipline, pralaya (deluge), engagements with elders of the Shaiva tradition, and anti-Veda thought feature as themes here. Additionally, Nagaraj examines how entities like the sun, water, the goddess Lakshmi, and animals work as metaphors in Allama, but not necessarily suggesting an unchanging essence.

Nowhere within the book does Nagaraj specifically discuss the title of his book, leaving much room for interpretation. He takes the notion of pratibhe from Indian literary thought and extends it to the Indian darshanas (philosophical schools). In Indian poetics, both the reader (receiver) and the poet (creator) are on an equal footing; they are sahridayas (sharing a temperament). But the poet possesses the unique ability to create a world of his own – the talent is called pratibha, translatable into English as imagination. David Shulman’s More than Real: A History of Imagination in South India draws our attention to the theory and praxis of the imagination in premodern South Asia. One of the meanings of imagination here is the ability to visualise, to see. In this respect, Nagaraj’s Allama is darshanika, a veritable seer. According to Shulman, in Sanskrit poetics, pratibha also means “illumination” or, more literally, “counterradiance” – “a visionary, luminous mode.” This seems in line with Nagaraj’s Allama, who is nothing if not luminous.

We could interpret “Allama” and “Shaiva Imagination” as Allama in the world of the Shaiva imagination, or Allama as the Shaiva imagination, Allama as extending the Shaiva imagination, or Allama illuminating the Shaiva imagination. There is also Nagaraj’s description of Allama as vyaktivishista pratibhe – one whose creative talent is highly individualistic. According to Kirtinath Kurtkoti, pratibhe involves the ability to create new meanings out of words; it is not just the ability to create new experiences, but also to transform life experiences to suit one’s own ends. In this respect, Nagaraj’s Allama has a different pratibhe: he is as a poet the creator of a new literary culture as well as he who has transformed the Shaiva sect.

So much for speculation on the title; of greater import is the substance of the achievement. In this respect, what seems most notable is that, in the absence of authentic archival material on medieval culture, Nagaraj resorts to Abhinavagupta’s hermeneutic method, sankalananusandhana, to build his arguments. In Abhinavagupta, “sankalana means effecting the congruous and suitable connection of distinct sounds and anusandhana means blending them in a definite, meaningful whole.” Nagaraj understands this as a hermeneutic method of weaving the whole–part relationship. In other words, it is a method of assembling diverse ideas to build arguments, which enables Nagaraj to read a variety of texts and facilitate a dialogue between different traditions. Accordingly, Nagaraj’s perspective on Allama weaves together Shaiva philosophers, including Shankara, Abhinavagupta, Sri Ramana Maharshi, Sekkizhar, Bheema Bhoi, Sri Narayana Guru, and Buddhist philosophers like Sarahapada and Nagarjuna. And, as noted, he draws connections between premodern and modern, Vedic and non-Vedic, folk and classical, Western traditions and Indian, desi and marga, all within a highly contrapuntal reading of twelfth-century vachanas. This is the work of a literary critic who expands into a desi philosopher in the process of revealing the spirit of the philosopher-poet Allama.

Nagaraj is throughout aware of the paucity of empirical contextual evidence outside the texts he is reading. Therefore, he makes it clear that his readings are in the form of hypotheses and speculation; he is not formulating any grand historical theory of the Shaiva imagination. In other words, Nagaraj here follows – to use Dilthey’s formulation – a hermeneutical procedure of imaginative recreation: that is, the book is an attempt to understand Allama in relation to Nagaraj’s own concerns. A project of historical reconstruction that cannot rely on material evidence may be understood with the help of an observation by Hans-Georg Gadamer:

The past is an active force providing an inexhaustible supply of possibilities and not passive, inert, merely an object of contemplation. Texts, events and so on come to acquire different meanings as they become part of new hermeneutical situations; as the interpreter’s horizons change with the understandings which he acquires, so he reconsiders and reviews the texts, and what they mean for him.

The idea is that Nagaraj’s reading of Allama comes to us as what Allama means for Nagaraj. Many might object to this as a misreading of Allama. But the solidity of Nagaraj’s arguments about Allama comes from his building them over and above how the Kannada imagination of past periods has read Allama. Nagaraj offers a better interpretation of Allama. This method suggests, in Heideggerian scholar Richard Polt’s words, an approach to “knowledge not as a static set of correct propositions, but as a continuing search for better interpretations.”

Excerpted with permission from Allama Prabhu and the Shaiva Imagination, DR Nagaraj, translated from the Kannada by NS Gundur, Permanent Black.