In her youth, she was a one-woman brigade who took on powerful religious heads, her own family members and centuries of established practice. She went on to become the first female Lingayat monk and, eventually, ascended to the status of a jagadguru or world leader — a title traditionally reserved for an extraordinary spiritual leader.
Mathe Mahadevi, the Lingayat religious leader who passed away on March 14 aged 74, had stirred controversy in 2014 by calling on women to dress modestly and demanding the legalisation of sex work to reduce the incidence of rape. But she was active till the end in promoting the Lingayat way of life and demanding a separate religion status for Lingayats.
Born Ratna in Chitradurga district, Karnataka, to a Lingayat family of doctors belonging to the Ganiga or what was traditionally the oil worker’s caste, she wanted to pursue spirituality from a young age. At 19, she received initiation from her guru, Lingananda Swami, and entered monkhood a year later. The same year, claiming the spiritual legacy of the 12th-century mystic-poet Akka Mahadevi, after whom she was renamed, she brought out three collections of poetry —
Her most path-breaking creation, however, remains the Jaganmata Akkmahadevi Anubhava Pitha, a spiritual post for women, which she set up in 1968.
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Established by the 12th-century reformist-saint Basavanna, Lingayatism broke away from several entrenched beliefs in Hinduism. Many of the sutakas , or impurities, were abolished. For instance, Lingayat women can perform pooja during periods. Many sharanes (female followers of the medieval Veerashaivism sect pre-dating Lingayatism) were ascetic though married, and successfully straddled both worlds.
Yet, when Mahadevi decided to join her guru’s ashram in 1966, she faced stiff opposition. While Buddhism did create an order for women, Hinduism considered the rigours of ascetism not suitable for women. However, ascetic or even semi-ascetic women have always existed, whether as Brahmavadins of the Vedic period or the bhaktins of the medieval period. This was the larger context within which Mahadevi’s asceticism and life’s work took shape — there was a space for her and yet there wasn’t.
Holding a Master’s degree in philosophy from Karnatak University, Mahadevi was invited to complete a PhD at Cambridge University in 1976, after she delivered a nuanced lecture on Indian religions at a symposium in London’s School of Oriental and African Studies. She, however, chose a spartan life instead.
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Mahadevi appeared to favour the West-endorsed, anachronistic and egalitarian interpretation of Basavanna’s vachanas or sayings, imputing to them a simplistic social activism rather than retaining the ambiguity of the philosophical-rhetorical questions raised by them.
In 1996, Mahadevi wrote the book Basava Vachana Deepti , wherein she declared a new birth date for Basavanna and changed the ankitanama , or signature, for his 1,342 vachanas to “lingadeva” in place of “kudalasangama deva.”
Predictably, this evoked large-scale protests from historians, littérateurs and religious leaders, leading to the government banning the book in 1998 for ostensibly hurting the sentiments of Veerashaivas.
The argument that the vachanas require commentaries by religious scholars to make them accessible to the contemporary reader is understandable, but the exegesis she offered created social and legal problems. Taking up her 2017 appeal against the ban, the Supreme Court initially said that it discouraged hypersensitivity in religious matters. Yet, in a U-turn of sorts, it dismissed her appeal later that year. Now, at Mahadevi’s passing, the time is ripe to re-evaluate her works from the perspectives of religion and secularism.
Mahadevi’s legacy of protest is numerous and varied. In 1996, she rallied against rituals through writings that urged people to stop prostrating at the feet of the jangamas (Lingayat teachers). In 2005, she published a book on what Lingayats ought to learn from the Sikhs. In 2007, she protested against the introduction of eggs in the midday meals at government schools in Karnataka, as also the proposal to declare the Bhagavad Gita as national text. For decades, she lamented that strict monotheism no longer prevailed in the Lingayat community, as followers began worshipping a large number of local gods. But monotheism is a Western construct and what Basavanna critiqued was the mechanical performance of rituals, forsaking genuine devotion.
In her early years, Mahadevi wrote that different traditions such as Buddhism, Sikhism and Jainism were a part of Hinduism’s ‘solar system’. But in later life, she ended up demanding a separate religion status with minority benefits for the Lingayats, who make up almost 17 per cent of the population of Karnataka.
As early as the 1970s, she had conducted extensive fieldwork and research to elucidate the differences between the Veerashaivas and the Lingayats, and this was one of the factors that spurred the then chief minister Siddaramaiah to demand a separate religion status in 2018.
She cemented her status as a powerful female guru, first by setting up in Kudalasangama the Basava Dharma Peetha, an organisation dedicated to spreading the teachings of Lingayatism’s founder Basavanna, and later by organising the Saranamela, a worldwide conclave of Lingayats. She also lent her vision to the Rashtreeya Basava Dal, a Lingayat association with nationalist ideals.
More than anything, she was a living reminder of the complexity and diversity of religious traditions — an aspect that is often overlooked, whether by the pre- or post-Independence historian, or the school textbook writer, all of whom tend to homogenise them.
Sushumna Kannan is adjunct faculty at the San Diego State University