Kalachuris of Kalyāṇi

A short interregnum

Bijjala II, a Kalachuri commander in Chalukya service, took Kalyāṇi in 1156 and ruled the Deccan for two decades before the Chalukyas were briefly restored. As a dynasty the Southern Kalachuris are a footnote; as the setting of a religious revolution they are among the most consequential courts in Indian history.

Basava

Basava served as treasurer and then chief minister to Bijjala, and around him gathered the community whose teaching became Vīraśaivism. Its positions were radical: the rejection of caste and of birth-based purity, of temple worship in favour of the personal iṣṭaliṅga worn on the body, of the ritual authority of brahmins, and of the distinction between the sexes in matters of religious eligibility. The Anubhava Maṇṭapa, the hall of experience at Kalyāṇi, was a forum in which men and women of all classes debated.

The movement's literature is the vacana — short, direct, unmetered Kannada prose-poems by Basava, Akka Mahādevī, Allama Prabhu and dozens of others, including many from artisan and labouring communities. They remain among the most widely read texts in Kannada.

The community was broken by violence at Kalyāṇi around 1167, following a marriage between the son of a brahmin convert and the daughter of a cobbler convert. Bijjala was assassinated, the Vīraśaivas dispersed, and the movement afterwards reconstituted itself across Karnataka, where the Liṅgāyat community remains substantial. Responsibility for the killing and for the persecution is disputed in the sources and has remained a live question.