Vachana Sahitya

Vachana Sahitya is a genre of rhythmic Kannada-language prose poetry that emerged in the eleventh century and flourished in the twelfth century as part of the Sharana movement within Lingayat devotion to the god Shiva. Vachanas, whose name means that which is said, were written in plain, direct language rather than Sanskrit, making them accessible to ordinary people, and they voice personal spiritual experience alongside social criticism of caste discrimination and empty ritual. More than two hundred vachana poets are recorded, over thirty of them women, among them Basavanna, Akka Mahadevi and Allama Prabhu, and roughly twenty two thousand vachanas survive in print, gathered by the Karnataka government into a fifteen-volume edition.