By Ravi Joshi, Former Joint Secretary, Cabinet Secretariat

As the State celebrates ‘Basava Jayanti’ today, it is indeed apt to recall one of the most revolutionary ideas of Basavanna — the ‘Anubhava Mantapa’ and its significance to the modern world. In the mid-12th century when Basavanna led the revolt against Brahminical Orthodoxy, he did it so on several fronts.

First was the rejection of ritual practices of Vaidika Brahmins, the family in which he was born by refusing to wear the ‘Janivaara,’ a sacred thread worn by a Brahmin boy after his Upanayanam ceremony. It is a tragic irony of our times that people in Karnataka are still fighting over this symbol of high-caste birth, today, more than 800 years after Basavanna rejected it.

When a social reformer fights a social ill or evil, he does so because, in principle, it goes against the very spirit of humanism that the religion propounds or extols. Or is it possible that the spirit of humanism is not the dominant tenet of our religion but maintaining social order, through a rigid structure of caste hierarchy, is?

The word ‘Dharma’ coming as it does from the word ‘Dhr’ meaning ‘to hold or support’ related to the Latin word ‘firmus’ (‘firm’ or ‘stable’) emphasised the need to uphold a social order, whether it was desirable or not, whether it promoted equality, justice and brotherhood of man. All these three notions are usually dismissed as post-Renaissance ideas borrowed from the West and are alien to our ‘Sanatana Dharma’ but that’s exactly what Basavanna fought for, in the mid-12th century.

Second was Basavanna’s rejection of temples and idol worship. He told his followers not to visit temples and pray to stone idols that are pasted with ‘kumkuma’ or ‘vibhuti’ but to pray to the God within oneself. This act of rejection of temples was an expression of his fellowship with all those who were denied entry into the temples, a social practice that continued till the early 20th century when Mahatma Gandhi, Vinoba Bhave and others had to fight for the right of all Hindus to enter temples.

Thirdly, Basavanna said that to worship the Gods one need not learn Sanskrit or the obscure ‘mantras’ but could recite verses called ‘Vachanas’ composed in Kannada, either by themselves or by the more spiritually inclined persons — the Sharanas (those who have surrendered to God).

Fourth was his bold and open support to women, a major challenge to the hide-bound rules of patriarchy.

Finally, his most important act was his total rejection of the ‘Varnashrama’ Dharma (four structures and four stages of social and individual life) and its unequal hierarchy and openly preaching and practicing inter-dining and inter-marriage between the castes. This was considered a direct threat to the social order sustained by the duo-poly of the Brahmins and Kshatriya power-structure.

Some may argue that the Kalachuri dynasty of the Chalukyas that ruled North Karnataka at that time was a Jain dynasty, hence did not fit into the conventional duo-poly of the old regimes. Still the power of Brahmins on this Jain dynasty cannot be ruled out, as Basavanna’s father-in-law was a prominent Minister under the Bijjala King and subsequently Basavanna became a Chief Treasury Officer or as ‘Basava Dandanayaka’ under the same King.

According to Dharmashastras, one of the principal duties of the King is to protect the ‘Varna’ system and to see that there is no ‘Varna-Sankara’ or mixing of castes through inter-marriage. The King ordered the marriage of Allayya’s son (an untouchable) with that of Madhuvayya’s daughter (a Brahmin), to be stopped, although Basavanna had blessed the proposed union. Upon their refusal to obey his orders, the King decreed to have their eyes plucked out. This led to a revolt of the Veerashaiva community, with one of their men Jagadeva finally killing the King.

Chaos ensued and Basavanna and a few of his followers left Kalyan and went to Kudalasangama where Basavanna became one with the Gods, as per the legend, or ‘Aikya with Shiva’ at the confluence of rivers Krishna and Ghataprabha.

‘Anubhava Mantapa’ as a precursor to ‘Public Sphere’

Among the threats to social order of his times, one of the most innovative practices that Basavanna started was the ‘Anubhava Mantapa’ which broadly translates into a ‘platform to exchange experiences.’ To understand the importance of this, we should turn to the explication of this concept — ‘public sphere’ by the German Marxist philosopher Jürgen Habermas.

Habermas argues that in the Middle Ages, there was a merely “representative” public sphere, in which kings and nobles displayed their status before society. The bourgeois public sphere begins to emerge in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, after the French Revolution, at first in the guise of a literary public sphere.

Needless to say, participants in the bourgeois public sphere were de facto almost all ‘educated male property-owning members’ of the bourgeoisie, along with some sympathisers from the aristocracy. His critics have charged that Habermas does not pay sufficient attention to the way it was constituted by ‘excluding property-less workers and, above all, women.’

This is where Basavanna stands out as a great visionary in conceiving the Anubhava Mantapa as a platform that was open to all castes, classes, creeds or religious persuasions without distinction of gender. The re-imagining and re-creation of the ‘public sphere’ had to wait till the arrival of Mahatma Gandhi on the Indian political scene in the early 20th century.