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Abstract
The vacanas, short devotional poems in the Kannada language that started to be composed in the twelfth century, are central for the modern identity of the “Vīraśaiva” or “Liṅgāyat” religious tradition and are also popular among the Kannada-speaking public and, through translations, global audience. But there is an ongoing interpretive controversy of what the vacanas are “really” about, and this partly rests on the “authenticity” of the poems themselves. While most uncritically attribute the vacanas we have at hand today to the twelfth century, some reject this attribution by pointing to the vacanas’ complex history of transmission and dissemination over roughly eight centuries, and specifically to the fact that written collections of vacanas only started to appear during the fifteenth century, three hundred years after their purported composition. This article adds nuance to the above controversy by tracing quotations of vacanas in a written hagiographical text that was created around the turn of the twelfth century. While disproving the claim that no written evidence for vacanas exists before the fifteenth century, the article also complicates assumptions about their content and other textual features in the early period by pointing to the relative marginality of the vacanas in the early hagiographical material, the absence of the term “vacana” and a concomitant appreciation of their outstanding poetic features in it. Lastly, the article suggests several options for explaining the difference in how the vacanas were understood in the early period and today.