Overview

Engages with the life and ideas of the twelfth-century Shaiva mystic and philosopher-poet Allama Prabhu. In his last, profoundly innovative work, D. R. Nagaraj (1954–1998) engages with the twelfth-century Shaiva mystic and philosopher-poet Allama Prabhu, whose enigmatic writings have perplexed many and thus resisted analysis. Nagaraj situates Allama in three intellectual contexts: the medieval philosophical world built around the worship of Shiva; the pan-Indian bhakti tradition; and, most broadly, Indian mystical thought. This framework enables a reconstruction of Allama through the poet's engagement with fellow poet-spiritualists (vachanakaras) such as Basava, as well as with the Kashmiri Shaiva philosopher Abhinavagupta and the founder of Hindu monasticism Gorakhnath. Nagaraj's close readings of Allama's vachanas offer a vision of Shaiva bhakti that seems to contradict the erotic and romantic expressive modes of Sringara rasa while tracing the limits of language for an understanding of the divine. Allama, Nagaraj suggests, is an epistemological iconoclast who expands the horizons of language and thought. Through these explorations, Nagaraj decolonizes the standard modes of inquiry and critiques certain settled notions in Indian philosophy, revealing himself as a postcolonial scholar whose ""hermeneutics of suspicion"" leads to a novel understanding of Indian texts and traditions. Unifying literary criticism with critical theory, philosophical inquiry, and the history of ideas, the book's focus on a specific religious tradition—Virashaivism—is never singular, making it as much a work for scholars of Indian spiritualism and religious thought as for those interested in frameworks that transgress Eurocentricism. Translated into English by Kannada philosopher N. S. Gundur, this is a major contribution to studies of Indian philosophy and literature.

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Reviews

""When D. R. Nagaraj died in 1998 at the age of forty-four, India—and the world—lost a thinker of extraordinary originality, insight, and subtlety. D. R. recognized as deeply as Walter Benjamin that 'there is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism,' and he had a way of bringing his readers into the heart of both—from the depths of caste violence to the heights of poetry and philosophy. That an English readership at last has access to his major work on Allama Prabhu, the most important and most enigmatic of Virashaiva masters, is a precious gift, for which we are deeply indebted to N. S. Gundur. His edition-translation is not just an homage, however, but is itself a remarkable contribution to literary and historical scholarship."" — Sheldon Pollock, author of The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India

Author Information

D. R. Nagaraj taught in the Kannada Department of Bangalore University and was Visiting Professor in the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. N. S. Gundur is Professor of English at Tumkur University, India.

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