In his last, profoundly innovative work, one of India’s finest minds, D.R. Nagaraj (1954–1998), engages with the life and ideas of the twelfth-century Shaiva mystic and philosopher-poet Allama Prabhu. 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.

Nagaraj tackles a thinker whose enigmatic writings have perplexed many and resisted analysis. His 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 reading of Allama’s vachanas (condensed promissory-poetic compositions) offers a vision of Shaiva bhakti which 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.

Translated into English by the Kannada critic N.S. Gundur, this is a major contribution to studies of Indian philosophy.

D.R. NAGARAJ (1954–1998) was a profound political commentator and cultural critic who consolidated and advanced the ideas of India’s leading Dalit thinker B.R. Ambedkar. He 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, 1997 and 1998.

N.S. GUNDUR is Professor of English at Tumkur University, India. A distinguished literary historian, translator, and bilingual writer, he has published widely in both Kannada and English across academic and public platforms.

“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. recognised 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