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.