- Lived:
- c. 11th century, somewhere in the Kannada country under the Chalukyas of Kalyāṇa — though tradition, unbothered by chronology, also sets part of his story in the Chola south. No date, no birthplace, no grave can be established; what survives is a handful of verses and a movement's memory
- Field:
- Bhakti poetry — by the Vīraśaiva tradition's own reckoning the first vachana poet in Kannada, and so the first voice of a whole literature; a cobbler and leatherworker by trade
- The Big Idea:
- God can be spoken to in plain workshop Kannada, from the most "polluted" trade in the caste order, without priest, temple, Sanskrit or apology — and the work itself, awl and hide and all, can be the worship.
- In their words:
- "Where word and deed hold together as one, there is no polluted birth… right conduct is the only caste, wrong conduct the only untouchability — know this, Nijātmarāma." (from a vachana bearing his signature; the rendering is ours)
- If you remember one thing:
- A century before the famous reformers of Kalyāṇa, the tradition remembers an untouchable cobbler talking to Śiva in short plain sentences — and when the movement's celebrated founder wanted to say who he was, he called that cobbler his father.