In the rolling black-soil country of northern Karnataka, in the Shiggaon taluk of Haveri district, stands the village of Baada. Ruins of an old fort and palace still mark the ground there, and it is this village, close to the once-powerful garrison town of Bankapura, that tradition names as the birthplace of the poet the Kannada world remembers as Kanaka Dasa. He was born into a Kannada Kuruba family of some local standing, to Beerappa and Bachchamma, and was given the name Thimmappa Nayaka. The name Kanaka, and with it a place in one of India’s great devotional movements, came much later.

A soldier before he was a singer

The first phase of his life was military rather than musical. Accounts of his early years place him in service at the fort of Bankapura, a chieftain’s son with land, men and responsibilities, living in a region repeatedly fought over as the Vijayanagara order weakened. The turning point in every telling of his life is a battlefield reversal — a wound, a defeat, a collapse of everything he had built his identity around. Whatever the precise events, the outcome is not disputed: he set aside arms and property and turned to a life of devotion, teaching and composition. The transformation was so complete that the warrior’s name effectively disappeared from memory, surviving only as a footnote to the poet’s.

Entering the Haridasa fold

He found his direction in the Haridasa movement, the Kannada devotional current that carried the Dvaita philosophy of Madhvacharya out of the scholarly Sanskrit world and into the streets, fields and temple courtyards of the Kannada country. Its instrument was not the treatise but the song. Its language was not Sanskrit but the speech of ordinary people. Kanaka Dasa became a disciple of Vyasatirtha, the towering teacher of the age, and was formally initiated into the tradition. Alongside Purandara Dasa he became one of the two figures who define the movement’s classical phase — and the one who pressed hardest on its social edge.

That edge mattered because Kanaka Dasa came from a pastoral community, not a priestly one. His right to sing, to teach, to enter a shrine and to be taken seriously as a theologian was contested in his own lifetime. He did not respond with polemic but with poetry, and the poetry is unusually direct about who is admitted and who is turned away. The most enduring illustration is the tradition attached to the Krishna temple at Udupi. Denied entry by those guarding the sanctum, Kanaka Dasa is said to have sung from behind the building until a wall gave way and the image of Krishna turned to face him. Whether one reads it as history or as parable, the small opening in the western wall — the Kanakana Kindi, Kanaka’s window — is still there, and pilgrims still look through it. It has become one of Indian devotional culture’s sharpest statements about where holiness actually resides.

The poet and his books

Kanaka Dasa was a considerable literary figure quite apart from his sanctity. Five long works in Kannada are attributed to him, and they are strikingly varied in ambition. Mohanatarangini retells episodes of Krishna’s story in the flowing sangatya metre meant for singing. Nalacharitre takes the ancient tale of Nala and Damayanti and renders it in a Kannada idiom accessible to listeners with no Sanskrit. Haribhaktisara, composed in the bhamini shatpadi metre, is a compact devotional and ethical handbook that generations of Kannada children learned by heart. Nrisimhastava is a hymn of praise.

The most original of the five is Ramadhanya Charite, a work with few parallels in medieval Indian literature. It stages a debate between rice and ragi — the grain of the wealthy and the millet of the poor — over which is the superior food. Ragi, humble and unglamorous but hardy and nourishing, prevails. Behind the fable stands an argument about class, dignity and the worth of what the powerful dismiss, made without a word of abstraction and entirely legible to a farming audience. It remains one of the earliest sustained pieces of social criticism in Kannada.

Songs that outlived the century

Beyond the long poems, Kanaka Dasa composed roughly two hundred and forty shorter pieces — kirtanes, ugabhogas, padas and philosophical songs — which entered the Carnatic music repertoire and have never left it. He signed them with the ankita or signature Kagineleya Adikeshava, invoking the deity of Kaginele, the town he was closely associated with in later life and where he is said to have died. His best-known songs pair musical simplicity with theological bite: one famously asks when the self will depart, so that the divine may be reached; another observes that quarrels over caste are pointless when nobody can say what caste the soul belongs to. Sung for four centuries by musicians who may never have thought of them as protest, these lines carried his argument far beyond the reach of any pamphlet.

Memory

The Kanaka Guru Peetha was established in his honour and remains a centre of the community that claims him most closely. The Government of India issued a postage stamp in his memory in 1990. Kanaka Dasa Jayanti is observed each year and has been marked as a state holiday in Karnataka since 2008, when schools, temples and music sabhas across the state return to his songs. Excavation at Baada has recovered traces of the fortified settlement his family once belonged to, and the village has been developed as a place of pilgrimage.

His achievement can be stated plainly. He took a philosophy that had been the property of scholars and set it to melodies a farmer could hum; he insisted, in the face of considerable opposition, that devotion answers to no register of birth; and he wrote a poem in which the poor man’s millet wins the argument. Four centuries later the songs are still sung, and the small window at Udupi is still the first place visitors are taken to see.