By Ritambhara
Akka Mahadevi’s vachanas, short devotional poems composed in Kannada in the 12th century, address forests, birds, bees and silkworms as places where her god can be found. She called that god Chennamallikarjuna, a name A K Ramanujan translated as “lord white as jasmine” in Speaking of Siva, his 1973 Penguin collection of Virashaiva poetry.
She was born in Udutadi, a village in what is now Shivamogga district in Karnataka. Ramanujan describes her as a younger contemporary of Basavanna and Allama Prabhu, the leading saints of the Virashaiva movement. She left home and walked to Kalyana, where those saints gathered for debate. She later moved on to Srisailam, the holy mountain in present-day Andhra Pradesh. Tradition places her death in the Kadali forest on that mountain.
The forest as the body of god
Her poems name living things with care. In one vachana she questions the creatures around her in turn: twittering birds, swans on the lakeshore, high-singing koils, circling bees, peacocks in the caverns and a mango tree. She asks each of them whether it knows where her lord has gone.
In another she tells him, in Ramanujan’s version, “You are the forest / you are all the great trees / in the forest / you are bird and beast”. C R Yaravintelimath and M M Kalburgi translated the same poem in 2003 as “You are the whole forest”. The two translations agree on the sense. For Akka, the forest is a form her god takes, and its trees and animals share in that standing.
The silkworm and its thread
Her sharpest image from nature comes from silk farming. Ramanujan’s poem 17 opens “Like a silkworm weaving / her house with love”. The poem then describes the worm dying inside the threads it has wound around itself. Akka compares this to her own entanglement in desire and asks her lord to cut her free. Laxmi Chandrashekhar and colleagues rendered the opening in 2005 as “Like a silk worm weaving its home in love”.
The image describes the silk trade accurately. Reelers kill the pupa inside the cocoon before they unwind the thread. A Food and Agriculture Organization study of Indian silk reeling calls this step stifling. The Central Silk Board states that its purpose is “to kill the pupae to prevent the emergence of moths”. In Akka’s poem the worm’s death is the point of the comparison, and the making of silk depends on that death.
Silk in India today
Karnataka remains one of the main centres of Indian mulberry silk. India produced 38,913 tonnes of raw silk in 2023-24, according to Ministry of Textiles figures reported by the news agency KNN in April 2025. Mulberry silk, spun by worms fed on mulberry leaves, made up 29,892 tonnes of that total. Mulberry silk is reeled from stifled cocoons, so most of that output carries the death Akka described.
Akka Mahadevi’s vachanas treat the forest and its creatures as sharing in the divine. Her silkworm poem keeps the cost of silk in plain view: a living worm makes the thread and dies inside it. Read today, the poem asks everyone who buys or wears silk to know where the fibre comes from and what its making takes.
