Basava lived in the twelfth century in what is now Karnataka, in South India, serving as an administrator, eventually treasurer, at the court of the Kalachuri king Bijjala II, who reigned from about 1156 to 1167. Alongside his official duties he composed vachanas, short free verse poems in colloquial Kannada rather than the Sanskrit of elite religious literature, addressed to Shiva under the name Kudalasangamadeva, meeting at the meeting of rivers.
The vachanas argue insistently against caste hierarchy, ritual formalism and Brahmanical privilege, proposing instead a devotional community organized around direct personal relationship with Shiva, symbolized by the small linga, the ishtalinga, that devotees wear on the body rather than worship at a fixed temple. That combination of social critique and devotional intensity gathered a community around Basava at Bijjala's capital, a community tradition later organized into the movement known as Lingayatism or Virashaivism. Basava's circle at Bijjala's court also included other vachana poets who became central figures in their own right, among them the woman poet Akka Mahadevi and the low caste poets Dohara Kakkayya and Madara Chennayya, whose inclusion in the movement's leadership was itself part of the caste critique the vachanas were making, a point later Lingayat tradition has continued to emphasize as central to Basava's own teaching.