Are they who celebrate Basava’s heterodox teachings, who uphold the vachanas of many remarkable women, who bury their dead and go to no temples, really Hindus? Those on the extreme right insist they are—where majoritarianism is the goal, one can hardly allow the dilution of the majority. And so, as many Lingayats contemplate a second divorce from the Hindu fold, it is the Hindus who seek to retain Basava’s children within their order—not so much due to a similarity of vision as to the naked expediencies of cultural politics.
