The image at Pandharpur is not in any of the usual postures. Vitthal stands upright with his hands on his hips, on a brick, and the story attached to that pose is the whole theology of the place in miniature. A devotee named Pundalik was attending his parents when the god arrived; unwilling to interrupt the service, he threw a brick outside for the god to stand on and asked him to wait. The god waited, and is waiting still. A tradition that tells this story about itself is saying that the deity is patient, approachable, and content to be kept standing by an ordinary person doing an ordinary duty, which is a very different register from the awe due to a great temple deity. The devotional literature follows from it.
The abhangas of Jnaneshwar, Namdev, Eknath and Tukaram were composed in Marathi rather than Sanskrit, and they address the god familiarly, argue with him, complain to him and call him by household names. That poetry, rather than any priestly manual, is what the Varkari carry. Anne Feldhaus has shown how strongly a regional religious identity in Maharashtra is built out of exactly this material, so that a body of vernacular song, a walking route and a single image at the end of it together define a region as much as any political boundary does.