Walking as the Practice Itself

The Varkari pilgrimage is not a journey to a rite. The walking is the rite. Groups called dindis form around a village, a family or an occupation and move together for two to three weeks, keeping the same order of march, the same songs and the same daily discipline of prayer, cooking and sleeping in the open, and the palanquins carrying the sandals of Jnaneshwar and Tukaram travel at the centre of the procession.

D. B. Mokashi's account of walking with a dindi describes a society that assembles itself for the duration of the journey and dissolves at the end of it, with its own rules about who carries what, who sings which part, and how strangers are absorbed into a group. Caste is not abolished on the road, and Mokashi does not pretend otherwise, but the tradition has a long record of admitting the poor and the low born as full participants in a way the temple's own history has not always matched, since access to the sanctuary at Pandharpur has been restricted at different periods. The atlas records both facts without collapsing either into the other. The scale is very large. The two annual walks are among the biggest recurring pilgrimages in India, and the tradition behind them is documented for roughly seven hundred years.