Vitthal Temple, Pandharpur

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.

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.