Varkari (Marathi)

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The Varkari tradition is the principal devotional (bhakti) movement of Marathi-speaking western India: a path centered on the god Vitthal — also called Vithoba or Pandurang — whose temple stands at Pandharpur on the Bhima river, and whose defining observance is the vari, the walking pilgrimage from which the movement takes its name. A Varkari is, literally, one who makes the journey. The tradition is a member of the larger bhakti movement of medieval and early-modern India and a saguṇa, Vaishnava current within Indic bhakti — its god has form, name, and a temple, and is held to be Vishnu in his Krishna aspect — but it is also unmistakably its own thing: a Marathi tradition, carried in a Marathi literature, walking a Maharashtrian road.

The god on the brick

The god himself is a singular figure. The black-stone image in the Pandharpur sanctum stands erect with hands set on the hips and feet planted on a brick, his consort Rakhumai — Rukmini — beside him. He is unarmed and unadorned by the usual fourfold attributes; the posture, arms akimbo and waiting, is unlike any other Vaishnava cult image in India, and it is the single most recognizable thing about the tradition. The Varkaris address him as Vitthal, Vithoba, Pandurang, or simply Mauli (“Mother”), and identify him with Krishna, Vishnu come to stand at Pandharpur for the sake of his devotees.

Modern scholarship has treated Vitthal’s origins as a more tangled question. The standard study is the Marathi scholar Ramchandra Chintaman Dhere’s Sri Vitthal: Ek Mahasamanvay (1984), which won the Sahitya Akademi award and was translated by Anne Feldhaus as Rise of a Folk God: Vitthal of Pandharpur (Oxford University Press, 2011). Dhere reads Vitthal not as a Sanskritic deity from the start but as a regional, probably pastoral god — a hero of the cattle-herding Dhangar communities of the Deccan plateau, worshipped from perhaps the sixth century, who absorbed local hero-cults and only later, with the bhakti efflorescence of the thirteenth century, was drawn fully into the Vaishnava fold and identified with Krishna. On Dhere’s account the figure also carries Shaiva, and possibly Buddhist and Jain, sediment — an amalgamation rather than an avatar — and his resemblance to Venkateshwara of Tirupati marks a shared Deccan pattern in which a regional god is reread as a form of Vishnu. The tradition’s own theology and the historian’s genealogy sit side by side here without canceling each other: to the Varkari, Vitthal is Vishnu standing on a brick at Pandharpur; to the scholar, the brick and the akimbo arms are the traces of a god who was something else before the sants sang him into the Vaishnava world.

The brick has its own story. Pundalik, the tradition tells, was a devotee so wholly absorbed in serving his aged parents that when the god himself arrived to bless him, he tossed out a brick for the visitor to stand on and asked him to wait until the service was done. The god waited — and waits still, on the brick, in the posture the image preserves. The tradition reads the legend plainly: devotion expressed as duty, attention to the living before one’s eyes, outranks even a divine arrival. Pandharpur is for this reason also called Pundarikapura, the town of Pundalik, and the place where the Bhima bends past the temple is venerated as the Chandrabhaga, the moon-river.

The line of the sants

The movement’s spine is its line of sant-poets, and they are the reason a regional cult became a literature and a discipline rather than a shrine.

Jnaneshwar — Dnyaneshwar, c. 1275–1296 — stands at the head. Before he was twenty-one he composed the Jnaneshwari (Bhavartha Dipika), a vast Marathi verse exposition of the Bhagavad Gita running to some nine thousand verses in the four-line Marathi ovi meter, completed by tradition in 1290 at Nevase. It is among the oldest surviving complete literary works in Marathi, and it did something decisive: it carried the metaphysics of the Vedanta — argued in Sanskrit, guarded by Brahmin learning — into the spoken language of farmers, on the explicit principle that the saving knowledge of the Gita should be available to everyone, not sealed behind a sacred tongue. The Jnaneshwari remains the tradition’s foundational book. Jnaneshwar wrote also the Amrutanubhav, an independent philosophical poem, and at the close of his short life took sanjeevan samadhi — entombment in conscious meditation — at Alandi, where his shrine still anchors one end of the pilgrimage.

A page of the Pasaydan, the concluding verses of Jnaneshwar’s Jnaneshwari (c. 1290), the tradition’s foundational Marathi text — scan from the Internet Archive, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

Namdev the tailor (traditionally c. 1270–1350) followed, and his career shows how porous the borders of this devotion were. A shimpi by caste, he settled at Pandharpur and made his abhangs and his kirtan — the sung, performed retelling of the god’s praise — the living form of the tradition. He is claimed at once by the Marathi Varkaris and by the northern Sant lineage of Hindi: sixty-one of his hymns were canonized in the Guru Granth Sahib, the scripture of Sikhism, when Guru Arjan compiled it in 1604, placing Namdev in the same volume as Kabir and the other bhagats. Christian Lee Novetzke’s study of Namdev’s afterlife (Columbia University Press, 2008) treats this double reception as the central fact about him: he survives less as a fixed body of text than as a memory continuously re-performed, a name to which centuries of singers attached their own verses.

Eknath — c. 1533–1599, a Deshastha Brahmin of Paithan — gave the tradition both a text and a precedent. In 1583 he renovated Jnaneshwar’s neglected samadhi at Alandi, and in 1584 he produced the critical edition of the Jnaneshwari that, after nearly three centuries of copying and interpolation, fixed the form in which the poem is still read. His own Eknathi Bhagavat, a Marathi commentary on the eleventh book of the Bhagavata Purana in some twenty thousand ovis, and his Bhavartha Ramayan, extended the project of bringing Sanskrit scripture into Marathi verse. A learned Brahmin who is remembered for eating with the despised and for defending the dignity of the low-born, Eknath is the tradition’s bridge between its scholarly and its egalitarian impulses.

Tukaram (c. 1608–1649) is, for many, its voice. A Kunbi grain-dealer of Dehu — a shudra by birth, a man who failed at business and lost a wife and child to famine before turning wholly to the god — he composed abhangs, short singable devotional lyrics, that are among the best-loved poetry in any Indian language. Where Jnaneshwar reasons, Tukaram speaks: he scolds Vitthal, pleads with him, accuses him of cruelty and indifference, and praises him with a directness that needs no commentary. Roughly four thousand of his abhangs survive; the standard English rendering remains the three-volume Poems of Tukārāma of J. Nelson Fraser and K. B. Marathe (1909–1915), itself a missionary-academic production that, in the idiom of its time, called the abhangs “psalms.” Jnaneshwar and Tukaram each carry a fuller treatment of their own.

A still from Sant Tukaram (1936), the Prabhat Film Company’s landmark depiction of the abhang-poet’s life — Prabhat Film Company, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain in India).

Across the caste order

The sants came from across the social order, and this is constitutive of the tradition rather than incidental to it. Alongside the Brahmin Eknath and the shudra Tukaram stand Chokhamela, of a Mahar community then held untouchable, whose abhangs speak from the far side of the temple door he was not permitted to cross; Janabai, a maidservant in Namdev’s household, who sang of grinding grain and gathering dung as acts of devotion and signed her verses in her own name; and a whole company of occupational saints — Sena the barber, Gora the potter, Savata the gardener, Narahari the goldsmith, Kanhopatra the courtesan. In the tradition’s self-understanding, the road to Pandharpur levels these distinctions: all are Varkaris, all walk, all sing the same abhangs.

How far that devotional openness loosened social hierarchy in practice is a matter scholars treat with care, and the tradition’s own memory is honest about its limits. By its own accounts Chokhamela worshipped from outside the temple door, and his samadhi lies at the foot of the temple steps rather than within; the saguṇa, temple-centered Varkari devotion was, in Dhere’s and Eleanor Zelliot’s reading, caste-permeable in its singing fellowship but not caste-abolitionist in its social order. The Marathi abhang form became, for its low-born poets, a vehicle of dignity and protest within a structure they did not overturn — a different position from the formless-God egalitarianism of the northern Sants, and different again from the modern caste-emancipation movement that grew around the Dalit poet-saint Ravidas, treated under Ravidassia.

The discipline and the road

The discipline is a householder’s, not a renunciant’s — and this is the tradition’s quiet distinction. A Varkari does not leave the world for the forest; the path is followed inside an ordinary life of family and work. Initiation is the taking of a necklace of tulsi beads from a teacher; the obligations that follow are a vegetarian diet, abstention from intoxicants, the steady remembrance of the divine name, the ekadashi fasts, kirtan — the communal singing of the abhangs — and the pilgrimage itself. (The architecture of these observances is described here as meaning, not as method; the tradition transmits them from teacher to initiate, not from a page.)

The vari is the discipline made visible. Twice a year — above all at Ashadhi Ekadashi in the monsoon month of Ashadha, and again at Kartiki Ekadashi in the autumn — processions converge on Pandharpur. At their head go the palkhis, palanquins bearing the padukas, the silver-shod sandals or footprint-images of the sants: Jnaneshwar’s set out from Alandi, Tukaram’s from Dehu. The palanquin custom has a traceable history. Tukaram, in the seventeenth century, is said to have walked carrying Jnaneshwar’s padukas about his neck; his youngest son, Narayan Baba, formalized the palkhi procession in 1685; and in the 1820s Haibatravbaba Arphalkar, a courtier of the Scindia rulers of Gwalior and a devotee of Jnaneshwar, reorganized the march into its present form — ordered ranks, mounted attendants, and the dindi groups into which pilgrims are divided. After a dispute within Tukaram’s family around 1830 the single procession split into the two separate palkhis, from Alandi and from Dehu, that still walk today. Along the way the marchers perform the ringan, in which a riderless horse gallops through the assembled dindis. In recent times hundreds of thousands walk for some two to three weeks together, covering two hundred and fifty kilometers and more on foot, singing the poets’ verses and calling on Vitthal and Rakhumai as they go.

The site of Tukaram’s home at Dehu, near Pune, from which his palanquin sets out each year on the walk to Pandharpur — Suresh Khole, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).

Text, scholarship, and reception

The Varkari tradition has an unusually rich documentary record, and a correspondingly layered reception. Its foundational text, the Jnaneshwari, expounds the Bhagavad Gita — hosted here in the Telang translation the tradition’s commentary takes as its base — and its philosophical register reaches toward the nondualism of the Vedanta. Eknath’s 1584 recension established the critical text; the modern critical study of the Marathi sants begins, in the scholarly-historical register, with R. G. Bhandarkar’s Vaiṣṇavism, Śaivism and Minor Religious Systems (1913), which surveyed the Maharashtrian Vaishnava traditions with a rigor that still holds. R. D. Ranade’s Mysticism in Maharashtra (1933) and Gunther-Dietz Sontheimer’s work on the pastoral substrate followed; Dhere’s Rise of a Folk God is the indispensable study of the deity. Anne Feldhaus has mapped the sacred geography of the Bhima valley and the pilgrimage; Christian Lee Novetzke’s Religion and Public Memory (2008) reconstructs Namdev’s performative afterlife and, in The Quotidian Revolution (2016), reads the Marathi vernacular turn around Jnaneshwar as the opening of a premodern public sphere; Eleanor Zelliot’s work situates Chokhamela and the untouchable saints within the longer history of Dalit assertion.

These distinctions matter because “bhakti” is not one theology. The Varkari god is saguṇa — with form, name, and image — which sets the tradition apart from the nirguṇa devotion of the formless absolute sung by the northern Sants, even as Namdev’s place in both lineages shows the line is porous. And the tradition contains its own internal registers: Jnaneshwar’s Vedantic nondualism, in which the soul and the absolute are finally not two, sits alongside Tukaram’s intimate, quarreling address to a Vitthal who is utterly other and utterly present. The Varkaris have never resolved this into a single doctrine, because the form that binds them is not a creed but a practice — the abhang sung in company, the name remembered, the road walked to Pandharpur.

The earliest substantial English access came through the Protestant missionary-academic complex of late-colonial India, and that framing must be read with its translations. Nicol Macnicol’s Psalms of Maratha Saints (1919) anthologized Jnaneshwar, Namdev, Eknath, Tukaram, and Ramdas, and the title’s word “psalms” is itself an interpretive act, reading a sectarian Varkari liturgical form through a Hebraic-Protestant genre; the same evangelical-comparative idiom shapes Fraser and Marathe’s Poems of Tukārāma (1909–1915), still the standard English Tukaram, published by the Christian Literature Society for India. At the level of the larger category, John Stratton Hawley’s A Storm of Songs (Harvard University Press, 2015) argues that the very idea of a single, pan-Indian “bhakti movement” was largely a twentieth-century construction of nationalist literary historiography built on a colonial-orientalist scaffolding — a caution that recommends reading the Varkari tradition first as the specific Marathi formation it is, and only then as a regional member of a wider family that includes the Tamil hymnists of Vaishnava bhakti and the temple theology of Srivaisnavism, the northern Sants and Kabir and Mirabai.

Read across that family, the Varkari movement holds a distinct place: a saguṇa, temple-and-pilgrimage tradition carried by a vernacular poetry, with a god who is local and cosmic at once and a fellowship that walks. Its real scripture, observers have often said, is in some measure the walk itself — doctrine carried in feet and song as much as in argument. Jnaneshwar reasons toward a nondualism close to Vedanta; Tukaram simply talks to his god. The tradition holds both, and keeps walking.

→ In the library: The Bhagavadgītā (Telang, 1882) — the text the Jnaneshwari expounds · Tagore — Songs of Kabir (1915), a cognate sant-poet

→ Related: Vedanta Advaita Visistadvaita Dvaita · Tirumurai Canon · Jnaneshwar · Tukaram · Bhagavad Gita · Krishna Bhakti · Vishnu · Sant Tradition Nirguna Bhakti · Bhakti Movement · Indic Bhakti · Tamil Vaisnava Bhakti · Kabir · Mirabai · Sikhism · Guru Granth Sahib · Srivaisnavism · Ravidassia