Chapter 11. The Wari: the pilgrimage today

A road, two palkhis, one town

Once a year, in the month of Āṣāḍha, roughly mid-June to mid-July, two silver palanquins leave two small towns in western Maharashtra and walk to a third. From Alandi, on the Indrayani river just outside Pune, the pādukā (silver footprints) of Sant Dnyāneshwar are placed in a palkhi (पालखी) and carried south. From Dehu, about thirty-five kilometres away, the pādukā of Sant Tukārām leave at roughly the same time. Both processions move along separate routes for most of three weeks, sometimes converging at a village for the night, sometimes camping a day's walk apart. Both are aimed at one place: the temple of Viṭṭhal at Pandharpur, on the banks of the Bhima river, where they must arrive before Āṣāḍha Shukla Ekādashī, the eleventh day of the bright fortnight of Āṣāḍha.

This is the Wāri. Also called the Pālkhī. It is not the only pilgrimage in the Varkari calendar; there is also the Kārtikī Wari to Pandharpur in November, the monthly walks some bind themselves to, and walks tied to other saints. But the Āṣāḍhī Wari from Alandi and Dehu is the great one. It is what most Maharashtrians mean when they say "the Wari."

The route from Alandi to Pandharpur is about 250 kilometres; the route from Dehu about 230. Both versions take roughly twenty-one days, the precise number varying year to year because the lunar calendar does. The procession averages fifteen to twenty-five kilometres a day, with longer days on the open stretches and shorter ones around the major halt-towns. (See Mokashi, Palkhi: An Indian Pilgrimage, trans. Engblom, and Karve, "On the Road"; figures approximate.)

The Wari is not a march. It is not a parade. It is a moving town. For three weeks, several hundred thousand to a million people share food, road, and song, and the form that holds them was not designed by anyone in particular.

The dindi: a singing-and-walking unit

Inside the procession the basic cell is the dindi. Typically fifty to two hundred pilgrims who walk together, sing together, eat together, sleep together. Each dindi has a banner (its patākā), a name (often a founding sant or a village), a number assigned by the central palkhi committee, and a fixed position in the order of the procession. Some dindis are centuries old. New dindis are added, but old ones do not lightly disappear; they are inherited.

A dindi has discipline. It marches in a column, usually two abreast, with women toward the front or in their own section, and the lead singers and the mridanga and tāl (cymbal) players setting tempo. The day's abhangas are not improvised. They follow a sequence: morning haripath (the fifteenth-century Marathi devotional sequence by Dnyaneshwar that the Varkari tradition uses as its daily breath), the abhangas of the route, the evening kirtan when camp is made. At halts, dindis cook in their own pots, sleep in their own corner, look after their own old and children and injured. The palkhi committee (Pālkhī Sohaḷā Samitī, Sansthān) manages the macro level: route permits, water, sanitation, police, the relationship with the Pandharpur temple. The dindi is the unit of life inside that frame.

There are women's dindis, men's dindis, mixed dindis, dindis from a village or caste-association or city neighbourhood, dindis that have walked with a specific palkhi for a hundred and fifty years. Around three hundred registered dindis walk with the Dnyaneshwar palkhi from Alandi in recent years, per the Sansthan's published palkhi-registration rolls, and similar numbers walk with Tukaram's from Dehu. (Exact count varies year to year. See Feldhaus, Connected Places.)

The rhythm of the road

The procession has fixed halts. The towns where the Dnyaneshwar palkhi stops at night, and their order, have not changed in the modern period. PuneSaswadJejuriWalheLonandTaradgaonPhaltanBaradNateputeMalshirasVelapurBhandishegaonWakhariPandharpur Each of these towns has its own welcome for the palkhi, its own customary halting spot, often a temple or maidan or a designated field outside the bazaar. The same families in some towns have served water and meals to the palkhi for generations.

At certain points along the route, the palkhi stops for a ringaṇ (रिंगण). The ringan is a circumambulation performed by a riderless horse, called the māuli's horse, who runs around the pādukā at full gallop while the dindis stand in concentric rings and watch. There are standing ringans, where the horse runs a smaller closed pattern, and dhāwtā ringans (running ringans), where the horse runs the full circuit. The ringan at Wakhari, near the end, is the most famous, and is usually the one televised. In tradition the horse is Dnyaneshwar's own; he is led but not ridden, and to be touched by the dust kicked up by his hooves is auspicious. Traditions on the horse's identity vary: some accounts call him the saint's living mount, others a successor animal in a lineage of Sansthan-kept horses, others as symbolic of the saint's vehicle; the Dehu palkhi has its own horse with its own legendry. There is in the modern period some choreography to the ringan; the committee organises it, the police clear it, the local administration counts heads. Whether this dilutes the ringan or preserves it is a question one walks past, as one walks past many things.

The day starts before dawn. The palkhi is bathed and dressed; abhangas are sung; the procession sets out by about 6 am, to walk before the sun gets cruel. Around 11 am or noon the column halts for the day's main meal. The afternoon is for rest if the route allows, walking again if it does not. By dusk the dindis are at the next halt; the kirtan starts; tents go up where there are no halls; dinner is cooked or distributed; people sleep on the floor.

Mauli, mauli

If you walk into the Wari for an hour and ask what it sounds like, the answer is one word, repeated: Māuli (माउली). Mother. It is what the pilgrims call Sant Dnyaneshwar. It is also what they call each other.

When two pilgrims pass on the road, each says "Māuli" and folds their hands. When water is offered, giver and taker each say "Māuli." When a child is helped over a stone, when an old woman is steadied on a slope, when a foot is bandaged, when food is passed in a queue, the word is Māuli. It is a greeting, an acknowledgement, a thanks, a please, an apology, a benediction. It collapses addressee, addresser, and deity into one designation; the doctrinal claim that lover, beloved, and Lord are not finally distinguishable is here enacted grammatically before it is ever stated. (See Novetzke, Religion and Public Memory, and Aklujkar on Marathi sant poetics.)

The other call is "Vitthal Vitthal." It is sung in waves down the column. A dindi at the front begins the line; the line is taken up by the next dindi and the next, until it travels the full length of the procession and dies somewhere a kilometre back, only to start again from the front. There is no leader and no schedule for it. It is the breath of the column.

Twenty-five kilometres a day

The Wari does not aestheticise itself. The feet bleed. By the third or fourth day, almost every walker is favouring one foot or the other. The medical camps along the route, run by the state, the Sansthān, and various NGOs, are mostly treating blisters, sprains, abrasions, and gastrointestinal infections; the Maharashtra public health camps release records each year listing tens of thousands of out-patient visits. Heat-stroke is the most serious common danger, because Āṣāḍha is the cusp of the monsoon and not yet reliably wet. Some years the procession is dry and brutal; some years it is rained on for ten days straight, walking through mud and slipping and arriving in Pandharpur with sodden bedding and chest infections.

Pilgrims sleep where they can: village schools, temple compounds, fields outside the town with rope-and-tarpaulin shelters, government-built temporary halls. They eat what is given. Annadāna (अन्नदान), the feeding of pilgrims by villages along the route, is a continuous river of free food: lentils, bhakri (the millet bread of the Deccan), pickle, sometimes rice, sometimes a vegetable. A pilgrim who walks the full Wari and is asked where they ate often cannot remember; the giving was that constant.

The bodies on the road belong to every kind of person. Subsistence farmers from Marathwada walk next to retired professors from Pune. Women in their seventies who have walked the Wari for forty years carry the same staff they carried at thirty. Software engineers take leave to walk a few days. There are children. There are entire families, three generations, each with their own pace and their own pain. The caste composition spans, within the practising Varkari community, every jāti; the gender ratio is roughly even and in some dindis tilts toward women. (See Feldhaus and Karve, on social heterogeneity of the column.)

What walking does that sitting cannot is not a mystical claim. It is a physiological one. A body that has walked for twenty-one days is a body whose weight has dropped, whose digestion has shifted to the simplest food, whose sleep has gone short and deep, whose proprioception has changed because the soles of the feet are differently informed. The mind that occupies this body has fewer thoughts in any given hour, and the thoughts that arrive arrive shorter. "Hari" instead of an argument about Hari. The line about the Name as the boat that crosses the ocean of births does not become more philosophically true on the road. It becomes louder, the way a sound becomes louder when the wind drops. This is the difference, and it is not subtle, and a pilgrim who has walked once tends not to need it explained.

The numbers, and the politics

The contemporary Āṣāḍhī Wari at Pandharpur is one of the largest annual pilgrimages in India. It is smaller than the Kumbh Mela's peak gatherings and not on the order of the Hajj, but it is the largest annual walking pilgrimage on the subcontinent, and the most demographically continuous: the same dindis, the same routes, year on year, without the once-in-twelve-years cyclic logic of the Kumbh. Estimates of the number of pilgrims arriving for the Ekadashi vary widely, depending on whether one counts only those who walked or all those who came by bus and train, and on whether one counts only the Ekadashi day or the full week. Recent years have seen estimates of seven to ten lakh, 700,000 to 1,000,000, with some accounts going higher. (Figures from Maharashtra state government press releases and Pandharpur Mandir Sansthan; see also Mokashi/Engblom. Approximate and contested.)

The town of Pandharpur, with a normal resident population on the order of a hundred thousand, swells by an order of magnitude. Sanitation, water, crowd-control at the temple, riverbank management, and emergency medicine are real public-health questions. Pandharpur has had stampede incidents in its history; the temple darshan queue can take many hours; the Bhima river, in which pilgrims bathe before the temple visit, is in some years polluted to a degree that dries out into infection statistics. The Maharashtra government publishes annual planning documents, and the press covers the public-health load each year.

The Wari has, in the contemporary period, been politically appropriated. State politicians attend the palkhi, sometimes walk a symbolic kilometre, sometimes garland it. Party flags have appeared in some dindis at some moments. There is commercial accretion: branded water bottles, sponsored medical camps, tour-operator packages for those who want to walk a day or two without the discomfort of the rest. The Varkari tradition has, on the whole, a mild immune response: the dindis are too old, too numerous, too loosely federated, and too theologically committed to non-attachment to be easily captured. But the appropriation is real.

The Wari survives this appropriation because what holds it together is older than any politics around it. A million people walk to Pandharpur because they have made a vow, or because their grandmother made a vow, or because walking and singing toward the standing god on the brick is what the Varkari tradition is, and has been, for at least seven hundred years. The body learns, over twenty-one days, what the mind cannot learn in a year of reading. Haripath becomes the foot. Saṅgha becomes the dindi. Viṭṭhal becomes the moment after the queue ends and the doorway widens and the standing figure on the brick is, finally, in front of you.

Sources

• Mokashi, Digambar Balkrishna. Palkhi: An Indian Pilgrimage. Trans. Philip C. Engblom. SUNY Press, 1987. Load-bearing for dindi life, ringan, halt-town etiquette, the day's rhythm.
• Karve, Iravati. "On the Road: A Maharashtrian Pilgrimage." Journal of Asian Studies 22, no. 1 (1962): 13-29. Foundational anthropologist's account; used for social composition.
• Feldhaus, Anne. Connected Places: Region, Pilgrimage, and Geographical Imagination in India. Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. For the social texture of pilgrim groups. See also Feldhaus, Religion and Society in Maharashtra, ed. with Eleanor Zelliot.
• Novetzke, Christian Lee. Religion and Public Memory: A Cultural History of Saint Namdev in India. Columbia University Press, 2008. For "Māuli" and the Varkari relationship to public performance.
• Aklujkar, Vidyut. Essays on Marathi sant poetics and Varkari devotional vocabulary.
• Tharu, Susie, and K. Lalita, eds. Women Writing in India: 600 B.C. to the Present, Vol. 1. Feminist Press / Oxford University Press, 1991. Source for the Janabai abhanga reproduced in this chapter; cross-referenced against Sakal Sant Gatha for the Marathi text.
• Sakal Sant Gatha (compiled Marathi corpus of the Varkari sants, twentieth-century editions). Reference for Marathi originals of the Janabai abhanga.
• Government of Maharashtra, annual Pandharpur Wari planning documents and post-event reports (Department of Public Health, Pandharpur Mandir Sansthan). For crowd estimates, sanitation and medical camp figures, route logistics. Figures approximate.
• Sansthan Sri Sant Dnyaneshwar Maharaj Palkhi Sohala (Alandi) and corresponding Sansthan at Dehu, palkhi route circulars and registered-dindi rolls. For the approximately three hundred registered dindis, the order of halt-towns, and the ringan locations.

Note on contested figures: pilgrim counts for Āṣāḍhī Ekādashī at Pandharpur are reported variously across government, temple, and press sources. The 700,000 to 1,000,000 range used in this chapter is the range most commonly reported in recent years and is to be treated as an order-of-magnitude estimate, not a precise figure. The route distances, average daily walking distances, and the registered-dindi count are similarly approximate; pilgrims and committees give slightly different numbers for different years and routes.

Editorial note: this chapter does not carry an Ananta passage. The Phase 0 corpus search (ananta-corpus-findings.md) returned no teaching passage on the Wari, palkhi, dindi, ringan, or the Alandi-Dehu-Pandharpur geography. Mauli and Alandi appear in the corpus only inside sung Marathi abhanga text at satsang bhajan sessions, not as topics taught. The chapter stands without a quoted Ananta voice; should fuller transcripts surface, this acknowledgement will be revisited.