The Way

A vow shaped like a road

The Marathi word vārkarī (वारकरी) is built from two pieces. Vārī (वारी) is the journey, the recurring pilgrimage, the trip taken at a fixed time toward a fixed place. Karī is the one who does it. A vārkarī, then, is someone who undertakes the vārī: a person whose life is organized around walking, again and again, to a particular god in a particular town. The town is Pandharpur (पंढरपूर) on the Bhima river. The god is Vitthala (विठ्ठल), also called Pandurang or Vithoba, who stands on a brick with his hands on his hips, neither dancing like Krishna nor reposing like Vishnu, simply waiting.

The first thing to understand about the Varkari tradition (वारकरी संप्रदाय) is that the name does not point to a doctrine. It points to a practice. The name does not mean "follower of a teacher" or "member of a school." It names the act. To be a Varkari is to be one who does the vārī. Eleanor Zelliot, whose decades of work on the tradition remain among the most careful in English, repeatedly insists on this point: the Varkari sampradaya is held together not by a single founder, not by a single text, not by a single guru lineage, but by the shared practice of the pilgrimage and the singing of the abhanga hymns of the sants on the way. R. D. Ranade, in the older but still useful Mysticism in Maharashtra, made the same observation in different words: this is a tradition whose theology is in its songs and whose creed is its road.

That is the first frame. Not a sect with a temple and rules. A way of organizing a life around the rhythm of walking to God.

What the etymology actually carries

It is worth lingering on vārī. The word does not simply mean "pilgrimage" in the generic sense English uses for any sacred journey. Vārī carries the sense of a turn, a recurrence, a regularly repeated visit. A Varkari does not go to Pandharpur once in a lifetime as a Hajj-style obligation. The Varkari goes again. The vow is a vow of repetition. Some take a vārī every month; others manage one of the two great pilgrimages a year; the most committed do every ekadashi (एकादशी) and both great walks. The return is the point. The road is not a single climactic event but a metronome.

Christian Novetzke, in his work on Namdev, has argued that the genre of bhakti the Varkari sants forged is built on a kind of perpetual approach: the devotee never stops walking, because the form of devotion is the walking. Stopping would not be arrival. It would be apostasy.

The vow itself

When a person formally enters the tradition, they take a vow. The vow has, by long convention, four observable elements. Different teachers describe them with slight variations of order or emphasis, but the core is steady.

The tulsi mala. The Varkari wears a necklace of tulsi (तुलसी) beads, usually with 108 small wooden beads strung on cotton thread. The mala is given by an existing Varkari, traditionally a guru or an elder of one's dindi (दिंडी, the singing-and-walking troupe), in a small initiation. It is worn at all times. The mala marks the wearer publicly as one who has taken the vow. It is not jewellery and is not removed for bathing or sleep. The mala's function is double. It signals to the community that the wearer has accepted certain disciplines, in particular the abstinence from meat, from alcohol, and from onion and garlic in many households. It is also the instrument of the daily nama-japa: the beads are turned through the fingers as the name of God is repeated.

The ekadashi fast. The eleventh day of each lunar fortnight, on both the bright (शुक्ल) and the dark (कृष्ण) halves, is fasted. This gives twenty-four ekadashis a year, and it gives the calendar its texture. The fast varies: some Varkaris take only water, some take fruit and milk, some take a single meal of permitted grains. The two ekadashis that anchor the year are Āṣāḍhī ekadashi in the monsoon month of Ashadha (आषाढ) and Kārtikī ekadashi in Kartika (कार्तिक). These are the days on which the two Great Wari processions arrive in Pandharpur. The fasting calendar and the pilgrimage calendar are the same calendar.

The small wari. Between the great pilgrimages, the Varkari maintains a smaller, local rhythm. On the days approaching ekadashi, dindis form in towns and villages and walk in procession to the local Vitthal shrine, singing abhangas. Anne Feldhaus, in her work on regional sacred geography in Maharashtra, has documented how thickly the landscape is layered with these smaller Vitthal shrines and the local processional routes that connect them. The point of the small wari is that the pilgrimage is not deferred to once a year. The vow is daily and weekly, not annual.

The Great Wari. Twice a year, in Ashadha and Kartika, hundreds of thousands of Varkaris walk to Pandharpur. The two largest contingents are the palkhi processions: one carrying the padukas (sandals) of Dnyaneshwar (ज्ञानेश्वर) from Alandi (आळंदी), one carrying the padukas of Tukaram (तुकाराम) from Dehu (देहू). The walk takes roughly twenty-one days and ends with the singing of the abhangas of the sants on the sandy bank of the Chandrabhaga river outside Pandharpur on ekadashi morning. The annual walk is not an exceptional event in the Varkari's year. It is the year's spine.

These four are the visible structure of the vow. Beneath them sits a fifth thing that the tradition treats as inseparable from the rest, though it is harder to put on a list: the cultivation of bhāva (भाव), the interior disposition that the outward practices are in service of. The mala, the fast, the walk are the body's part. The bhāva is what the body is in service of.

The practices that recur

The practices that recur in Varkari self-description, which different teachers count differently, can be grouped as follows. They are not separate technologies of devotion. They are faces of the same single practice, which is the inhabiting of the divine name.

Nama-japa. The repetition of the name. The two phrases that anchor Varkari japa are "विठ्ठल विठ्ठल" (Viṭhṭhala Viṭhṭhala) and "राम कृष्ण हरि" (Rāma Kṛṣṇa Hari). These are not mantras in the technical Tantric sense, with bīja syllables and sealed transmission. They are public, simple, and given to anyone. Ranade describes the Varkari relation to the Name as the central nerve of the whole sampradaya, the place where saguna devotion (devotion to the form of Vitthala) and nirguna devotion (devotion to the formless) become indistinguishable, because the Name is both.

Satsang. The keeping of the company of those who walk this way. Sangha in the Varkari sense is concrete: it is the dindi, the singing group, the household where the Haripath is sung at evening, the gathering on ekadashi at the local shrine. The tradition is emphatic that bhakti is not a private affair. Tukaram's abhangas return often to the figure of the sant-sangati, the company of the saints, as the condition under which the inner work becomes possible at all. (See the Tukaram Gatha; the relevant abhangas are gathered in the Government of Maharashtra critical edition compiled by V. S. Bendre, and discussed in Dilip Chitre's translation Says Tuka.)

The Haripath. The daily reading or singing of the Haripath (हरिपाठ), the cycle of twenty-seven abhangas attributed to Dnyaneshwar that lays out the discipline of remembering Hari.¹ The Haripath has the status in Varkari practice that the nitya pātha (daily liturgy) has in many other Hindu communities: it is the minimum, the floor, the thing one does whether or not one feels like it. A Varkari household sings the Haripath in the evening. A dindi on the road sings it during the walk. The text itself is short enough to memorize and is normally sung from memory.

Kirtan. The performed singing of abhangas, usually by a kirtankar (कीर्तनकार) who alternates between sung verse, spoken commentary, story, and the call-and-response refrain in which the audience joins. The Varkari kirtan tradition has its own pedagogy and its own teachers, distinct from but overlapping with the Haridasi kirtan tradition. Christian Novetzke's Religion and Public Memory, focused on the figure of Namdev, treats kirtan as the medium through which the sants' words have been kept alive across seven centuries: not in the manuscript, primarily, but in the mouth of the kirtankar.

The Wari. The pilgrimage itself, treated as a practice and not only as an event. To walk in the dindi for twenty-one days, sleeping where one is given a place, eating what is donated, singing the abhangas through the heat and the rain, is itself the discipline. Concrete physical fact, not metaphor. Feet that bleed, the dust of the Deccan in the lungs, the Mauli call rising and falling along a column of pilgrims that stretches for miles.

Older lists sometimes substitute pravachan (the formal exposition of scripture) for kirtan, or fold satsang into kirtan, or count the Haripath under nama-japa rather than separately. The variations matter less than the structure: a daily practice (Haripath, japa), a community practice (satsang, kirtan), and an annual practice (wari) that integrates all of them.

What the Varkari path is not

The Varkari sampradaya did not arise in a vacuum. Maharashtra in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries already held several developed religious streams, and the early Varkari sants stand out by what they took from those streams and what they refused.

The Naths. The Nāth sampradaya of haṭhayoga siddhas, going back to Matsyendranath and Gorakhnath, was strongly present in Maharashtra. The Varkari tradition acknowledges this lineage at the source: Dnyaneshwar's elder brother and guru, Nivruttinath, is presented in the hagiographies as having received the Nath transmission, and Dnyaneshwar's verses on yoga in the sixth chapter of the Dnyaneshwari show real familiarity with Nath physiological vocabulary. But the Varkari movement made a turn that the Nath tradition did not make. It took the practice out of the cave and the math of the renunciate yogi and put it on the open road, in the mouth of the householder, in Marathi rather than the Sanskrit-Apabhramsha mix of the Nath songbooks. The Varkari acknowledges its Nath roots and turns elsewhere. (Wave 2 Chapter 3 carries the detailed initiation lineage.)

The Mahanubhavas. The Mahānubhāva (महानुभाव) sect, founded by Chakradhar in the thirteenth century, was the other major Marathi-language religious movement of the period: strict Krishna-devotees, ascetic, anti-caste in some respects, and producers of their own large vernacular literature (the Līḷācaritra and others). On certain points the Varkari and Mahanubhava streams overlap: vernacular Marathi as the language of the holy, criticism of Brahminical exclusivity, devotion centered on a form of Krishna. But on the central object they parted. The Mahanubhavas took Chakradhar himself as the incarnation of Parameshwar and rejected the worship of Vitthal at Pandharpur. The Varkari tradition took Pandharpur as its center and Vitthal as its god, and several Varkari sants polemicized against the Mahanubhavas in their abhangas. Jon Keune's Shared Devotion, Shared Food gives the most careful recent treatment of how this rivalry played out.

Brahminical orthodoxy. The most consequential thing the Varkari tradition did, structurally, was bypass the Sanskrit Brahminical establishment. Dnyaneshwar wrote his commentary on the Bhagavad Gita in Marathi, in ovi meter, in the language of farmers and weavers, when the convention was iron: scripture was Sanskrit and its exposition was Sanskrit. The Bhaktavijaya preserves the tradition that Dnyaneshwar was opposed by Brahmin authorities at Paithan; the historical layer underneath this hagiography is debated, but the cultural fact is clear enough. The sants of the Varkari line, century after century, were not Brahmins for the most part. Namdev was a tailor (शिंपी). Gora was a potter (कुम्भार). Sena was a barber (न्हावी). Savata was a gardener (माळी). Chokhamela (चोखामेळा) was a Mahar, an untouchable. Janabai was a maidservant. The tradition's claim, made over and over in their abhangas, was that the Name dissolves caste. The claim has two registers: metaphysical (the Name reaches across all marks of birth because what it names lies behind them) and sociological (the dindi, in which a tailor and a Brahmin sing the same line, embodies that reach in practice). Chapter 5 takes up the gap between the two registers.

This bypass was not anti-Vedic in the sectarian sense. Dnyaneshwar quotes the Upanishads constantly. Eknath later wrote a vast Marathi Bhāgavata commentary that is theologically continuous with the Sanskrit Bhagavata Purana. The sampradaya's relation to Vedic and Puranic literature is one of grateful inheritance translated into Marathi. What the Varkari sants refused was not the scripture. It was the gatekeepers.

Why this opening matters

A reader coming to the Varkari tradition for the first time often looks for what they would find at the entrance to most religious traditions: a founder, a doctrine, a creed, a clergy. The Varkari sampradaya offers none of these in the form expected. It has no single founder; it has a chain of sants beginning conventionally with Dnyaneshwar in the thirteenth century, but Dnyaneshwar himself credits Nivruttinath, who credits the Naths. It has no creed in the propositional sense; it has the Haripath. It has no clergy with the power to admit and excommunicate; it has gurus who give the tulsi mala, and the dindi which is a community of practice rather than an office.

What the tradition has, instead of those things, is a road, a song that travels along it, and a god at its end who is said to be waiting. What it asks of its members is that they keep walking. G. B. Sardar put the point starkly: the unity of the tradition is not in what its members believe but in what they do together at the end of Ashadha each year. Eleanor Zelliot, who saw it for forty years, said it more directly. To understand the Varkari sampradaya, you must understand that its central truth is something the body learns by walking before the mind can put it into a sentence.

The chapters that follow trace the parts: the shrine and the god, the sibling-saints, Namdev's northern bridge, the sants of the margins, Janabai, Eknath, Tukaram, Bahinabai, the abhanga as form, the modern pilgrimage, the theology. But the unit beneath all of them is the one defined here. A vow. A road. A song. A god on a brick. And the body that learns, by walking, what cannot be told in any other way.

Sources

• Eleanor Zelliot, From Untouchable to Dalit: Essays on the Ambedkar Movement (Manohar, 1992); and The Experience of Hinduism: Essays on Religion in Maharashtra, ed. Eleanor Zelliot and Maxine Berntsen (SUNY Press, 1988), especially Zelliot's introductory and bibliographic essays on the Varkari sampradaya.
• Eleanor Zelliot, "The Medieval Bhakti Movement in History: An Essay on the Literature in English," in Hinduism: New Essays in the History of Religions, ed. Bardwell L. Smith (Brill, 1976).
• R. D. Ranade, Mysticism in Maharashtra: Indian Mysticism (Motilal Banarsidass reprint of the 1933 edition). This volume sits within Ranade's Pathway to God trilogy. It is related to, but distinct from, Pathway to God in Marathi Literature (the Marathi-literature volume of the trilogy) and Pathway to God in Hindi Literature; the three are sometimes confused in older bibliographies because the umbrella series title circulates alongside the individual volume titles.
• G. B. Sardar, The Saint-Poets of Maharashtra: Their Impact on Society, trans. Kumud Mehta (Orient Longman, 1969).
• Christian Lee Novetzke, Religion and Public Memory: A Cultural History of Saint Namdev in India (Columbia University Press, 2008).
• Christian Lee Novetzke, The Quotidian Revolution: Vernacularization, Religion, and the Premodern Public Sphere in India (Columbia University Press, 2016).
• Anne Feldhaus, Connected Places: Region, Pilgrimage, and Geographical Imagination in India (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).
• Jon Keune, Shared Devotion, Shared Food: Equality and the Bhakti-Caste Question in Western India (Oxford University Press, 2021).
• Jon Keune, "Eknath in Context: The Literary, Social, and Political Milieus of an Early Modern Saint-Poet," doctoral dissertation, Columbia University, 2011.
• Mahipati, Bhaktavijaya, trans. Justin E. Abbott and Narhar R. Godbole as Stories of Indian Saints (2 vols., Motilal Banarsidass reprint of the 1933 edition).
• Nabhadas, Bhaktamāl, with the Bhaktirasabodhinī commentary of Priyadas; standard edition Tejkumar Press, Lucknow, with English summaries available in the secondary literature.
• Dilip Chitre, Says Tuka: Selected Poetry of Tukaram (Penguin India, 1991), introduction.
• Sri Tukaramachi Gatha, Government of Maharashtra critical edition compiled by V. S. Bendre and others (1950 to 1973).
• Dnyaneshwari, with the standard Marathi text edited by V. K. Rajwade and the English translation of V. G. Pradhan, ed. H. M. Lambert (SUNY Press, 1969).
• The Haripath of Dnyaneshwar, Sant Eknath Maharaj Sansthan recension, as presented at /scripture/haripath.
• For the Mahanubhava sampradaya as comparator: Anne Feldhaus, The Religious System of the Mahanubhava Sect (Manohar, 1983); and Feldhaus, trans., The Deeds of God in Riddhipur (Oxford University Press, 1984).