Vithobaविठोबा

Vithoba (विठोबा), also Viṭṭhal or Pāṇḍuraṅga, is the deity of Pandharpur on the Bhīmā river in Maharashtra — a form of Krishna-Vishnu shown in a posture found nowhere else: standing erect on a brick, arms akimbo, hands resting on his hips, waiting. Around this waiting god grew the Vārkarī sampradāya, the devotional movement that has shaped Marathi religion, literature and social life for some seven centuries.

The story

Tradition explains the brick with the tale of Puṇḍalīka, a devotee absorbed in serving his aged parents when the god came to visit. Unwilling to interrupt his duty, Puṇḍalīka tossed a brick over his shoulder for the visitor to stand on and asked him to wait. The god has waited ever since — the legend's point being that service to those in one's care outranks even the divine caller, and that God is content to stand on a brick for such a devotee. He is worshipped with his consort Rakhumāī, the Marathi Rukmiṇī.

The Vārkarī tradition

Vithoba's fame is inseparable from the poet-saints who sang to him in Marathi from the thirteenth century onward: Jñāneśvar, whose commentary carried the Bhagavad Gītā into the vernacular; the tailor Nāmdev; Eknāth; the outcaste Chokhāmeḷā; the servant-woman Janābāī; and the grocer Tukārām, perhaps the best-loved of all. Their abhaṅgas — short, blunt, intimate lyrics — form one of India's great devotional literatures, and their inclusion of women and the low-born gave the tradition its enduring egalitarian cast.

The pilgrimage

Twice a year, and above all in the month of Āṣāḍha, hundreds of thousands of Vārkarīs walk to Pandharpur in the vārī, accompanying palanquins bearing the sandals of the saints from their home towns — Jñāneśvar's from Alandi, Tukārām's from Dehu. Walking, singing the saints' songs, taking the god's names in the chant of Viṭṭhal, the pilgrims enact the tradition's essence: a god reached on foot, in company, in one's own language.