Place · Vitthal pilgrimage town · India

Pandharpūr

Also known as Pandharpur, Pandharpūr

Function

Sacred site & pilgrimage

Tradition

Marathi saint traditions; ethnographic accounts

Confidence

Established / referenced

Location

17.679, 75.323

Connections (11)

• Parivrajaka legShatrunjaya / Pālitānā

  Palitana and Pandharpur were both on the route of Vivekananda's wandering years — a Jain temple-city of some nine hundred shrines on one hill, and the Maharashtrian town where the Varkari palkhis converge on Vithoba. Neither was his own tradition. The point of the parivrajaka years was to walk the whole existing sacred map of India, of every sect, and he came back from it with a political and cultural argument rather than a devotional one.

• Life routeNāmdev

  Nāmdev was a calico-printer of Pandharpūr and asked to be buried on the temple's first step so that every pilgrim entering would tread on him. The step is still shown and still touched, which makes the humblest claim in the tradition also the most unavoidable part of the building. He is the earliest of the great Varkarī poets by about a generation, which makes the tradition's first major voice an artisan rather than a Brahmin.

• Pilgrimage order ofVarkarī sampradāya

  Pandharpūr is what the Varkarī order is organised around: the vārī, the twice-yearly walk to Vitthal at Āshādhi and Kārtiki Ekādashi, is the observance from which the order takes its name. A vārkarī is simply one who makes the vārī, so membership is defined by walking rather than by doctrine or birth.

• Image migrationHampi Vitthala complex

  Vijayanagara's Vitthala temple was built for the Pandharpūr deity, and tradition holds the image was brought south — by some accounts for safety, by others as a prize. It was later returned. The Hampi complex remains the grandest building ever raised for Vitthal, standing empty of him. Krishnadevarāya's masons gave it the stone chariot and the musical pillars that are now Hampi's emblem, so the empire's most photographed building was raised for a Maharashtrian village deity.

• Procession toĀlandi

  The Dnyāneshwar palkhī leaves Ālandi about eighteen days before Āshādhi Ekādashi and walks some two hundred and fifty kilometres to Pandharpūr. The pādukās ride in a silver palanquin; everyone else walks, in dindis that hold their own order on the road, singing abhangs and stopping at the same villages every year.

• Procession toDehū

  Tukārām's palkhī leaves Dehū a day before Dnyāneshwar's and takes a slightly shorter road to Pandharpūr. The two meet at Wākhri on the eve of Āshādhi Ekādashi and enter the town together. The ringan, where horses run through the assembled dindis, is run on the way at fixed places. Between them the two processions move several hundred thousand people on foot across Maharashtra every monsoon, in dindis that keep their own order and their own cooks for the whole three weeks.

• Parivrajaka legKanyākumārī

  A leg of Vivekananda's five years of wandering, 1888 to 1893, which took him from Vārānasī and Ayodhyā through Vrindāvan, Pandharpūr and the Deccan to Kanyākumārī, where he swam to the rock and sat three days. He left for Chicago from the far south, having walked most of the country first.

• Teaching lineageVallabhāchārya

  Pandharpūr is one of Vallabha's eighty-four baithaks, the seats where tradition has him expound the Bhāgavata. The Pushti Mārga and Varkarī geographies therefore overlap at Vitthal's town, two Krishna devotions of different languages and different centuries claiming the same riverbank. Vallabha's own descendants still hold the seats at several of the eighty-four baithaks, which makes the network a family property as well as a pilgrimage, and the two claims have been litigated more than once.

• Life routeSwami Vivekananda

  The Maharashtra leg took him through Pandharpūr, where he is recorded singing abhangs with Varkarīs. A Bengali Vedāntin joining a Marathi devotional practice with no stake in it is the pattern of the whole journey: he kept arriving as a stranger and leaving having joined in. He travelled under changing names and was not announced anywhere, so almost the whole route has been reconstructed afterwards from letters and from the memories of the people who housed him.

• Devotional corpus onTenali Ramakrishna

  The Panduranga Mahatyamu is a full-length Telugu prabandha on the Vitthala shrine at Pandharpur, which is a Marathi Varkari centre six hundred kilometres from Tenali and four hundred from Hampi. A Telugu court poet writing the temple-purana of a Marathi pilgrimage site is the kind of thing the Vijayanagara literary establishment did routinely, and it is the surviving proof of his career.

• Traditional linkHampi Vitthala complex

  The Vitthala-Rukmini murti of Pandharpur — the central deity of the Varkari bhakti tradition — was moved to the newly-built Vitthala temple at Hampi during the 14th-16th-century Deccan Sultanate campaigns against the Yadava heartland. Vijayanagara chronicles and Varkari tradition name Krishnadevaraya (ruled 1509-29) as the king who formally invited the Vitthala from Pandharpur into his Vitthala complex at Hampi, both to protect the image from sultanate iconoclasm and to associate the Vijayanagara crown with the preeminent bhakti deity of the Deccan. After the sack of Hampi in 1565 the image was moved back to Pandharpur, where it has since remained; the empty Vitthala garbhagriha at Hampi is one of the most visited sites of the ruined capital.

On these journeys

• Vivekananda's wandering, 1888–93
• Varkari palkhis
• Krishna & Vaishnava circuit

Sources

Wikipedia, “Pandharpur”. Archaeological Survey of India and State Archaeology monument records, and the standard regional literature.

• Wikipedia — Pandharpur