The Road to Pandharpur

This is a bonus story — not one of our thirty nights, but one you can read on any evening. It is about the saints who lived before Shivaji — some of them hundreds of years before — and who made the Maharashtra he grew up in a land full of songs.

Remember Pandharpur, from Day 9, with its temple of Vithoba? For centuries, people called Varkaris — "those who make the vari," the pilgrimage — have walked there, singing as they go. Their road was laid down by a whole line of saints.

The first great one was Dnyaneshwar, who lived about seven hundred years ago. While he was still a teenager, in the year 1290, he wrote the Dnyaneshwari: the great Bhagavad Gita, explained in Marathi, so that ordinary people — not only scholars who knew Sanskrit — could understand it.

People tell many wonderful stories about him. When proud scholars mocked Dnyaneshwar and his brothers and sister, the legend says, he touched a buffalo on the head, and the buffalo began to recite the Vedas! (A legend — but a lovely way of saying that wisdom belongs to everyone.) When he was only about twenty-one, in 1296, he entered samadhi at Alandi, near Pune, where his shrine still stands.

He ended his great book with a prayer called the Pasaydan — a prayer not for himself, but for the whole world. One of its lines:

"भूतां परस्परे जडो मैत्र जीवांचे""May all living beings be joined together in friendship."

Around the same time lived Namdev, a tailor's son who loved Vithoba with his whole heart. Namdev travelled all the way to Punjab and, tradition says, lived there for many years, at a village called Ghuman. His songs were loved so much that sixty-one of them were later placed in the Guru Granth Sahib, the holy book of the Sikhs. A Marathi saint, honoured in Sikh scripture!

Much later, in the 1500s, came Eknath of Paithan, on the Godavari river. He wrote his own Marathi Bhagavat and Ramayan, and he taught that in God's eyes there is no difference between high and low, or between one person and another. A famous tradition says that once, carrying precious holy river water on a long pilgrimage, he found a donkey dying of thirst on a hot, dusty road — and he poured the water into its mouth. (A tradition — and a lesson in kindness.)

And in Shivaji's own time came Tukaram of Dehu, whose story has a page of its own.

Today the vari is one of the biggest pilgrimages on earth. Every year in the month of Ashadh, the palkhi of Dnyaneshwar sets out from Alandi and the palkhi of Tukaram from Dehu, and for about three weeks huge crowds walk with them to Pandharpur — men, women, children, people of every kind — singing all the way.

Why does this matter for our story? Because these saints taught Maharashtra that a farmer, a tailor or a shopkeeper matters to God just as much as a king. Shivaji grew up among people who sang those songs — and you can see the same spirit in his idea of a kingdom that protects the ordinary farmer.

Now for the honest part. The dates of these saints are often only approximate, and many of the most beautiful stories about them are legends. We have told you which is which.

Goodnight — tonight's line: "मैत्र जीवांचे" — friendship among all living beings.