Marathi carries one of the great devotional traditions of India, the Varkari, whose object is Vitthal, a form of Vishnu, at Pandharpur on the Bhima river. Its founding text is the Jnaneshwari, a commentary on the Bhagavad Gita composed in Marathi verse in the thirteenth century by Jnaneshwar, who was a young man and who argued by the very act of writing in the vernacular that the teaching belonged to everyone.
The tradition after him is a succession of poet saints, among them Namdev, Eknath, the Muslim born Shaikh Muhammad, the woman saint Janabai who worked as a servant, and Tukaram in the seventeenth century, whose abhangs are the most widely known religious poetry in Marathi. Dilip Chitre's translations carry across their tone, which is direct, argumentative and frequently bitter about caste and about religious hypocrisy.
The practice that holds it all together is the wari, the pilgrimage on foot to Pandharpur made twice a year, in which groups called dindis walk for up to three weeks carrying the sandals of the saints and singing abhangs as they go. Hundreds of thousands take part. The Varkari tradition has no priesthood set over it, admits all castes, and takes its organisation from the walk itself rather than from an institution.