Dnyaneshwar Samadhi, Alandi

A temple town on the Indrayani river, 22 km north, built around the samadhi of Sant Dnyaneshwar - the shrine over the resting place of the poet-saint who wrote the Dnyaneshwari, a commentary on the Bhagavad Gita in Marathi, and entered sanjeevan samadhi here in 1296, at the age of twenty-one. This is the emotional centre of the Warkari tradition: every June or July the Palkhi procession sets out from here for Pandharpur with hundreds of thousands of pilgrims, and major Ekadashi days draw sixty to seventy thousand. Riverside ghats, temple lanes and prasad stalls fill the town. Dress modestly; queues on holy days are long.

The heart of Maharashtra's Warkari devotion, twenty minutes north of the city