Jai Hari Vitthal.
Some traditions ask for nothing — they simply continue, year after year, until they become part of who you are. The Wari has been walking for eight hundred years. Each monsoon, as the first rains sweep across Maharashtra, hundreds of thousands of Warkaris set out on foot from Alandi and Dehu, bearing the palkhis of Sant Dnyaneshwar and Sant Tukaram towards Pandharpur — a walk of some 250 kilometres, undertaken not out of obligation but out of love. Each year, I find myself woven into its fabric once more, a privilege I trace directly to my family, and above all to my grandmother, whose devotion to the Wari long predates my own. To grow up steeped in such values is to be shaped by them in ways one only fully understands with time; to carry them forward is a quiet, enduring pride.
There is a particular aesthetic to the Wari that no photograph quite captures. The sea of white — kurtas and Gandhi topis stretching to the horizon. The women balancing tulsi plants on their heads with impossible grace. The rhythmic clash of taal cymbals, the low thrum of the mridang, and above it all, the abhangs — devotional verses composed centuries ago, sung today with the same fervour as if the ink were still wet.
It is, in every sense, a moving meditation: farmers and professors, grandmothers and schoolchildren, all walking shoulder to shoulder, all equal on the road to Vitthal. The Bhakti saints who birthed this tradition preached a radical simplicity — that devotion requires no intermediary, no hierarchy, only a willing heart and walking feet. Eight hundred years on, that message still moves.
“Farmers and professors, grandmothers and schoolchildren, all walking shoulder to shoulder, all equal on the road to Vitthal.”
And the Wari does not stop. It never has. Even at the height of the pandemic, when the world itself seemed suspended, the tradition pressed on in miniature — the palkhi travelling by bus that year, its spirit entirely undiminished. Eight centuries, and not once has it truly paused.
This year brought its own trial. Pune was lashed by relentless rain; one of the palkhi's starting points lay submerged, another site along the route flooded entirely. For a moment, the question hung in the air — would the Wari happen at all? And then, as if on cue, the rain relented. The skies cleared just enough, and the procession moved forward, as it always does. Perhaps that is the Wari's deepest lesson: it does not wait for perfect conditions. It simply walks.
Every year, my family sets up a stall in Akurdi, serving food to the Warkaris as they pass — a tradition nested within a tradition, our own small offering of gratitude and devotion. Seva, after all, is as much a part of the Wari as the walking itself; for every pilgrim on the road, there are countless others who feed them, shelter them, tend to their blistered feet. This year was no exception. The crowds were thinner, but the spirit was not, and watching the procession arrive against all odds felt nothing short of miraculous.
Truthfully, I nearly didn't make it. Work had swallowed the days whole, and adulthood, with its quiet accumulation of obligations, no longer permits the luxury of simply walking out the door. I finished at nine in the evening, spent — and went anyway. Looking back, I wouldn't have had it any other way. Because standing there, amid the cymbals and the chants and the faces lit with something older than electricity, the exhaustion of the day simply dissolved.
“The Warkaris walk for weeks to meet their god; the least I can do is show up.”
Some traditions have a way of reminding us precisely who we are. However demanding life becomes, returning to the Wari always feels like coming home.
Jai Hari Vitthal — Haute50, Issue III, July 2026