Sant Dnyaneshwar Samadhi Temple, Alandi

Alandi, a town on the Indrayani river just outside Pune, is the spiritual capital of Maharashtra’s Varkari movement, built around the site where the 13th-century saint-poet Sant Dnyaneshwar — author of the Dnyaneshwari, a landmark Marathi commentary on the Bhagavad Gita — took samadhi in 1296 at the age of barely 21, beneath the town’s older Siddheshwar Shiva temple. Within the Varkari and Nath tradition this is understood not as an ordinary death but as a sanjeevan samadhi, a willed entombment undertaken while still spiritually alive, after which devotees hold that the saint remains present at the site rather than having departed it — a matter of devotional belief that this entry presents as tradition rather than settled history. A temple was raised over the samadhi around 1580–1600 by a patron named Ambekar Deshpande, with the complex substantially expanded during the Maratha and Peshwa period; from 1778, after Alandi was granted to him, the Shinde (Scindia) family became its principal patrons and renovators.

Alandi’s importance extends well beyond its own precincts through the Wari, the great annual pilgrimage procession of the Varkari sect. Beginning in Ashadh (June/July), Dnyaneshwar’s silver paduka (sandal-relics) are carried in a palanquin on a roughly 223-kilometre, three-week walking procession to Pandharpur — already documented in this directory as the seat of Vithoba — arriving in time for the Ashadhi Ekadashi festival; the organized form of this procession dates to the 1820s, though devotional walking pilgrimage to Pandharpur is far older. Even outside the Wari season, Alandi remains a major destination in its own right: the dark-half Ekadashi of every month draws an estimated 60,000 to 70,000 pilgrims, and the Kartik Vadya Ekadashi festival, marking the anniversary of Dnyaneshwar’s samadhi, is the town’s other major annual gathering.