Maharashtra's central religious institution is a walk. Twice a year, and most massively in the month before the monsoon festival of Ashadhi Ekadashi, hundreds of thousands of people walk to the town of Pandharpur on the Bhima river to see the image of Vitthal, a form of Vishnu who stands with his hands on his hips as if waiting.
The walkers are the Varkari, and the tradition is organised around processions that carry the sandals of the poet saints from their home towns to the temple, singing their compositions along the way. Those poets are the tradition's literature: Jnaneshwar, who in the thirteenth century wrote a commentary on the Bhagavad Gita in Marathi rather than Sanskrit and thereby put its argument into the language people spoke; Namdev, a tailor; Chokhamela, of an untouchable community, whose shrine stands outside the temple steps because he was not permitted inside; Janabai, a household servant; and Tukaram in the seventeenth century, whose short verses are among the most quoted lines in Marathi.
The social claim in this material is explicit and old. The poets come from many castes and several are women, they wrote in the vernacular, and the tradition treats the walk itself as the practice rather than requiring priestly mediation. It has never abolished caste in Maharashtra and it has never stopped saying that God does not observe it.