Marathi is the Indo-Aryan language of Maharashtra, described in the survey edited by George Cardona and Dhanesh Jain, and it is spoken by around eighty million people. It descends through Maharashtri Prakrit, which is one reason its devotional literature could draw on so much older material without a visible break.
Its religious range extends well past the Varkari. The Mahanubhava sect, founded in the thirteenth century by Chakradhar, wrote in Marathi from the beginning, kept its own scriptures, and for a period wrote them in cipher scripts to protect them from outsiders; it survives today. The Nath tradition of yogis is strongly present in the region, and Jnaneshwar's own lineage is traced through it.
Maharashtra is also the home of the largest modern conversion movement in India. B. R. Ambedkar, born into a Marathi speaking Dalit family, rejected Hinduism on the ground that caste was inseparable from it, and in October 1956 at Nagpur he and several hundred thousand followers took Buddhist vows in a single ceremony. The Navayana Buddhism that followed is a Marathi speaking movement in its origins, with its own literature and institutions, and it is the reason Maharashtra has by far the largest Buddhist population of any Indian state.