Vithoba, also Vitthala and Panduranga, is a form of Krishna (or of Vishnu) worshipped at Pandharpur in Maharashtra, where his image stands with its hands on its hips, waiting, upon a brick. The brick belongs to the story of the devotee Pundalik, who was so absorbed in serving his aged parents that when the god himself arrived he tossed out a brick for the god to stand on rather than interrupt his service, and the god, honouring that devotion to duty above devotion to himself, has been standing on it ever since.
Vithoba is the presiding deity of the Varkari movement, a devotional (bhakti) tradition of largely non-brahmin poet-saints, among them Dnyaneshwar, Namdev, Tukaram, Chokhamela and the woman-saint Janabai, whose songs (abhangas) are in Marathi, the people's language, rather than Sanskrit. Twice a year hundreds of thousands of pilgrims walk to Pandharpur in the great wari, carrying the sandals of the saints in palanquins, one of the largest and most enduring devotional movements in India.