Maharashtra

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.

Maharashtra holds the oldest surviving religious architecture in India, and it is architecture cut downward and inward rather than built up.

The Buddhist cave complexes of the Western Ghats, at Ajanta, Karla, Bhaja and elsewhere, were excavated from the second century BCE onward as monsoon retreats and monastic residences on trade routes between the coast and the plateau. Ajanta's later caves carry wall paintings of the fifth century that are the principal surviving evidence for Indian painting of the period and for the narrative literature of the Buddha's previous lives. At Ellora, Buddhist, Hindu and Jain excavations stand along the same escarpment, and the Kailasa temple there is a complete Shaiva temple with towers, courtyards and free-standing elephants carved downward out of the living rock as a single piece.

The modern event of comparable weight took place at Nagpur in October 1956, when B. R. Ambedkar, the principal drafter of the Indian constitution and a leader of the Dalit movement, publicly converted to Buddhism with several hundred thousand followers. He had announced two decades earlier that he would not die a Hindu, and the conversion was argued as an escape from a religion he held to be inseparable from caste. The form he taught, set out in The Buddha and His Dhamma, is social and rational in emphasis, and the movement remains concentrated in the state.