At Alandi on the bank of the Indrayani river near Pune stands the samadhi temple of Sant Dnyaneshwar, the great thirteenth-century saint-poet of Maharashtra, whose Dnyaneshwari — a luminous Marathi commentary on the Bhagavad Gita — opened the wisdom of the Gita to the common people and became a cornerstone of the Varkari tradition.
Tradition holds that Dnyaneshwar, at barely twenty-one, entered a living samadhi (sanjeevan samadhi) here, and his shrine is revered as a place where his presence still abides. Each year his palkhi sets out from Alandi in the great pilgrimage to Pandharpur, joined by hundreds of thousands of Varkaris. Alandi is one of the holiest places of Maharashtra, the abode of its beloved Mauli.
