Connected Places- Region, Pilgrimage, and Geographical Imagination in India

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Anne Feldhaus is Professor Emerita of Religious Studies at Arizona State University. In 2022 she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and she served as President of the Association for Asian Studies in 2018-19. Over the past five decades, she has lived in India at regular intervals, adding up to more than a dozen years. She is fluent in Marathi and has travelled extensively in Maharashtra. Her work combines philological and ethnographic approaches to the study of religious traditions in the state. Besides Connected Places, her major publications include Water and Womanhood: Religious Meanings of Rivers in Maharashtra (1995) and several books on Old Marathi religious literature. She co-edited A Dictionary of Old Marathi (1999/2000) with S.G. Tulpule and is currently translating the first literary text in Marathi, Liļācaritra, for the Murty Classical Library of India.

The Book in the product of more than thirty years (1970-2003) peat working in and thinking about Maharashtra. Over those years, numerous teachers, friends, and colleagues have prepared me and helped me to gather and analyse the information presented here. Among these people I must mention in particular Vaghmare, who has accompanied me to virtually Sudhir W all the places and all the festivals described in this book. The anonymous Vompanions that I mention from time to time also include Ramdas Atkar and Sakharam Lakade, as well as Jeffrey Brackett, R.C. Dhere, Maruti Gaykwad, Shubha Kothavale, Bhau Mandavkar. VL. Manjul, Manisha and Dnyaneshwar Mehetre, Asha Mandlay, M.L.K. Murty, Purushottam Nagpure, Chandrakant Nimbhorkar, Prerna Rotellu, Lee Schlesinger, Thakur Raja Ram Singh, Günther Sontheimer, Sonja Stark-Wild, Ananya Vajpeyi, Kranti Waghmare, Pushpa Waghmare, Shraddha Waghmare, Rajaram Zagade, and Eleanor Zelliot. Many more people have willingly spent their time patiently explaining things to me, a complete stranger from far away who suddenly appeared in their village, at their temple, or at their festival, trying to understand what was going on. Most of these people have been rendered anonymous in this second edition of the book, but they are (or were, when I carried out the bulk of the field work for it in the 1980s and 1990s) real, live people whom I am privileged to have had the chance to meet and learn from. I made tape recordings of my conversations with many of these people. For her help in the laborious task of transcribing the tape recordings, I am grateful principally to my honorary daughter, Manisha Mehetre.

WHEN I Finse went to Maharashtra, I did not even know it existed. Invited to go to India, I thought that a college summer there would be my chance to see the world. I looked up India on a map of the world, India was the country that hung down in a point, far west and south of the curving bulge of China and the smaller, sharper bulge of South-East Asia, south-east of the Arabian Peninsula, far to the east of Africa. Then, on a map of India, 1 searched for Pune (at that time still usually spelled 'Poona), the place where my teacher' had said that we would stay. Only later did I learn that I was going to a part of India called Maharashtra, the part where most people's first language is Marathi (see map of major rivers of the Deccan).

Like most twentieth-century foreigners entering Maharashtra, we arrived first in Bombay (now Mumbai), the booming, polyglot metropolis that India's British rulers had stitched together out of a cluster of small islands halfway down the west coast of the South Asian peninsula. Mumbai is the economic capital of India, the centre of the Indian film industry, and also the political capital of Maharashtra-but I knew none of these things when I arrived there one day in early June 1970. The monsoon had just struck, as it does around that time every year. Rain was teeming down unrelentingly. The gutters, knee-deep with water, overflowed onto the streets and sidewalks. We took refuge in the office of a travel agent who got us train tickets to Pune.

The most famous train from Mumbai to Pune is called the 'Deccan Queen'. It leaves the posh 'Fort' area of Mumbai in the late afternoon, travels for an hour or more through the neighbourhoods and suburbs of Mumbai, takes another hour to the coastal astal plain, cross and then begins to climb almost straight up the mountains called the Sahyadris or Western Ghats.