We did not invent this.

The deepest river the walk swims in is the Varkari tradition of Maharashtra. The word means, plainly, one who walks the pilgrimage. The sampradāya is at least seven centuries old. Its present-day palkhi procession, given its institutional shape in the early nineteenth century, carries lakhs of Varkaris on foot to Pandharpur each year, to the temple of Vithoba and his consort Rakhumai, singing abhangs as they go. The palkhi of the thirteenth-century saint Dnyaneshwar leaves from Alandi. The palkhi of the seventeenth-century householder-saint Tukaram leaves from Dehu. They converge on Pandharpur on Ashadhi Ekadashi, in the rains.

The walkers organise themselves into dindis, small groups of a hundred to a few hundred, each with its own leader and its own singer. The tutari is sounded to call the dindi to walk at dawn. Within a dindi, only one abhang is sung at a time. Newcomers carry a small book of the verses while walking, until they have learned them.

Tukaram was a householder, a peasant and a trader by his own description, not a renunciate. Before him, Namdev, Janabai, Eknath, and Chokhamela had been writing devotion in plain Marathi for centuries. Women. Low-caste labourers. Men with day-jobs. Brahminical orthodoxy held that a Shudra had no right to compose scripture. Tukaram’s manuscripts were famously thrown into the Indrayani river. He kept writing in the language his neighbours spoke. The verses are still sung, in that same Marathi, by Varkaris walking today.

When our first walk in Bangalore, on 23 April 2026, carried Vitthal and Rukmini, this was not an accident. It was the smallest possible namaskar to a tradition that has been walking for seven hundred years before us and will be walking for seven hundred years after.

What we share with the Varkaris: walking, householders, the Name sung aloud, plain language, the murti carried, the small organised group. What we do not share: the Wari is annual, with a single distant destination. Ours is irregular, with a local one. A small temple in the same neighbourhood, and then home. An echo. Not a replica.

Where the Varkari walks to a shrine, the Bengali tradition of Harinama Sankirtan walks through the city, singing. The form was given its modern shape by Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, born in Navadvipa in 1486. He took the chanting of the Names of God out of the temple and into the public street, with drums and cymbals and ordinary people walking together. His procession to the house of Chand Kazi around 1510, after the Kazi had tried to ban public chanting, is remembered in Gauḍīya tradition as the moment Sankirtan stepped, irrevocably, into the public street.

The Walking Temple is doing a recognisable form of this, in Bangalore, in 2026. Less Bengali in its music, closer to the Marathi abhang. The same insistence: devotion belongs in the shared street, not only behind a threshold. What the Harinama groups continue to do in dozens of cities, on their own schedule, with their own murti, in their own neighbourhood, we are doing in our own small way, in the rhythm each locality holds.

Walking devotion is older than any one region of India and broader than any one lineage or sub-tradition. The form has been walking, under different names, in every part of the country. Vaishnava and Shaiva and Shakta. Sant, yogi, householder.

In Tamil Nadu, the Alvars and the Nayanars

Between the sixth and tenth centuries, the twelve Alvars, devotees of Vishnu, and the sixty-three Nayanars, devotees of Shiva, walked from temple to temple across what is now Tamil Nadu, composing hymns. The Alvars’ verses are the four thousand Nālāyira Divya Prabandham, sung in Sri Vaishnava temples to this day. The Nayanars’ hymns form the first seven books of the Tirumūṟai. The Tēvāram of Appar, Sambandar and Sundarar is the most-sung core, and Manikkavāchakar’s Tiruvāchakam sits alongside it. The walking was not metaphor. It was the form. Andal, alone among the Alvars who was a woman, walked. Manikkavāchakar walked, composing as he went.

In Karnataka, the vachanakaras and the Haridasas

In the twelfth century, in the Kalyana of the Kalachuris, the Lingayat vachanakaras walked the streets of Karnataka. Basavanna, Allama Prabhu, Akkamahadevi. They refused caste, refused temple-as-property, carried the linga on the body and the vachana in the mouth. Akkamahadevi walked away from a kingdom, in Kannada, toward Chenna Mallikarjuna. The compositions she sang are still sung. Three centuries later, in the same Karnataka, the Haridasas, Madhva-Vaishnavas walking devotion in the Dvaita key, moved through the streets of Vijayanagara (Hampi) and the towns of the south Deccan. Purandara Dāsa, called the grandfather of Carnatic music, and Kanaka Dāsa composed in Kannada the kīrtanas that are still sung today, on streets that pass near where our walks begin.

In Bengal, beyond the Sankirtan

Bengal’s walking devotion is not only Vaishnava. The eighteenth-century Shakta sant Ramprasad Sen walked Calcutta lanes singing Devi to Kali, in his own padāvalī. Songs still sung at Kali Puja, in homes and on temple-yards from Tarakeshwar to Tarapith. Kamalakanta Bhattacharya walked the same century in the same idiom. The Sankirtan of Chaitanya in the north, the Devi-bhakti of Ramprasad in the south of the same Bengal: walking, singing the Name, refusing to leave devotion behind a wall.

In the north, the sants

Kabir walked, in fifteenth-century Banaras, between weaver’s loom and street, refusing to choose between his Hindu and Muslim listeners. Mirabai walked, in sixteenth-century Rajasthan, away from a palace and toward Krishna, composing in Mewari, Braj and Gujarati as she went, the languages of the road. Surdas walked Braj, blind, in the Vallabha lineage. Tulsidas walked Awadhi across the Gangetic plain, from Ayodhya to Kashi, carrying the Rāmacaritamānasa. None of them founded an order. None of them registered a name. The verses are sung today by walkers who could not necessarily tell you where the singer was buried.

The forms differ. The cadence differs. The deities differ: Vitthal and Rukmini, Rama, Krishna, Shiva on Tiruvannamalai’s hill, the Devi at Kamakhya, Murugan on his six hills, Andal’s Vishnu, Mira’s Giridhar, Tulsi’s Ramji, Akkamahadevi’s Chenna Mallikarjuna, Ramprasad’s Kali. The river is the same river. The walk is older than any of the names we have for it.

Sitting meditation asks the mind to settle inside stillness. Walking offers the mind a rhythm to settle against. Left, right, left. The body, finding nothing to resist, lets the cadence carry it. Both are old. This form is the second. It is also how mothers calm infants.

The other thing walking does is harder to name. It returns devotion to the shared street. In a modern city, the temple has been quietly enclosed: into buildings, into private hours, into the half-hour before work. A walk has no threshold. There is no door to cross. Anyone on the road is already inside the walk for as long as they walk alongside, and the moment they stop walking, they have left without ceremony. The form includes the strangers on the street by default, not by invitation.

And the city slows. The pace of the walk is slower than the city’s pace. For one hour, on one road, the city is asked to make room for slowness. It does, more often than you might expect.

There is one more thing the form is doing. Tukaram, the householder-poet of Maharashtra, said it most plainly. हृदयीं वसे विठ्ठल. Vitthal dwells in the heart. The outer murti is a doorway. The inner one is what the walk is finally pointing at. Kabir, two centuries earlier, said the same thing in a different register: मोको कहाँ ढूँढे बन्दे, मैं तो तेरे पास में। ना तीरथ में ना मूरत में, ना एकान्त निवास में। Where do you seek me, friend; I am beside you. Not in pilgrimage, not in the image, not in solitude alone. And Ramana, closer to us, located the hṛdaya, the heart, two finger-breadths to the right of the centre of the chest, and called it the seat of the Self. Same inner room. Different doors. Saguna and Nirguna walk the same lane. The antaryāmin in form and the formless ātman turn out, in the end, to be one. The outer form is loud enough to be heard on the street. The inner form is quiet enough to be missed for a lifetime. The walk is loud so that the quiet may, briefly, be remembered.

This is the river the Bangalore walk is a tributary of. Anyone may walk. Anyone may pray. The walks are free.