Vittala

A Hindu deity who is considered to be a form of Vishnu and is popularly worshipped in present-day Maharashtra and parts of Karnataka. In iconographical form, he is shown standing on a brick, with his arms held akimbo. He is considered to have been a pastoral deity before being assimilated first into Saivism, briefly, and then Vaishnavism. His principal shrine is located in Pandharpur, Maharashtra, and he is the central deity of the Varkari Panth, a sect with roots in the thirteenth-century Bhakti movement of the region. He is also the central figure of a large corpus of Varkari devotional poems, known as abhangs, which were written by the poet-saints of the region, namely Dnyaneshwar, Namdev, Tukaram and Eknath.