Mayureshwar, Morgaon

As the first and last of the eight, Morgaon frames the whole Ashtavinayak journey; to bow here at the outset and again on the return is, for Maharashtrian devotees, to complete a circle of devotion that many undertake at least once in a lifetime. The Ganapatya tradition holds it the very source of Ganesha worship, which lends the modest village an outsized place in the faith.

The deity's trunk turns to the left, and the image sits beneath a canopy formed by a cobra's hood, jewels set in its eyes and navel and consort figures at its side. Around the sanctum stand some two dozen other images of Ganesha and, unusually for a Ganesha shrine, a large stone Nandi — Shiva's bull — together with a stone mouse, the Lord's own mount, keeping watch before him.

Morgaon, on the banks of the Karha river southeast of Pune, is the head and the foot of the Ashtavinayak pilgrimage: the circuit of eight Ganesha shrines begins here and is held incomplete unless the pilgrim returns to Morgaon to close it. The village is revered by the Ganapatya tradition as the adya pitha, the foremost seat of Ganesha worship, and its name — 'village of peacocks' — is bound to the legend it keeps.

Here Ganesha took the form of Mayureshwar, the Lord who rides the peacock (mayura), to destroy the demon Sindhu and his army; having felled the demon's general and then Sindhu himself, he set aside the peacock mount, and the place took its name from it. The image worshipped today is swayambhu, its features long softened beneath a thick coat of vermilion and oil that is renewed only about once a century.

The temple's exact age is unknown — scholars place it no earlier than perhaps the 14th to 17th centuries — but its cult is inseparable from the saint Morya Gosavi, whose Chinchwad lineage came to administer many of the Ashtavinayak shrines, and from the Peshwas, for whom Ganesha was the family deity. It is cared for today by the Chinchwad Devasthan Trust, and palkhi processions still travel between Morgaon and Chinchwad on the great festival days.

Morgaon's temple is enclosed by a high black-stone wall with a minaret at each of its four corners — a deliberately fort- and mosque-like design widely said to have been meant to spare it from destruction in troubled centuries. Four gates face the cardinal directions, each associated in tradition with one of the four ages of the world, and guarded by paired deities.

The rare stone Nandi before the sanctum is explained by a story that a cart carrying it to a Shiva temple broke down here and would go no further, so it stayed. Within the walls stand a sabha-mandapa, a Nagarkhana and two tall deepmalas, and a revered kalpavriksha tree; the whole is raised in the dark basalt of the Deccan, plain and massive.