Why is Vithoba, a dark-skinned god, called the white one?
Vithoba, worshipped above all in Maharashtra and Karnataka, is shown as a dark young boy standing on a brick with his hands on his hips. One of his best-loved names, Panduranga, means the white god in Sanskrit. Unravelling that contradiction opens a long and still unsettled story.
Devotees regard Vithoba as a form of Vishnu in his Krishna avatar. He stands at the centre of the Varkari faith in Maharashtra, a devotional movement largely without ritual, and of the Haridasa sect in Karnataka. His chief temple is at Pandharpur, and his poet-saints wrote a distinctive kind of Marathi devotional lyric, the abhang, in his honour. His greatest festivals fall on two Ekadashi days, in the months of Ashadha and Kartika.
Even his names are argued over. Varkari tradition reads Vitthala as one standing on a brick, which matches his iconography and the legend of his devotee Pundalik, credited with bringing him to Pandharpur. The poet-saint Tukaram offered another reading: the one who accepts the innocent who lack knowledge. The historian R. G. Bhandarkar suspected Vitthu was a Kannada rendering of Vishnu, and another scholar linked the name to a Hoysala king, Bittideva, said to have built the temple at Pundalik's urging.
Panduranga has its own theories. The 12th-century Jain writer Hemachandra recorded it as a title of Rudra-Shiva, and Bhandarkar proposed it first belonged to a form of Shiva worshipped at Pandharpur, whose temple still stands, before passing to Vithoba as his cult grew. Others think Vithoba himself began as a Shaiva god and was later identified with Vishnu, or that the name simply comes from an old name for the town.
Richard Eaton argues that Vithoba was worshipped as the pastoral Krishna as early as the 6th century, and Christian Novetzke suggests his cult moved from Karnataka to Pandharpur before 1000 CE. Firmer ground comes from inscriptions: one dated 1237, carved on a beam of the present temple, records a Hoysala king granting a village to pay for food offerings to Vitthala. The oldest parts of the building date from the 12th and 13th centuries, though most of it went up in the 17th.
Source: Vithoba
