01The pillar of the Jnaneshwari
Jnaneshwar came to Nevasa with his brothers Nivrittinath and Sopan and his sister Muktabai. Sitting in a temple of Shiva and leaning against one of its pillars, he spoke the Gita into Marathi ovi verse while Sacchidananda Baba wrote it down. The closing verses name the place, Nevase on the Pravara, the reign of the Yadava king Ramachandra, and the year Shaka 1212, which is 1290 CE. Some nine thousand ovis long, the Bhavartha Dipika became the foundation text of the Varkari path. The temple is now the Jnaneshwar Mandir, and the pillar, the paisacha khamb, stands inside it, smeared with sandal and hung with garlands.
02Older than the saint
Nevasa’s Mohiniraj temple honours Bhagwan Vishnu in his Mohini form, who in the Puranic katha distributed the amrit after the churning of the ocean. The ground under the town is far older still. H. D. Sankalia of the Deccan College excavated here in 1954–56 and found a long sequence: stone tools of the old stone age in the Pravara gravels, a chalcolithic farming village, and a Satavahana-period town with Roman pottery. The middle palaeolithic industry he described is still called Nevasian after this place.
The life of this place
- 1290 CE (Shaka 1212)Jnaneshwar completes the Jnaneshwari at Nevasa, in the reign of Ramachandra Yadava.
- 1954–56Deccan College excavations under H. D. Sankalia reveal the town’s prehistoric and Satavahana layers.
Nevasa is about 60 km north-east of Ahilyanagar (Ahmednagar); the Jnaneshwar Mandir is crowded on Kartik Ekadashi.
