Where Pune began
Kasba Peth & Budhwar Peth
कसबा पेठ आणि बुधवार पेठ
Kasba is the oldest peth in the city and Budhwar grew up beside it. Together they hold Pune's founding temple, its densest surviving wada fabric, and its most complicated present.
If Pune has a beginning, it is here. Kasba Peth holds the Kasba Ganpati — the city's gramadaivat, installed by Jijabai — and around it the oldest continuously inhabited fabric in the city.
We walk from Kasba into Budhwar Peth, reading doorways and plinths, stopping at temples and at the tamboli and brass shops that have outlasted several regimes. We talk about the peth system itself: how a seventeenth-century town planner laid out neighbourhoods by day of the week, who was settled where, and how much of that logic still runs under the modern street.
This is an honest walk about a complicated neighbourhood, and we conduct it with care and respect for the people who live and work there.
On this walk
- Kasba Ganpati, Pune's gramadaivat
- The peth system and how the city was laid out
- Surviving wada fabric at close quarters
- Old trades still working in the same lanes
- Reading a neighbourhood respectfully
From this walk
Keep walking
Other routes
Colonial Chronicles: A Walk through Camp
Two miles and two centuries from the peths. Basalt churches, wrought-iron verandahs, Irani bakeries and East Street — the other Pune, built by an empire and kept alive by everyone who came after it.
Sarasbaug: Heritage & Nature
Everyone in Pune has been to Sarasbaug. Almost nobody knows it was built as a lake — or that it is named after the cranes Sawai Madhavrao released onto its water.
Timeless Tales of Laxmi Road
Pune had a shopping street sixty years before it had a mall. Laxmi Road is retail, ritual, architecture and civic history all running along the same kilometre.