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
In & Around Shaniwar Peth
One of Pune's oldest neighbourhoods, founded under Murtaza Nizam Shah, and one of its least explored. Quiet lanes, magnificent wadas and temples the Peshwas built.
Old City Heritage Walk
The walk we come back to again and again. Through Kasba, Shaniwar and Budhwar Peth — past Pune's oldest temple, the walls of Shaniwar Wada, and wada doorways that have been opening onto the same lanes for two hundred years.
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.