Peshwa waterworks
Sarasbaug: Heritage & Nature
सारसबाग
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.
Nanasaheb Peshwa did not build a garden here. He built a lake, in the 18th century, as much for the look of the thing as for the water. His successor Sawai Madhavrao added saras — the tall, grey, red-headed Sarus cranes — and the name stuck: Sarasbaug, the garden of cranes.
In 1784 Madhavrao Peshwa established a Ganesh temple on the island in the middle. Punekars still call it Talyatla Ganapati — the Ganapati in the lake — even though the lake has been dry ground for well over a century. The deity's trunk turns right, an uncommon and auspicious form.
This is our gentlest walk, and the one that most often surprises people who thought they knew the place. We read the garden as a piece of Peshwa-era water engineering, look at what the temple tells us about eighteenth-century patronage, and spend time on what actually lives here now — the trees, the birds, the lotus in the remaining water.
On this walk
- The lake that became a garden — Peshwa-era waterworks
- Talyatla Ganapati, established 1784, and its right-turned trunk
- Where the Sarus cranes came from and where they went
- Trees, birds and lotus: reading the garden as habitat
- Why this corner of Pune was laid out the way it was
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.
Kasba Peth & Budhwar Peth
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.
Pataleshwar Caves
A whole temple cut downward out of one sheet of Deccan basalt, twelve hundred years ago, when this was not Pune yet but the village of Bhamburda. Ten minutes from JM Road, and most Punekars have never been inside.