The market street
Timeless Tales of Laxmi Road
लक्ष्मी रस्ता
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.
No visit to Pune is complete without Laxmi Road, and no Punekar has ever crossed it without complaint. It is the city's commercial spine — saris, gold, sweets, brass, books — and it has been for well over half a century.
We walk it slowly, which is the one thing nobody does. We look up at the facades above the shopfronts, where the older buildings are still legible. We stop at the temples that the street grew around rather than replaced. And we trace how a Peshwa-era lane became a modern market, what that did to the buildings on either side, and what the street tells you about how Pune shops, worships and argues.
On this walk
- How a peth lane became the city's commercial spine
- Shopfronts, signboards and the facades hidden above them
- Temples the market grew around
- Trades and traders: who sells what, and why here
- Festival Laxmi Road versus ordinary-Tuesday Laxmi Road
Keep walking
Other routes
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.
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.
Raja Dinkar Kelkar Museum
Twenty thousand objects of everyday Indian life, gathered by one man over six decades. We take a themed route through it — so you leave having actually seen something, rather than everything.