Urban landscapes are formed and reformed through the interactions of people, place, and time. These processes are most of the time slow-paced (except in the event of disasters, wars, or deliberate interventions) and their effect is apparent over a span of decades, if not centuries. However, urban landscapes can transform in a matter of days, although temporarily, through various rituals and festivals celebrated at the level of a neighbourhood or a city. Such rituals and festivals played an important role in giving meaning to the urban landscape of eighteenth-century Maharashtra. The meaning-making operated at the level of regions, settlements, and neighbourhoods. In settlements, these rituals and festivals gave sanctity to the town, protected it from supernatural forces, and symbolically connected it to the cosmic whole. The paper discusses such meaning-making through the instrument of rituals and festivities as observed in eighteenth-century Maharashtra (in India) under the Peśvā rulers (a Persian word meaning ‘leader’).

The first part of the paper examines urban festivals and rituals in pre-colonial India as studied by various scholars. In the second part, the emergent themes are studied in the context of Maharashtra, both as observed through historic contemporary literary sources and through field study in Wai (in Satara district, Maharashtra). The latter part focuses in particular on the festival of the river goddess Kṛṣṇā celebrated at Wai as an example of a living tradition of urban festivals. It is argued that the study of ephemeral urban landscapes reveals continued associations and meanings that a culture group attaches to them. This understanding is important for managing historic urban landscapes, not just for their physical fabric, but also for the values and continuities embedded in them.