Pune

Pune is the city Maharashtra keeps for itself. Where Mumbai is the state's engine and shop window, Pune is its memory and its mind — the seat of the Maratha Peshwas, the crucible of the Indian social-reform and freedom movements, and, for well over a century, a university town serious enough to earn the nickname "Oxford of the East". It rewards the traveller who arrives curious about how modern India was argued into being, and it does so at a gentler tempo than the megacity two hours to its west.

The city sits on the Deccan plateau at the confluence of the Mula and Mutha rivers, a little over 550 metres above sea level, and that altitude gives it a climate noticeably milder than the coast — one of the quieter reasons Pune has always drawn students, pensioners and monsoon-season migrants. Its historic core is a grid of old peths (ward-neighbourhoods with names like Shaniwar, Budhwar and Sadashiv) laid out in the 18th century, when Pune was the de facto capital of the Maratha confederacy and the Peshwa prime ministers ran an empire from the riverside palace of Shaniwar Wada. That Peshwa century — its architecture, its temples, its cuisine and its sense of civic self-importance (Puneris are famously, affectionately proud) — still sets the tone of the old city.

Layered over the Maratha past is a colonial and reformist one. The British built a large cantonment here and made Pune the monsoon capital of the Bombay Presidency; the same era produced the reformers Jyotirao and Savitribai Phule, Gopal Krishna Gokhale and Bal Gangadhar Tilak, whose ideas rippled out across the country. Tilak's decision in the 1890s to turn the private worship of Ganesh into a mass public festival was made in these streets, which is why Pune's ten-day Ganesh Chaturthi remains the most spectacular in India. A short drive east, the Aga Khan Palace holds an even more solemn chapter — the place where Mahatma Gandhi, Kasturba and their companions were interned during the Quit India movement.

For all that heritage, Pune is emphatically a living, modern city rather than a museum. It is one of India's largest hubs for information technology, automobile manufacturing and higher education, with a young, cosmopolitan population, a well-known café and music culture, and the leafy, upscale enclave of Koregaon Park with its Osho meditation resort. That mix — Peshwa temples in the morning, a plateau-fort trek at midday, a craft-coffee and misal-pav crawl by evening — is Pune's particular appeal.

Practically, Pune fits a couple of shapes of trip. It is an easy one- or two-day cultural stop in its own right, a natural gateway to the Sahyadri hill stations and Maratha forts of the Western Ghats, and a comfortable weekend break from Mumbai. Give the old city a full day for its wadas, temples and museums, and — if you have a second day — trade the pavement for one of the forts or hill towns that ring the city.