Chhath Puja 2026

Chhath is the great vrat of the Sun, and it is unlike every other festival of the Hindu year in one plain respect: the deity worshipped is visible overhead. Bhagwan Surya is offered arghya directly — no murti stands between the devotee and the god, no temple encloses the rite, and no priest is required to mediate it. The vrati walks into the river, stands in the water with folded hands, and lifts the offering to the Sun herself. Beside Surya is worshipped Chhathi Maiya, whom folk tradition reveres as his own sister and whom the learned identify with Usha, the dawn; she is the giver and guardian of children, and it is chiefly for the well-being of children and the household that the vrat is kept. The name is the tithi: Shashthi, the sixth of Kartik's bright fortnight, worn down in Bhojpuri and Maithili to Chhath.

The vrat runs four days, and in 2026 they are Friday 13 to Monday 16 November. It opens on Nahay Khay, when the vrati bathes in the Ganga, carries river water home and the family eats a single satvik meal of kaddu-bhaat. The second day is Kharna: a fast from sunrise to sunset, then kheer of jaggery and new rice offered and eaten as prasad — and the instant that meal ends, the nirjala vrat begins, some thirty-six hours without food or a drop of water. The third day, Shashthi itself, is the main day: thekua baked in ghee and jaggery, fruit, sugarcane and coconut are heaped into the winnowing soop and the bamboo daura, carried on the head to the ghat, and at evening the family stands in the water to offer the Sandhya Arghya as the Sun goes down. The night belongs to the Kosi, lamps lit under a canopy of sugarcane, and to the Chhath geet, whose tunes are among the oldest melodies still sung in Bharat. Before dawn on the fourth day everyone returns to the ghat, faces east, and offers the Usha Arghya to the rising Sun; the vrati then breaks the fast with ginger and water, and the prasad goes round the whole neighbourhood.

Two things in that sequence are worth pausing over. The first is the order of the arghyas: the setting Sun is honoured before the rising one. It is the reverse of ordinary human habit, and Chhath makes a teaching of it — the Lord is to be adored in decline as in ascent, and the household that thanks him at sunset has understood something the household that only greets him at sunrise has not. The second is how little the rite needs. There is no murti to buy, no priest to engage, no sanctum to enter; the ghat is open, the water is common, and the offerings are what the fields have just yielded — new rice, new jaggery, sugarcane, radish, the green ginger. Nothing about it can be bought better by one family than another, which is why Chhath is remembered as the most egalitarian of the great vrats, and why its discipline is guarded so fiercely: the fast, the purity of the kitchen, the barefoot walk to the ghat, the prostrations some vratis make the whole way down.

Its homeland is Bihar and it has carried the state's name across the world. The ghats fill along the Ganga at Patna, and along the Kosi, Gandak, Bagmati, Son and Kamla Balan; Jharkhand, eastern Uttar Pradesh and the Mithila region of Nepal keep it as their own, and wherever Bihari families have settled — Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Mauritius, Trinidad, Fiji — a stretch of water is found and a ghat is made. The Sun temples of the region become its centres: above all Deo in Aurangabad district, whose west-facing shrine and Brahma Kund draw immense crowds twice a year, and with it Ulaar in Patna district and Ongari in Nalanda. In Varanasi the same arghya is offered from the Ganga ghats below Kashi Vishwanath, and Bihar's own great shrines — Mahavir Mandir beside Patna Junction, Mundeshwari on its Kaimur hill — keep the days with it. If you travel for Chhath, go for the ghat rather than the sanctum: the festival happens at the water's edge, at sunset and at sunrise, and it asks only that you stand quietly with everyone else and let the Sun be greeted.