Chhath Puja 2029in Puri

Chhath Puja is among the oldest continuously observed festivals in the Indian subcontinent — the Atharva Veda and the Rig Veda both contain hymns to Surya and to Usha that the modern Chhath chants quote verbatim. The festival is observed primarily across Bihar, Jharkhand, eastern Uttar Pradesh, and the Terai region of Nepal, on the Shashthi (sixth) of Kartika Shukla Paksha — the name Chhath being the Bhojpuri-Maithili pronunciation of Shashthi. Several Puranic and itihasa-layer stories explain it.

The Mahabharata gives the most-cited Vedic-layer story. After the Pandavas had lost their kingdom in the dice-game and gone into the forest, Draupadi began the Chhath vrat at the advice of the sage Dhaumya for the restoration of the kingdom. The vrat is described in the Mahabharata as a nirjala (waterless) and even nirjala-anna (foodless) vow with a specific ritual: standing in cold water at sunset and offering arghya to Surya, then standing again at dawn for the rising Sun. The Pandavas observed it with her. Their kingdom was eventually restored, and the vrat passed into the practice of the eastern plains as a remembrance of what the Pandavas had done.

A second layer belongs to Karna. The Mahabharata's Vana Parva describes Karna — the son of Kunti and Surya, raised by the charioteer Adhiratha — as a daily upasaka of Surya. He would stand waist-deep in a river at sunrise, recite the Suryashtaka, and offer arghya through cupped palms. Anyone who came to him during this time, the story says, could ask for anything and he would not refuse — and it was during one of these solar offerings that Indra, in the guise of a Brahmin, came to him and asked for his kavacha and kundala (the divine armour and earrings he had been born with). Karna gave them, as he had vowed, knowing it would cost him his life. The image of Karna standing in water at sunrise is the iconographic source of the Chhath devotee's posture; the offering through cupped palms with no priest, no temple, and no idol between the devotee and the deity is the Karna-shape the festival has preserved.

A third layer concerns Sita. The Ramayana describes Sita performing Chhath upon Rama's coronation at Ayodhya after the Lanka war; she went to the banks of the Ganga at Sitamarhi in Bihar (her own birthplace, in the regional tradition) and observed the four-day vrat with a community of women, asking Surya for the longevity and welfare of her husband's reign. The Sitamarhi tradition holds Sita as the originator of the women-led Chhath observance — and Bihar today is unique in that the principal vratis at Chhath are still overwhelmingly women.

A fourth, less-known layer belongs to the Brahmavaivarta Purana, which identifies Chhathi Maiya — the deity of the festival's name — as Devasena, the daughter of Prajapati and the wife of Skanda (Kartikeya). She is described as the sixth aspect of Prakriti — manas-shakti, the power of the mind — and as the protector of children and newborns. This is the layer that explains why Chhath is also observed by women asking for the welfare of children, why the prasad is traditionally distributed to children first, and why the festival is held on the Shashthi (sixth) tithi — the sixth tithi from a child's birth is the day Hindu tradition holds the soul to fully enter the body, and Chhathi Maiya is the deity of that moment.

The four-day structure is the festival's architecture and is unchanged from at least the Mahabharata era. Day one, Nahay Khay: the vrati bathes in a river, prepares pure food (kaddu-chaval — pumpkin and rice cooked in mustard oil on a clay stove), and eats only that single meal. Day two, Kharna: a full daylong fast, broken only at moonrise with a meal of kheer (gud-laden rice pudding), roti, and a banana — and from this moment the vrati does not eat or drink a single drop until the second sunrise that follows. Day three, Sandhya Arghya: in the late afternoon the household carries the prasad — thekua (a wheat-jaggery cookie unique to Chhath), fruits, sugarcane, coconuts — in soop and daala (bamboo trays and baskets) to the riverbank. The vrati enters the water as the sun sets; cupped palms full of milk and water are offered to the setting sun as the family stands in a semicircle behind, singing Chhath geet — songs in Bhojpuri and Maithili whose melodies are unaccompanied by instruments, descending from village to village across generations. Day four, Usha Arghya: in the pitch dark before dawn the vrati returns to the same spot, enters the cold water again, and waits for the first ray of the rising sun — the moment Usha first arrives — and offers the second arghya. With this the 36-hour nirjala vrat ends; the vrati drinks her first sip of water from the river, breaks the fast with thekua and fruit, and the four-day observance closes.

The festival's most striking feature is that it is one of the very few Hindu observances with no priest, no temple, no idol, and no intermediary of any kind. The vrati stands directly in water and addresses the visible Sun. Chhath thus carries the oldest layer of Vedic religion forward into the present unmediated — Surya as the daily, visible, life-giving devata, addressed face to face, and Usha as the dawn-goddess whose arrival is greeted as Vedic Indians greeted her three thousand years ago. The chants the vrati sings during arghya are sometimes the actual Rig Vedic hymns; sometimes Bhojpuri folk songs that carry the same meaning in vernacular. The festival's scale — millions standing in rivers across the eastern plains at both sunset and sunrise — makes it visually the largest synchronous religious observance in India, and its difficulty (the 36-hour nirjala) makes the proportion of vratis to observers remarkable: nearly every family has at least one woman undertaking the full vrat, and the festival is among the few in which the household's spiritual centre is publicly and uncontestably a woman.