Chhath Puja 2026: Four-Day Vrat, Arghya Times and Meaning

Surya, Chhathi Maiya and the Chhath legends

Few major Hindu festivals are addressed so directly to the visible Sun. Devotees stand in a river or pond and offer arghya, water poured from cupped hands or a bamboo tray, to Surya as the giver of light, warmth and harvest. Alongside him they worship Chhathi Maiya, identified with Shashthi Devi. The Brahma Vaivarta Purana describes Shashthi Devi as Devasena, the protector of children, and Chhath folk songs often call her the Sun’s sister. Popular tradition also links the evening offering with Pratyusha and the morning one with Usha, the powers of the Sun’s last and first light.

Several legends are told around the ghats. Karna, the son of Surya in the Mahabharata, is said to have stood waist-deep in water every day to offer arghya to his father, the very posture devotees take at Chhath. A popular story has Draupadi and the Pandavas keeping the vrat in their years of hardship, and another tells of Sita observing it at Munger after returning to Ayodhya. The Puranic account of King Priyavrat, whose sorrow over a stillborn son was answered by Shashthi Devi, is cited as the origin of her worship.

The autumn festival in Kartika is the great one, but a smaller Chaiti Chhath is kept on Chaitra Shukla Shashthi in spring with the same pattern. The person who keeps the fast is called the vrati, and the vrat belongs to women and men alike; the whole household, and often the whole street, takes part in preparing the offerings and cleaning the ghats.

How the four Chhath dates are fixed

The anchor is Kartika Shukla Shashthi, the sixth tithi (lunar day) of the waxing fortnight of Kartika. As a bright-half festival it carries the same month name in purnimanta calendars of the North and amanta calendars elsewhere. The four days run in sequence around that anchor: Nahay-Khay on Chaturthi, Kharna on Panchami, the sandhya arghya on Shashthi evening and the usha arghya on Saptami morning. Chhath therefore usually begins about four days after Diwali, with the main evening falling roughly six days after it, in late October or November.

What sets Chhath apart is that its governing moments are sunset and sunrise themselves. The evening arghya requires Shashthi to prevail at sunset, and the dawn arghya requires Saptami at sunrise. The published arghya time is simply the local moment of sunset or sunrise, which is why it differs noticeably between cities: Patna, lying well to the east, sees the Sun set roughly half an hour earlier than New Delhi does.

When Shashthi ends before sunset on one day, or begins only after it, the evening arghya moves to the day on which Shashthi holds at dusk, and the other three days shift with it. Panchangs that use different sunrise and sunset times or different tie-break readings can therefore disagree, which is why “Chhath Puja kab hai” sometimes returns two answers. The dates on this page follow the sunset and sunrise rule for New Delhi.

Chhath Puja vidhi, day by day

Day one, Nahay-Khay (literally “bathe and eat”), begins with a bath, ideally in a river, and a thorough cleaning of the house. The vrati then eats a single sattvic meal of rice, chana dal and lauki (bottle gourd) cooked with rock salt, which the family also shares. Day two is Kharna, also called Lohanda: the vrati fasts through the day and in the evening offers kheer made with jaggery, known as rasiya, along with roti, then eats this prasad. With that meal the 36-hour nirjala fast, without food or water, begins.

Day three is the sandhya arghya. The offerings are arranged in a soop (winnowing tray) and a daura (bamboo basket): thekua, kasar (rice-flour laddoo), sugarcane, bananas, coconut, the large citrus called gagal, radish, sweet potato, water chestnut (singhara) and suthni. The family carries them to the ghat, singing Chhath songs on the way, and some devotees cover the distance by repeatedly prostrating on the ground, a practice called dand. Women vratis wear a long line of orange sindoor from the tip of the nose to the hairline. Standing in the water and facing west, the vrati raises the soop and offers arghya to the setting Sun.

Day four is the usha arghya. The family returns to the ghat before dawn, the vrati again stands in the water, now facing east, and offers arghya to the rising Sun. Prasad is distributed among relatives and neighbours, elders bless the younger members, and the vrati ends the long fast with parana, usually beginning with water and a little prasad.

Purity rules and the spirit of the vrat

Chhath is known for its strict purity. Traditionally no onion or garlic enters the kitchen during the four days, only rock salt is used, the utensils and stove for the prasad are kept apart from everyday ones, and nobody tastes the offerings before they reach the ghat. Neighbourhoods clean and decorate the ghats together, and in many places volunteers sweep the paths so that devotees walking barefoot or performing dand meet no obstacle.

The fast is demanding, and custom is practical about it. Tradition allows family members to help a vrati who cannot complete the nirjala fast, and the elderly, the unwell and expectant mothers commonly keep a lighter form or take on a supporting role. Folk songs, sung mostly in Bhojpuri, Maithili and Magahi, carry the festival from the first evening to the last morning, and many families say the singing matters as much as the fasting.

Chhath from the Ganga ghats to the Caribbean

The heartland is Bihar, where the ghats of Patna on the Ganga draw some of the largest gatherings, along with Jharkhand and eastern Uttar Pradesh, including the ghats of Varanasi. Across the border, the Terai and Madhesh plains of Nepal keep Chhath with equal fervour, and Janakpur’s ponds fill with devotees at both arghyas.

Migration has carried the festival far from its home. Delhi’s Yamuna ghats and the many ponds prepared across the capital, Mumbai’s Juhu beach and the riverbanks of Kolkata now host large crowds every year. Further afield, communities descended from nineteenth-century Bhojpuri-speaking migrants in Mauritius, Fiji, Suriname and Trinidad still keep the vrat, often at beaches and riverbanks.

Local touches differ, from the songs sung to the fruits that fill the daura, but the core is the same everywhere: a cleaned bank, water up to the waist, a basket of seasonal produce and two arghyas, one at dusk and one at dawn.

Astrology of Chhath: Shashthi, Saptami and the Sun in Libra

The tithi pairing is striking. Shashthi’s classical deity is Kartikeya, also called Skanda, and Shashthi Devi is identified with Devasena, Skanda’s consort, so the mother goddess of Chhath sits on her husband’s tithi. Saptami’s classical deity is Surya himself, which means the dawn arghya falls on the Sun’s own tithi. Shashthi belongs to the Nanda group of tithis and Saptami to the Bhadra group, and neither Shukla Shashthi nor Shukla Saptami contains Vishti karana.

At Chhath the Sun is in sidereal Libra (Tula), its sign of debilitation, while the days grow shorter towards winter. A common reading is that the festival honours the Sun precisely when it is weakest, and that offering to the setting Sun before the rising one acknowledges decline before renewal.

On Shashthi evening the Moon is 60° to 72° ahead of the Sun, a thick crescent already up in the southern sky at sunset. It usually stands in Sagittarius (Dhanu) or Capricorn (Makara), in the region of Purvashadha, Uttarashadha or Shravana nakshatra. The presiding deity of Purvashadha is Apas, the cosmic waters, an apt echo for a worship performed standing in water.