Festivals
The Hindu festival calendar: what each observance marks, where the stories come from, and how it is kept.
Hindu festivals fall on a lunar calendar, which is why their dates move against the Gregorian year. Its dates move, because they are fixed to lunar months corrected against the solar year, which is why Diwali arrives in October some years and November others.
Each festival carries at least two stories and usually more. Diwali is Rama’s return in the north and Lakshmi’s arrival almost everywhere, and in Bengal it is a night for Kali. Navaratri is nine nights of the Goddess, danced in Gujarat, fasted elsewhere, and closed in the south with an arrangement of dolls. Ganesh Chaturthi as a public event is barely a hundred and thirty years old, reshaped in the 1890s into something political.
These pages give what each festival commemorates, how it is actually kept, and where regional practice diverges enough that two Hindus would describe the same day differently.