Victory and Light

The Goddess has won. The buffalo-demon is dead on the tenth morning. And the year now enters its richest, brightest stretch, three festivals in three weeks that together do one thing: they answer the dark.

The autumn is the season when the light fails. The days shorten toward the winter, the nights lengthen, the year tilts into its long descent. And the tradition meets the descent with fire rather than mourning. A demon burned in effigy. A million lamps on the darkest night of the moon. A people standing in cold rivers to lift water to the rising sun. The festivals of victory and light are the year’s great refusal to let the dark have the last word.

The tenth day

The tenth day is Vijayadashami, the victory of the tenth, also called Dussehra. It is the day after Navaratri, and it carries two triumphs at once.

It is the day Durga killed Mahishasura, the climax the nine nights were climbing toward. And it is the day, in the Ramayana, that Rama killed Ravana, the demon-king of Lanka who had carried off Sita, after a war that the autumn worship of the Goddess, the Akalbodhan, had prepared him for. Two victories of order over a power that order could not at first defeat, kept on the same day.

In the north the day belongs to Rama. Through the nine nights before it, towns and neighbourhoods stage the Ramlila, the play of Rama’s life, acted out night after night, and on Dussehra it reaches its end: enormous effigies of Ravana, often with his ten heads, and of his brother and son, are raised in open grounds, stuffed with fireworks, and set ablaze before huge crowds, the demon-king burning down as the arrow of Rama finds him. In the south and the west the day takes another form, the Ayudha Puja, the worship of tools and weapons and instruments, when a craftsman honours his tools, a musician her instrument, a clerk his books, a driver his vehicle, the implements of one’s work laid down and blessed. It is also Vidyarambham in places, a day to begin learning, as Vasant Panchami is in spring. The victory is marked as a burning in one region and as a blessing of the means of livelihood in another. One day, two keepings.

The five days of light

Three weeks after the victory, as the moon of Kartika wanes toward its darkest night, the year keeps its greatest festival. Diwali, Dipavali, the row of lamps, the festival of lights.

It is five days, not one, and each has its own character. The first is Dhanteras, a day of prosperity, when households buy metal and gold and begin the cleaning and lighting that the festival turns on. The second is Naraka Chaturdashi, tied to Krishna’s destruction of the demon Naraka. The third, the heart of it, is the new moon of Kartika itself, amavasya, the darkest night of the darkest fortnight, and on this night the lamps are lit, row upon row, in every window and doorway and along every roof and wall, and Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth and fortune and well-being, is welcomed into the cleaned and lighted home. The fourth is Govardhan Puja, the Annakut, recalling Krishna lifting the hill Govardhan to shelter the cowherds from the storm, kept with a mountain of food offered to the god. The fifth is Bhai Dooj, honouring, like Raksha Bandhan, the bond of brother and sister.

Why does the tradition light a million lamps on the darkest night of the year? Because the festival is a genuine composite, and almost every region answers the question with its own story, and an honest treatise gives them all.

In the north it is the return of Rama. After the fourteen years of exile and the war in Lanka, Rama, Sita, and Lakshmana came home at last to Ayodhya, and the city, the tradition tells, lit every lamp it had to guide them in and welcome the rightful king to his throne. An honest note belongs here: this homecoming-by-lamplight is how the living tradition keeps Diwali, and it is most explicit in the later retellings rather than in the earliest layer of Valmiki. The treatise marks that and keeps the tradition’s telling as the tradition’s. Across India it is the festival of Lakshmi, the dark night chosen precisely because it is dark, the goddess of fortune drawn to the home that answers the blackest amavasya with the most light. In the east and elsewhere it is Krishna’s defeat of Narakasura, light over a tyrant. In Jainism it marks the liberation of Mahavira, the last Tirthankara; in Sikhism the return of the sixth Guru from imprisonment. The festival is old: a traveller from Central Asia noted it a thousand years ago, and inscriptions and texts carry it back further still.

The treatise does not flatten these into one origin. Diwali is a festival with many true beginnings gathered onto one dark moon, and the gesture they all share is the answer the whole autumn has been making. The dark is real. The lamp is lit anyway.

The sun on the river

A few days after the lamps of Diwali burn down, the eastern regions keep a festival that could hardly be more different in mood, and it makes a fitting close to the autumn cluster because it strips the celebration back to pure discipline.

Chhath is the festival of Bihar, Jharkhand, and eastern Uttar Pradesh, kept on the sixth tithi of the bright fortnight of Kartika, devoted to Surya, the sun, and to Chhathi Maiya. It runs four days, and its central acts are austere to a degree few other festivals approach. The devotee, most often a woman, keeps a fast that can run without even water for a full day and night. And twice the devotee stands in the cold water of a river or a pond, waist-deep, to offer arghya, water lifted in cupped hands to the sun: once at sunset, to the setting sun, and once at the next sunrise, to the rising one. No priest mediates it. No image is central. There is the sun, the water, the fast, and the standing.

Chhath reaches back to the oldest layer of the tradition, the worship of Surya that the Rigveda sings. Griffith’s public-domain translation carries the most famous of all the solar verses, the Gayatri at 3.62.10, the prayer on the light of the sun that the daily sandhya of the first volume turns upon. Chhath takes that ancient sun-reverence and makes it a festival of the body and the riverbank, the devotee offering discipline itself in place of lamps or feasts, standing in the water to thank the sun that the whole calendar, in the end, is a way of keeping time with.

The answer of the year

Step back and look at the three festivals together, because they are the emotional summit of the year. The demon burned. The lamps lit on the darkest night. The sun thanked at sunrise from the cold river. They are three forms of a single refusal.

The autumn is the dying of the light, and the tradition knows it, exactly as it knew, on the first night of the year, that time is the devourer. It does not pretend the dark is not coming. It burns the effigy in front of the dark. It lights the lamp into the amavasya. It stands in the river and waits for the sun to come back over the water, and lifts the offering the moment it does. The festivals of victory and light are not naive. They are defiant. They are the year, at its darkest turning, lighting every lamp it owns.

The lamps burn down. The river goes quiet. The sun rises on a colder country.

The last volume follows the year into the winter, to the harvest fires of January, to the largest gathering of human beings on earth, and to the question the whole calendar has been circling: what is the sacred year, finally, for?