The New Year and the Avatara

There is a moment, near the end of March, when the lunar year simply runs out. The dark fortnight of Phalguna ends, the moon goes new, and on the next dawn a fresh bright fortnight opens the month of Chaitra, the first month. The old year is finished. A new one begins.

And the tradition does not let the turning pass unmarked. It builds, onto the first days of the new year, the birth of the god who came to set the world right.

The year turns over

The lunisolar new year falls on the first tithi of the bright fortnight of Chaitra, the Chaitra Shukla Pratipada, around late March or early April. By the reckoning of the first volume, this is the natural head of the year: the first bright day of the first month, the moon beginning to wax in the month of the spring equinox.

It is kept across much of the subcontinent, under names that change with the region. In the Deccan, in Andhra, Telangana, and Karnataka, it is Ugadi, from yuga and adi, the beginning of an age. The day is met with a particular dish, the ugadi pachadi, made to hold all six tastes at once, sweet and sour and salt and bitter and pungent and astringent, so that the year is tasted whole on its first morning, its pleasures and its griefs accepted together. In Maharashtra and the Konkan it is Gudi Padwa, marked by the gudi, a bright cloth and an inverted pot raised on a pole outside the house, a banner of victory and welcome. In much of the north this day begins the Vikram Samvat, the era the first volume counted, the years rolling over to a new number. The tradition also ties the day to creation itself, holding that Brahma began the making of the world on this morning.

So the year opens twice. Once in the dark, weeks ago, with the vigil of Shiva. And now in the light, with a banner raised and an age begun.

The nine nights of spring

The same first day of Chaitra opens something else, and the two run together. It is the first of the nine nights of the Goddess, the spring Navaratri, the Vasanta Navaratri.

The autumn Navaratri is the famous one, and the eleventh chapter of this treatise gives it its due. But there are two great nine-night observances of the Goddess in the year, balanced on opposite sides of it, one in spring and one in autumn, and the spring one climbs the first nine tithis of the new year. For nine nights the Goddess is worshipped in her forms, the cycle of devotion that the autumn chapter will describe in full. Here the spring Navaratri matters most for where it arrives. It does not end in the Goddess’s victory, as the autumn one does. It ends in a birth.

On the ninth night, the navami, the festival is Rama Navami. The Goddess’s nine nights of spring deliver the reader to the birthday of Rama.

The birth at midday

Rama is the seventh avatara of Vishnu, the descent of the preserving god into the line of Ayodhya, born to restore a world tilting toward disorder. His story is the Ramayana, the first poem, and the poem tells his birth.

The Valmiki Ramayana, in Griffith’s public-domain rendering in the nineteenth canto of the Bala Kanda, sets the moment precisely against the calendar this treatise has been teaching. “Eleven months had passed away,” it runs, “‘Twas Chaitra’s ninth returning day. The moon within that mansion shone which Aditi looks kindly on.” The ninth tithi of Chaitra, the moon in the nakshatra of Punarvasu that the goddess Aditi favours, the hour of midday: the poem fixes the birth by tithi and star and hour, exactly as a festival is fixed. And then: “Kausalya bore an infant blest with heavenly marks of grace impressed; Rama, the universe’s lord, a prince by all the worlds adored.”

That is the moment Rama Navami keeps. On the ninth day of the bright fortnight, the devout fast until noon, the hour of the birth, and then break the fast in celebration. The Ramayana of Valmiki and the Ramcharitmanas of Tulsidas are recited, sometimes in an unbroken reading across days. At Ayodhya the faithful bathe in the Sarayu. Across the south the day is kept as the Sita Rama Kalyanam, the ceremonial marriage of Rama and Sita re-enacted in the temples, the wedding of the divine pair celebrated as the festival’s heart. The birth of the prince who would lose everything and set everything right is welcomed into the first days of the new year.

The son of the wind

Close after Rama in the Chaitra sky comes the one who served him, and in much of India Hanuman Jayanti falls on the full moon of the same month.

Hanuman is the son of Anjana and the vanara chief Kesari, and of Vayu, the wind, whose son he is in the deeper telling, which is why he is called Pavanputra and Maruti, child of the wind. Some traditions hold he carries an amsha, a portion, of Shiva himself. He is the strength that serves, the devotee whose love for Rama is so complete that he becomes the very pattern of devotion, the bhakta against whom all others are measured. His birthday is kept with the recitation of the Hanuman Chalisa, with worship at his shrines, with the strength and the humility he embodies held up together.

But here an honest treatise must slow down, because the date of Hanuman Jayanti is one of the genuinely unsettled points in the calendar. In the north and in Maharashtra it falls on the Chaitra full moon, in spring. In Karnataka it is often kept in Margashirsha, in December or January. In Tamil Nadu and Kerala it falls in Margazhi, also in the winter. The Telugu tradition keeps a forty-one-day observance running from the Chaitra full moon into Vaishakha. These are not errors to be corrected to a single right answer. They are real regional reckonings of when the great devotee was born, and the treatise names the divergence and leaves it standing, as it has promised to do. Hanuman is born on the day his region remembers him.

The other new year

There is a final thing to set straight before leaving the spring, and it is a thing easily got wrong.

About three weeks after Ugadi and Gudi Padwa, around the thirteenth to the fifteenth of April, a second wave of new years sweeps across the land. In Kerala it is Vishu. In Tamil Nadu, Puthandu. In Bengal, Pohela Boishakh. In the Punjab, Baisakhi, which is also the day the Khalsa was founded in 1699. In Assam, Bohag Bihu. In Odisha, Pana Sankranti.

It is tempting to file these as more regional names for the same new year. They are not. These are solar new years, fixed to the sun’s entry into Mesha, the sign of Aries, the Mesha Sankranti. They belong to the solar reckoning of the third chapter, not the lunisolar one of Chaitra. Because they are pinned to the sun, they barely move, landing in the same mid-April window every year, while Ugadi slides across late March and early April with the moon. The two are about three weeks apart and they keep two different clocks. To collapse them into one is to misread the calendar the first volume took such care to open.

So the spring holds two new years, not one, and they tell the reader something the whole treatise keeps insisting on. India does not have a single calendar. It has a family of them, lunisolar and solar, northern and southern, each true to its own reckoning, each turning the year over at its own appointed moment. The festival that is one festival in one state is, in the next, a different day under a different sky.

The new year has turned. The avatara is born. The devotee who serves him is honoured.

The heat is coming now, and with it the chariots.