What is Diwali?

A child sets a clay lamp on a windowsill at dusk. The wick catches, the flame leans, steadies, and then the lamp beside it is lit, and the one beyond that, until the ledge is a line of small fires against the dark. Down the street the same thing is happening on every parapet and doorstep. By full night the city is drawn in light.

That row of lamps is the festival. The word says so. Dipavali (dee-PAH-vah-lee), the older form behind the everyday Diwali, is a compound of dipa (lamp) and avali (a row, a line, a series): a row of lights. Whatever else is claimed for the night, the lamps are not in dispute. They are the one thing every version of the festival agrees on.

What the lamps are for is where the agreement ends.

One festival, many reasons

Here is the part that most short accounts of Diwali quietly skip. There is no single story behind it. Diwali is one festival of lamps that different regions and different traditions explain with different stories, all of them laid over a much older autumn observance around the dark of the moon in the month of Kartika (KAR-tik-uh), which falls in October or November.

Ask in Ayodhya and you will hear about Rama. Ask in coastal Karnataka or among Telugu and Tamil families and you will hear about Krishna and a demon named Narakasura. Ask almost anywhere and you will hear about Lakshmi, the goddess of fortune, and the lamps lit to welcome her in. A Jain household marks the night for the passing of Mahavira. A Sikh family may keep it as the day a Guru came home from prison.

These are not rival theories competing to be correct. They are different communities lighting the same lamps for reasons that grew up in different places. The tradition itself does not flatten them into one. Neither will this article.

How old, and how uncertain

The festival is old. How old, exactly, no one can say.

The lamps appear in literature well within the first millennium of the common era. The Sanskrit poet and critic Rajasekhara, writing around the ninth or tenth century, names Dipamalika, a garland or array of lamps, and describes houses freshly whitewashed and set out with rows of lights. Earlier still, the seventh-century play Nagananda, attributed to the emperor Harsha, carries references read by scholars as the same autumn lamp festival. Around 1030 the Persian scholar Al-Biruni, surveying Indian custom in his Tahqiq ma li-l-Hind (“Inquiry into India”), recorded Hindus observing a festival at the new moon of Kartika. So by the early second millennium the outline we recognise was already in place and worth a foreign visitor’s notice.

The Puranas carry pieces of it too. The Padma Purana and the Skanda Purana, in the layered, much-revised form they have come down to us, describe the predawn bath and the lamps of the season. But Puranas are notoriously hard to date, accreting material over centuries, and the wise course is caution. We can say the festival is very old and was clearly established by the early medieval period. Pinning one origin, one founding event, one first Diwali, is something the evidence does not allow. Anyone who tells you the precise year it began is guessing.

What probably underlies all of it is humbler than any of the grand stories: a harvest-season festival, tied to the turn of the agricultural year and the dark of the autumn moon, onto which the great narratives were later fastened. The lamps may well be older than every reason given for them.

The thread that runs everywhere: Lakshmi

If any single element comes closest to being shared across the whole festival, it is the worship of Lakshmi (LUCK-shmee), goddess of wealth, fortune, and well-being, on the new-moon night.

She is an ancient figure. The Sri Sukta, a hymn appended to the Rig Veda, already praises her as Sri, the radiant one, asking her for cattle, gold, and abundance. The tradition tells of her emergence from the churning of the cosmic ocean, the samudra manthan (sah-MOO-druh MUN-tun), when gods and demons turned the sea of milk in search of the nectar of immortality and Lakshmi rose from it seated on a lotus. The Vishnu Purana (1.9) gives one well-known telling of that scene. The tradition associates her appearance with this same dark night of Kartika, and the lamps are read as her welcome, set out so that fortune, finding the house clean and bright, will choose to enter and stay.

This is why, on the central night, households clean and whitewash, open the doors, and perform Lakshmi puja (the formal worship of the goddess), often alongside Ganesha, the remover of obstacles. Of all the meanings stacked on Diwali, the welcoming of fortune is the one you will find in the most places.

How far back the Diwali Lakshmi worship in its present form reaches is itself debated. Several scholars connect its prominence to the medieval flowering of devotional, bhakti religion, which drew local harvest and prosperity rituals into a shared pan-Indian frame. The goddess is ancient. The shape of her Diwali night, as kept today, took form over a long time.

The northern story: Rama comes home

Across much of North India the festival is told as the homecoming of Rama.

The Ramayana of Valmiki tells how Rama, prince of Ayodhya (uh-YODH-yuh), is sent into forest exile for fourteen years; how his wife Sita is carried off by Ravana, the ten-headed king of Lanka; how Rama, with his brother Lakshmana and an army of forest allies, wages war, kills Ravana, and recovers Sita. The epic describes the return to Ayodhya and the city’s joy at receiving its king. Popular tradition completes the picture: the people of Ayodhya, the story goes, lit rows of lamps to guide the travellers home through the new-moon dark and to celebrate the restoration of their rightful ruler.

It is worth being precise here. Valmiki’s Ramayana narrates the return and the rejoicing. The neat equation of that homecoming with this specific festival of lamps is something the living tradition supplies and amplifies, rather than a line you can lift cleanly from the oldest text. The association is real, deeply held, and central to how the North experiences the night. Its standing as the origin of Diwali is a claim the festival’s own variety undercuts.

In this telling the lamps mean what the people of Ayodhya meant by them: light against darkness, the welcome of the good king, the end of an exile.

The southern story: Krishna and the demon

Travel south and the night changes its hero.

In much of South India and the Deccan, and in the wider Bhagavata tradition, the festival, especially the day called Naraka Chaturdashi (NUH-ruh-kuh chuh-TUR-duh-shee), marks Krishna’s killing of the demon Narakasura. The Bhagavata Purana (book 10, chapter 59) tells how Narakasura, a tyrant who had seized the earrings of the divine mother Aditi and imprisoned thousands of captives, was slain by Krishna, who rode out with his queen Satyabhama. With the demon dead, the captives were freed and the worlds released from his terror.

The custom that grew around this is the Abhyanga Snan, a ritual oil bath taken before dawn, washing off the impurity of the demon’s defeat and the old darkness with it. In Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, and Marathi households this dawn bath, rather than the night of Lakshmi, can be the emotional centre of the festival.

Again the careful note. The Bhagavata Purana tells the Narakasura story; the binding of that story to this calendar day is carried by regional observance. And again, the meaning is recognisably the festival’s own: a darkness broken, captives loosed, light at dawn.

Five days, more or less

In its fuller North Indian form, Diwali is five nights, not one, each with its own character. The sequence varies by region, and not everyone keeps all five, but the common pattern runs like this.

Dhanteras opens it. The name joins dhana (wealth) with the thirteenth lunar day on which it falls. Tradition links it to Dhanvantari, the physician of the gods who, in the churning-of-the-ocean story, rose bearing the vessel of nectar. It is the day many families buy metal, especially gold and silver, as a token of incoming prosperity.

Naraka Chaturdashi, also called Choti (“little”) Diwali, is the second day, the day of Krishna’s victory over Narakasura and of the predawn bath described above.

Lakshmi Puja, on the amavasya (the new moon) of Kartika, is the main night: the dark of the moon, the rows of lamps, the welcome of the goddess of fortune. This is the night most people mean when they say Diwali.

Govardhana Puja, or Annakut (“a mountain of food”), follows. It recalls an episode from the Bhagavata tradition in which the young Krishna lifted Govardhana hill on one hand to shelter his village from a punishing storm sent by Indra (Bhagavata Purana 10.24-25). Temples and homes pile up offerings of food in answer, a small mountain for the hill that was raised.

Bhai Dooj closes the five days, honouring the bond between sister and brother. The sister marks her brother’s forehead with a tilak and prays for his long life; tradition tells of Yama, the lord of death, visited and honoured by his sister Yami on this day.

The point worth holding is that the five days gather several distinct strands, Lakshmi, Krishna twice over, the family bond, into one stretch of the calendar. Diwali is less a single event than a season braided together.

Other lamps, other meanings

The festival reaches past the boundary of any one tradition.

For Jains, the night of the Kartika new moon is the night Mahavira, the twenty-fourth and last of the Tirthankaras, the great teachers of the age, attained nirvana, final release. The Jain canonical text the Kalpasutra speaks of the lamps lit at Pava to mark the moment, the worldly lights kindled because the light of knowledge had departed the world. Jain tradition dates the event traditionally to 527 BCE. So when Jains light lamps on Diwali, they light them for a passing, and for the knowledge left behind.

For many Sikhs the day is Bandi Chhor Divas, the “day of the release of prisoners”. Sikh tradition holds that the sixth Guru, Guru Hargobind, imprisoned by the Mughal authorities, was freed, traditionally on this day in 1619, and contrived the release of fifty-two princes held with him, and that he reached Amritsar to find the Harmandir Sahib lit up in welcome. The historical details are debated by scholars, but the observance is firm: lamps, processions, and the lit precincts of the Golden Temple.

One night. A Hindu welcoming fortune, a Jain marking a teacher’s release from the world, a Sikh remembering a Guru’s release from prison. The lamps are the same. What burns in them is not.

What we can say, and what we cannot

We can say that Diwali is the festival of lamps kept around the new moon of Kartika, in autumn, across the Indian subcontinent and its diaspora. We can say the lamps are its oldest and steadiest feature, attested in literature more than a thousand years ago and noticed by a Persian scholar by the eleventh century. We can say that the worship of Lakshmi on the new-moon night is its most widely shared thread, and that beyond it the reasons divide by region and by tradition: Rama in the North, Krishna in the South, Mahavira for the Jains, Guru Hargobind for many Sikhs.

We cannot say which story came first, or which is the true one, because the question itself misreads the festival. The lamps did not wait for a single story. They gathered stories to themselves.

The wick catches. The flame leans and steadies. Down every street, the dark is being answered, one lamp at a time.