Chhath Puja 2026: Dates, the 4-Day Ritual Arc and Significance

Last updated 26 September 2026 · About a 21 minute read · By Rohan Verma

Chhath Puja 2026 runs from Friday 13 November to Monday 16 November, with the main Sandhya Arghya on Sunday 15 November and the closing Usha Arghya at sunrise on Monday 16 November. It begins five days after Diwali and two days after Bhai Dooj, and it is the only major Hindu festival where the deity being worshipped is visible to everyone standing on the bank.

Chhath is also the hardest vrat in the Hindu year. The person keeping it goes roughly 36 hours without food and without a single sip of water, standing in cold November river water twice in that stretch.

Most pages about Chhath give you the four dates and stop. This guide walks the whole arc: what happens on each of the four days, who Chhathi Maiya actually is, what goes into the soop, how to keep the vrat properly on a Delhi terrace with no river in sight, and why there are two Chhaths every year rather than one.

Chhath Puja 2026 dates: when is Chhath Puja?

Chhath Puja 2026 falls from Friday 13 November to Monday 16 November. The festival always occupies four consecutive days, from Kartik Shukla Chaturthi to Kartik Shukla Saptami, which in 2026 lands on that Friday-to-Monday stretch.

Every October the question that starts appearing in Bihar and eastern UP households is simply chhath puja kab hai, and for 2026 the answer is that four-day stretch in the second week of November.

A tithi is a lunar day, and it does not line up neatly with the calendar. That is why the same festival can show a one-day difference between two panchangs printed in two different cities.

Day	Ritual	Date 2026	Tithi
Day 1	Nahay Khay	Friday 13 November	Kartik Shukla Chaturthi
Day 2	Kharna	Saturday 14 November	Kartik Shukla Panchami
Day 3	Sandhya Arghya	Sunday 15 November	Kartik Shukla Shashthi
Day 4	Usha Arghya	Monday 16 November	Kartik Shukla Saptami

If someone asks you for one date, give them Sunday 15 November. That is Sandhya Arghya, the evening offering, and it is the day the ghats fill and the day most workplaces in Bihar and Jharkhand effectively stop.

Chhath sits at the tail of a long Kartik sequence. It helps to see the whole run:

• Diwali: Sunday 8 November 2026, on Kartik Amavasya
• Govardhan Puja: Tuesday 10 November
• Bhai Dooj: Wednesday 11 November
• Chhath: Friday 13 to Monday 16 November
• Dev Uthani Ekadashi and Tulsi Vivah: 20 and 21 November

So Chhath begins five days after Diwali. Families who travel home for Diwali often simply stay on, which is why Bihar-bound trains in that window are booked out months ahead.

One thing worth settling before you plan anything. Arghya is offered at the actual moment of sunset and sunrise, so the clock time depends entirely on where you are standing. Sunset in Patna, Ranchi, Delhi and Mumbai on 15 November are all different. Check a panchang for your own city, and if you are going to a ghat, reach at least an hour early.

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What is Chhath Puja, and who is worshipped?

Chhath Puja is a four-day festival of sun worship in which offerings are made directly to Surya, the sun god, and to Chhathi Maiya, alongside a fast of about 36 hours without food or water. The name comes from chhath, meaning sixth, because the central rituals fall on the sixth day of the lunar fortnight.

The festival has another name that tells you more: Surya Shashthi. Surya for the deity, Shashthi for the sixth tithi.

What makes Chhath unusual among Hindu festivals is the absence of a middleman. There is no priest conducting the puja. There is no idol at the centre of it, and no temple.

That shapes the whole chhath puja vidhi, the ritual procedure itself. Where most pujas follow a script a pandit reads out, this one is held in the memory of the women who have done it before, and it is learned by standing next to them.

The person keeping the vrat, called the parvaitin, stands in the water herself and raises the offering herself, to a deity she can see with her own eyes. It is one of the few large Hindu observances that runs almost entirely on household and community knowledge passed down by watching.

Two things are being asked for, and they are the plainest requests in the calendar. Health for the family, and the wellbeing of children. Surya is thanked for what he visibly provides, which is light, warmth and the food that grows because of both.

That directness is also why Chhath has almost no commercial layer. There is nothing to buy that makes the vrat count for more, a point worth holding on to as the rest of this guide gets into samagri lists.

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Who is Chhathi Maiya?

Chhathi Maiya is the goddess worshipped alongside Surya during Chhath, identified in the Puranas as Shashthi Devi, the sixth form of Prakriti and the protector of children. Her name is the one you hear in every Chhath song, usually before Surya's.

Here is the honest complication that most pages skip. There is more than one tradition about who she is, and they do not agree.

• Surya's sister. The most widely cited identification, and the one used in the standard reference accounts, makes Chhathi Maiya the sixth form of Prakriti and the sister of Surya.
• Usha, the dawn. Another living tradition identifies her with Usha, associated with Surya as the first light of morning. This reading fits the fourth day neatly, since Usha Arghya is named for exactly that.
• Shashthi Devi, born of Brahma's mind. The Puranic figure who guards newborn children, invoked on the sixth day after a birth in many Indian households.

Notice that all three point the same direction even while disagreeing on genealogy. Sixth. Child-protecting. Bound to the sun.

That third identification explains something you may already have seen without connecting it. In large parts of north India the ceremony on the sixth day after a baby is born is itself called chhathi. The goddess who is asked to protect a newborn in that rite is the same goddess the parvaitin stands in the river for.

The katha most often read as Chhathi Maiya's own story is from the Brahmavaivarta Purana. King Priyavrat and Queen Malini had a stillborn son. Shashthi Devi appeared, restored the child to life, and told the king to establish her worship. That is the origin story behind a festival whose central petition is the safety of children.

If your family reads a katha on Kharna evening, it is usually this one.

Sources for the deity identifications in this section: Wikipedia entries on Chhath and Shashthi, and the Brahmavaivarta Purana account of King Priyavrat as recorded in standard Puranic summaries.

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Why Chhath is called the hardest vrat in the Hindu calendar

Chhath involves roughly 36 continuous hours without food and without water, which makes it physically harder than Karva Chauth, Navratri fasting or Ekadashi. The nirjala part, meaning waterless, is what separates it from almost every other Hindu fast.

The sequence is what does it. The parvaitin eats at dusk on Kharna, Saturday 14 November. She does not eat or drink again until after the offering to the rising sun on Monday morning, 16 November.

Inside those 36 hours she also does two river standings. One in the evening of the 15th, one before dawn on the 16th, in November water that is genuinely cold in Bihar and Jharkhand.

Compare it plainly:

Vrat	Duration	Water allowed?
Ekadashi	One day, often partial	Yes, usually
Navratri fasting	Nine days, restricted diet	Yes
Karva Chauth	Sunrise to moonrise, about 14 hours	No, in the strict form
Chhath	About 36 hours	No

There is a second reason the word hardest keeps coming up, and it is not about the body. The purity discipline runs for all four days, not just the fasting stretch.

The kitchen is scrubbed before Nahay Khay. Onion and garlic leave the house. In many families the prasad is cooked on a fresh earthen or mud stove, by someone who has bathed, in clothes that have not been worn since washing. Nobody tastes the thekua before it is offered.

Ask anyone from a Chhath-keeping family what they remember and it will not be the fast. It will be their mother or grandmother awake at two in the morning, and the whole house organised around one person's vow for four days.

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Day 1: Nahay Khay, Friday 13 November

Nahay Khay means bathe and eat, and it is the day the household enters a state of ritual purity with one simple sattvik meal. The fast has not started yet. The discipline has.

The name is literal. Bathe first, ideally in a river or with water carried from one, then eat. Traditionally the parvaitin bathes in the Ganga and carries some of that water home for the next three days of cooking.

What happens in the house on the 13th:

• A full clean. Kitchen especially, including vessels. Many families set aside a separate set used only for Chhath.
• Onion, garlic and any non-vegetarian food leave the house for the duration.
• New or freshly washed clothes for the parvaitin.
• One sattvik meal, eaten once. The classic Nahay Khay plate is arwa chawal, which is unpolished rice, chana dal, and lauki or bottle gourd sabzi. No onion, no garlic, cooked in ghee.

The bottle gourd is not incidental. Lauki is the signature Nahay Khay vegetable, chosen because it is light, watery and easy on a stomach about to be put through two days of nothing.

A practical note that matters more than it sounds. The parvaitin eats this meal only after everyone else has been served and the kitchen is clean. From here the household is effectively on her schedule.

The next day is where the actual fast begins, and it ends with the one meal everyone in the family waits for.

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Day 2: Kharna, Saturday 14 November

Kharna is a full day without food or water, broken after sunset with kheer and roti, and the moment that meal ends the 36-hour nirjala fast begins. It is the emotional centre of the four days for most families.

You will hear this day called three things: Kharna, Lohanda, or Rasiaav-roti after the food itself. Rasiaav is the jaggery kheer.

The parvaitin fasts through Saturday. In the evening she prepares or supervises the prasad, does a small puja, and eats:

• Rasiaav, kheer made with jaggery rather than sugar, usually with rice and milk
• Roti, often plain chapati made from freshly ground wheat
• Banana, and sometimes a little ghee

Two details about this meal that outsiders always get wrong. First, it is eaten in silence and alone in many families, with no interruptions permitted until she has finished. Second, the moment she puts the plate down, that is it. No water after.

Neighbours and relatives come by on Kharna evening to receive this prasad. In Bihar towns the Kharna round is a social event in itself, one house to the next, a small bowl of rasiaav at each.

Then the house turns to Sunday. Through Saturday night and Sunday morning, the thekua gets made, the fruit is washed, the soop is packed. Almost nobody sleeps much.

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Day 3: Sandhya Arghya, Sunday 15 November

Sandhya Arghya is the evening offering to the setting sun, made standing in water, and it is the ritual most people mean by Chhath Puja. In 2026 it falls on Sunday 15 November, on Kartik Shukla Shashthi.

The whole day is preparation. Thekua is fried, fruit is arranged, the soop is loaded, and by late afternoon the family walks to the ghat together carrying it.

What happens at the ghat, in order:

1. The family reaches the water well before sunset and claims a spot. The ghats are crowded and the timing is not adjustable.
2. A small area is marked and diyas are lit. Sugarcane stalks are often stood up and tied to make a small canopy.
3. The parvaitin enters the water, usually knee to waist deep, facing the setting sun.
4. She raises the loaded soop and offers arghya, pouring water or milk from a lota towards the sun, while family members support the soop or hold diyas.
5. Prayers are made for the family, particularly for children, and the offering is repeated as the sun goes down.

The visual that defines Chhath comes from this hour. Hundreds of people waist-deep in a river at dusk, bamboo soops raised above the water, diyas floating past, and folk songs going up from the bank in Bhojpuri and Maithili.

After the offering, the family does not go home and sleep. Many stay at or near the ghat through the night, keeping diyas lit and singing. Those who go home return in the dark, usually by four in the morning.

And the parvaitin still has not had water since Saturday night.

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Day 4: Usha Arghya, Monday 16 November

Usha Arghya is the offering to the rising sun on the fourth morning, and it is the ritual that ends both the festival and the fast. In 2026 it falls on Monday 16 November, on Kartik Shukla Saptami.

Usha means dawn. The family returns to the same ghat in the dark, often between three and five in the morning depending on local sunrise, and waits for first light.

The sequence mirrors Sunday evening, reversed. The parvaitin enters the water, faces east, and offers arghya as the sun comes up rather than as it goes down.

Then comes the part the family has been waiting on:

• Parna, the breaking of the fast. She is given ginger and a little water first, then prasad. Ginger and raw sugar are the traditional first things after 36 hours.
• Prasad is distributed to everyone present, then carried home for neighbours. Chhath prasad is shared widely and refusing it is not done.
• The soop and daura are put away for next year. Many families use the same brass soop for generations.

One custom on this morning deserves mention because it surprises people. Strangers will ask the parvaitin for prasad on her way home, and it is given. The prasad is not treated as family property.

If you want to understand Chhath in one image, it is not the sunset. It is a woman who has not had water since Saturday, handing out thekua on a Monday morning to people she does not know.

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Chhath Puja samagri list: what goes in the soop

The core Chhath samagri is a bamboo soop and daura, thekua, whole sugarcane with leaves, seasonal fruit, diyas, and a kalash and lota for pouring arghya. Most of it is agricultural produce rather than anything bought from a puja shop.

Two words first, because the rest of the list sits inside them. A soop is a flat bamboo winnowing fan, the kind used to separate grain from husk. A daura is the larger bamboo basket the offerings are carried to the ghat in.

Item	What it is for	Notes
Soop (bamboo or brass)	Holds the offering, raised during arghya	Brass soops are common now and are reused yearly
Daura and bahangi	Carrying the offerings to the ghat	Bahangi is the shoulder pole the dauras hang from
Thekua	The main prasad	Made at home, never bought, in most families
Sugarcane, whole with leaves	Offered and used to build a small canopy	5 or more stalks, bought fresh
Banana, whole comb	Offering	Kept uncut on the stalk where possible
Coconut, with water intact	Offering
Seasonal fruit and produce	Offering	Sweet lime, custard apple, singhara or water chestnut, radish with leaves, fresh turmeric with leaves
Diyas and wicks	Lit at the ghat and through the night	Earthen, brass or silver-plated; many families light dozens
Kalash and lota	Pouring the arghya	Brass or copper, usually the household's own
Sindoor, akshat, dhoop, ghee, honey	Puja items	Sindoor applied nose to hairline is a Chhath marker
New clothes for the parvaitin	Worn for the arghya	Usually a yellow or red saree, unstitched where traditional

Look at what is on that list and what is not. There is no idol, no framed picture and no murti anywhere in Chhath samagri, because the deity is the sun itself. This is one of the very few large Hindu observances with no image at its centre, and it is worth saying plainly rather than implying otherwise.

Two items are genuinely hard to substitute. Whole sugarcane with the leaves still attached, and fresh turmeric with leaves, both of which vanish from city markets by the 14th. Buy them on the 12th or 13th.

The diyas are the one place where a household's own things carry over year to year. Earthen diyas are traditional and get replaced annually; brass and silver-plated ones are kept, cleaned and reused, which is why they end up in the same steel trunk as the brass soop.

A word on what that means if you are buying. Pieces sold as silver diyas in this price range are almost always pure silver plating over a base, not solid silver, and a handcrafted plated diya gives the same lustre on a puja shelf without the cost. Dev Aastha's own diyas are plated, and it is worth asking any seller the same question directly.

Nothing on this list decides whether the vrat counts. Chhath is kept by families who buy nothing beyond fruit and sugarcane, and that is the older form of it.

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Thekua: the prasad that defines the festival

Thekua is a stiff, deep-fried wheat and jaggery biscuit, moulded by hand or in a wooden press, and it is the single prasad Chhath is known for. If a house smells of jaggery and ghee in mid-November, someone there is keeping Chhath.

It is made from four things: wheat flour, jaggery, ghee and water. Fennel or grated coconut goes in depending on the family.

The method is where the care shows:

1. Jaggery is melted in water and cooled, never used dry.
2. Ghee is rubbed into the flour first, a step called moyan, which is what makes thekua crisp rather than hard.
3. The dough is kneaded stiff, much stiffer than roti dough, and rested only briefly.
4. Portions are pressed into a wooden mould that leaves the ridged pattern, or shaped and marked by hand with a fork or comb.
5. They are fried in ghee on a low flame until deep golden. Low and slow, or the inside stays raw.

In strict households the wheat is prepared from scratch for this. Grain is washed, dried in the sun, and ground, sometimes at a mill reserved for the purpose. Market flour is avoided because it may have been handled without the purity rules Chhath asks for.

The rule everyone follows without being told: nobody tastes the thekua before it is offered. A cook who has made it for forty years still does not know how this year's batch came out until Monday.

Thekua keeps for a week or more, which is why it travels. A tin of it going from Patna to a relative in Bengaluru in late November is its own small tradition.

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How to do Chhath Puja at home without a river

You can keep Chhath fully at home by offering arghya into a clean tub, tank or large vessel of water on an east-facing terrace or balcony, and this is accepted practice for millions of families in cities. A river is traditional. It is not a requirement of the vrat.

This matters more each year. Chhath is now kept in Delhi NCR, Mumbai, Kolkata and Gujarat by families who moved a generation or two ago, and most of them have no ghat within reach.

A workable home setup:

• Pick the spot on the 12th. East-facing for Usha Arghya, and open enough to actually see the horizon for Sandhya Arghya. A terrace beats a balcony.
• Clean it properly and wash it down. The ground where the offering is made is treated as ritually clean, the same as a ghat.
• Use a large clean tub or tank filled with fresh water, deep enough for the parvaitin to stand ankle or knee deep, or to stand beside if that is not possible.
• Add a little Ganga jal if the family keeps some. Common practice, not obligatory.
• Stand the sugarcane and light the diyas the same way you would at a ghat. This is where a household's brass or silver-plated diyas earn their keep, since they hold up outdoors in a way earthen ones sometimes do not. A set like these silver-plated lotus diyas gets reused every Kartik rather than replaced.
• Offer at the real sunset and sunrise times for your city, not Patna's. This is the detail people get wrong when they observe away from home.

One honest caution about the water. If you are using a terrace tank, do not let anyone treat it as a swimming spot, and empty it afterwards. Families report more accidents from improvised home arrangements than from ghats, which are at least supervised.

If the parvaitin is unwell, standing in water at all can be dropped. Offering arghya from the bank, or from beside the tub, is a recognised alternative and no elder in a Chhath family will tell you otherwise.

Many city families also do a version of this before travelling. Kharna at home in Delhi on Saturday, then the train, then the ghat in Patna on Sunday.

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Chhath vrat rules: who keeps it and what to avoid

Chhath is not a women-only festival, though most parvaitins are women, and the rules centre on purity of food, cleanliness and not breaking the fast rather than on gender. Men keep the full vrat in many families, particularly where a vow was made.

The standard reference accounts are explicit that the main worshippers, the parvaitin, are usually women, but that Chhath is not gender-specific. In practice you will see men in the water at every large ghat.

What the vrat asks:

• No food or water from the end of Kharna until after Usha Arghya. This is the core of it.
• No onion, garlic or non-vegetarian food in the house for all four days.
• Prasad is cooked by someone who has bathed, in clean clothes, in dedicated vessels, and is not tasted before the offering.
• The parvaitin sleeps on the floor during the festival in most traditions, not on a bed.
• No leather is worn to the ghat, and footwear is left well back from the water.
• Nothing is eaten at the ghat before the offering is complete, by anyone in the immediate family in stricter households.

Who should not attempt the full nirjala form:

• Anyone pregnant or nursing
• People with diabetes, kidney conditions or low blood pressure
• Children and the very elderly
• Anyone on medication that must be taken with food or water

This is not a modern softening. Hindu fasting traditions have always allowed substitution, and for Chhath the accepted route is that another family member keeps the vrat on behalf of the person who cannot. A daughter-in-law, a sister, sometimes a son. The vow is kept; the body at risk is not.

One more rule, unwritten and absolute. Whoever is keeping it decides when it is over, not the clock and not an eager family. If the sun is late behind cloud on the 16th, everybody waits.

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The stories behind Chhath: Karna, Sita and Draupadi

Chhath has no single origin story; four separate traditions claim it, and the festival's roots are usually traced to Vedic sun worship rather than to any one of them. The four named figures are Karna, Sita, Draupadi and King Priyavrat.

Each story attaches to a place, which is part of why they all survive.

• Karna. The Mahabharata's Karna was the son of Surya, and tradition holds that he worshipped his father standing in water daily. Chhath is often described as a continuation of his practice. Karna ruled Anga, which is modern Bhagalpur in Bihar, and that geography is not a coincidence.
• Sita. A widely held tradition says Sita performed the first Chhath at Munger on the banks of the Ganga after returning from Lanka. There is a temple at Munger associated with this, and families from the area treat it as the founding event.
• Draupadi. Another Mahabharata thread has Draupadi keeping the fast on the advice of Dhaumya, for the wellbeing of the Pandavas during their exile.
• King Priyavrat and Queen Malini. The Brahmavaivarta Purana story of a stillborn child restored by Shashthi Devi, which is the katha read as Chhathi Maiya's own.

Beneath all four sits something older. Sun worship with Rig Vedic mantras is the layer scholars actually point to, with sages described as fasting and offering to Surya directly. The Gayatri mantra itself is addressed to the sun.

Historians also place an early institutional form of Chhath in Varanasi under the Gahadavala dynasty, which gives the festival a documented footing separate from the epics.

Which story is true is the wrong question to ask of a folk festival. What the four have in common is the useful part: a person in water, asking the sun for the life of someone they are responsible for.

Sources for the legends and historical notes in this section: Wikipedia entries on Chhath and Shashthi, and Sahapedia's account of the festival's origin.

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Where Chhath is observed, and the second Chhath most people miss

Chhath is observed most intensely in Bihar, Jharkhand and eastern Uttar Pradesh, across the Madhesh and Terai provinces of Nepal, and wherever families from those regions have settled. It is also kept twice a year, not once.

Start with the second Chhath, because it is the fact almost every article leaves out.

	Kartik Chhath	Chaiti Chhath
Month	Kartik, October or November	Chaitra, March or April
2026	13 to 16 November	Fell in March 2026
Scale	Very large, public, crowded ghats	Much smaller, mostly household
Who keeps it	Most Chhath families	Families with a specific vow or tradition
Difficulty	Cold water, November	Heat, which makes the nirjala fast harder

Chaiti Chhath is the harder of the two by most accounts, for an obvious reason. Thirty-six hours without water in March or April is a different proposition from the same fast in November.

Now the regional picture. What changes is scale and setting, not the ritual:

• Bihar. The heartland. Patna's Ganga ghats run for kilometres and the state effectively closes. Munger and Bhagalpur carry the Sita and Karna associations.
• Jharkhand. Very widely kept, with Ranchi's tanks and reservoirs used where rivers are not close.
• Eastern Uttar Pradesh. Strong in the Bhojpuri belt, Varanasi, Ballia, Gorakhpur and Deoria.
• Nepal. Kept across Madhesh, Koshi, Bagmati, Gandaki and Lumbini provinces, with the Terai observance essentially continuous with Bihar's.
• Delhi NCR, Mumbai, Kolkata, Gujarat. Large migrant observance. Municipal bodies build temporary ghats on the Yamuna, at Juhu and elsewhere.

Language is where the regional texture actually lives. The songs are in Bhojpuri, Maithili and Magahi, and the same ritual sounds quite different on a Maithili ghat and a Bhojpuri one.

For the fuller Kartik-month sequence that Chhath sits inside, the Hindu festival and vrat calendar for 2026 lays out the dates either side of it, and Govardhan Puja on 10 November is the festival immediately before.

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Chhath geet: the songs that carry the festival

Chhath geet are the folk songs sung through the four days, in Bhojpuri, Maithili and Magahi, and they function as the festival's instruction manual as much as its soundtrack. There is no priest, so the songs carry the knowledge.

Listen to the words and you notice what they are doing. They name the offerings. They describe the walk to the ghat, the soop, the sugarcane, the waiting for the sun. A girl who has heard these songs every November knows the sequence before anyone teaches her.

The voice most associated with them is Sharda Sinha, called Bihar Kokila, who sang in Maithili, Bhojpuri and Magahi for over five decades. She was awarded the Padma Bhushan in 2018 and died on 5 November 2024.

Her best-known Chhath recordings include "Chhathi Maiya Aayi Na Duariya", "Kartik Maas Ijoriya" and "Ho Deenanath". In Bihar and eastern UP these are not background music. They are the sound of the festival starting.

Older songs in the tradition are anonymous and still sung live at ghats, particularly by groups of women walking to the water together. That live singing is the part no recording replaces.

If you are keeping Chhath away from home for the first time, the songs are the shortest route back. Several families describe playing them on a Delhi terrace on the 15th as the thing that makes the arghya feel right.

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Frequently asked questions

2026 में छठ पूजा कब है?

छठ पूजा 2026 में 13 नवंबर (शुक्रवार) से 16 नवंबर (सोमवार) तक है। नहाय खाय 13 नवंबर, खरना 14 नवंबर, संध्या अर्घ्य 15 नवंबर (रविवार) और उषा अर्घ्य 16 नवंबर को है। मुख्य दिन रविवार 15 नवंबर है, जब डूबते सूर्य को अर्घ्य दिया जाता है। अर्घ्य का समय आपके शहर के सूर्यास्त और सूर्योदय पर निर्भर करता है, इसलिए अपने शहर का पंचांग देखें।

2026 में छठ पूजा खरना कब है?

खरना 2026 में शनिवार 14 नवंबर को है, कार्तिक शुक्ल पंचमी के दिन। इस दिन व्रती पूरे दिन निर्जला रहती हैं और शाम को सूर्यास्त के बाद गुड़ की खीर (रसियाव) और रोटी खाकर व्रत खोलती हैं। उसी क्षण से लगभग 36 घंटे का निर्जला व्रत शुरू हो जाता है, जो 16 नवंबर की सुबह उषा अर्घ्य के बाद ही टूटता है।

Chhath Puja 2026 mein Diwali ke kitne din baad hai?

Diwali 2026 mein 8 November (Sunday) ko hai, aur Chhath ka pehla din Nahay Khay 13 November ko, yaani Diwali ke theek 5 din baad. Beech mein Govardhan Puja 10 November aur Bhai Dooj 11 November padte hain. Main Sandhya Arghya 15 November ko hai, Diwali ke 7 din baad. Isi wajah se bahut se parivaar Diwali par ghar jaakar Chhath tak wahin ruk jaate hain.

How many hours is the Chhath Puja fast?

The main fast is about 36 hours without food or water. It begins after the parvaitin finishes her Kharna meal on the evening of 14 November 2026 and ends after the Usha Arghya offering on the morning of 16 November. She does not drink water at any point in between, and she also enters the river twice during that stretch, once at sunset on the 15th and once before dawn on the 16th.

Can Chhath Puja be done at home without a river?

Yes. Offering arghya into a clean tub, tank or large vessel of fresh water on an east-facing terrace or balcony is accepted practice, and it is how most families in Delhi, Mumbai and other cities keep Chhath. Clean the spot thoroughly, fill the vessel with fresh water, stand the sugarcane, light the diyas, and offer at the true sunset and sunrise times for your own city rather than Patna's.

Who is Chhathi Maiya, and is she Surya's sister or his wife?

Traditions differ, and both answers are held sincerely. The most widely cited accounts identify Chhathi Maiya as the sixth form of Prakriti and the sister of Surya, while another living tradition identifies her with Usha, the dawn, associated with Surya. The Puranas name her as Shashthi Devi, born of Brahma's mind and the protector of children, which is why the sixth-day ceremony after a birth is also called chhathi in north India.

Can men keep the Chhath vrat?

Yes. The main worshippers, called parvaitin, are usually women, but Chhath is not a gender-specific festival and men keep the full fast in many families, often where a personal vow was made. You will see men standing in the water at every large ghat. If the person who normally keeps the vrat cannot, another family member keeping it on their behalf is the accepted practice.

What is offered to the sun during Chhath arghya?

The soop carries thekua, whole sugarcane with leaves, bananas, coconut, and seasonal produce such as sweet lime, custard apple, water chestnut, radish and fresh turmeric. Water or milk is poured from a lota towards the sun as the actual arghya. There is no idol or image in Chhath samagri at all, because the deity being worshipped is visible in the sky.

Why is thekua never tasted before the offering?

Chhath prasad is offered to Surya and Chhathi Maiya first, so tasting it beforehand would break the purity the whole four days are built on. It is made in cleaned vessels by someone who has bathed, often from wheat washed and ground at home, and nobody in the house tries it until after Usha Arghya. Experienced cooks genuinely do not know how a batch turned out until the fast is broken.

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