Chhath Puja

On Panchami the vratin keeps a day-long waterless fast, breaking it only after dark with rasiao — a kheer of rice and milk sweetened with jaggery, never sugar — eaten with roti and banana, in silence and seclusion, for an outside word can break the prasad’s sanctity.

Whatever the vratin leaves is shared as blessed prasad. And the instant that meal ends, the formidable ~36-hour nirjala fast begins — no food and no water — to be broken only at sunrise on the fourth day.

Through the morning of Shashthi, still without food or water, the household makes the offerings by hand. The flagship is thekua — a deep-fried biscuit of wheat flour, jaggery and ghee scented with fennel, pressed in a carved wooden saancha mould and fried over a mango-wood fire — alongside rice-laddu (kasar), khajuria and tikri.

These are heaped on the bamboo soop (winnowing fan) and daura (basket) with the offering-set: whole sugarcane stalks, a coconut, a comb of bananas, water-chestnut (singhara), the big citron daab-nimbu, turmeric and ginger root still leafy, and lit lamps. Nothing may be tasted before it is offered.

At dusk the whole community processes to the water, the daura carried on a shoulder-pole. The vratin wades knee- to waist-deep and, facing the setting sun, raises the laden soop and offers arghya — water and milk poured toward the sun — the rite’s most distinctive act: reverence even for the sun in decline.

Those who have had a wish fulfilled then keep Kosi: a small canopy of five sugarcane stalks raised over a cluster of lit earthen lamps, with thekua and fruit beneath, watched through a night-vigil of Chhath geet.

Before dawn on Saptami the community returns to the same ghat. The vratin re-enters the water, faces east, and as the first light breaks offers arghya to the rising sun — completing the worship of the sun’s whole arc, the rare festival that honours both its setting and its rising.

The ~36-hour fast is then broken with the Parana — a little prasad and water. Married women draw the long sindoor from the nose-tip up into the parting for their husband’s long life, elders are touched for blessings, and thekua is shared far and wide as Chhath closes.

Sun-worship is among the oldest layers of Hindu practice — the Rigveda sings to Surya, and the dawn goddess Ushas, with whom Chhathi Maiya is identified, is Vedic. The festival’s stories, though, are devotional rather than dated: tradition holds that Sita kept the Surya vrat (popularly at Munger), that Karna, son of the Sun, worshipped standing waist-deep in water — the model for the rite’s posture — and that Draupadi and Kunti observed it for the Pandavas. Chhathi Maiya herself is identified in the Brahmavaivarta Purana with Devasena/Shashthi, the protectress of children — though whether she is the Sun’s sister or consort is told differently across sources. Beneath the legends, Chhath reads most clearly as an ancient post-harvest thanksgiving of the rice-growing Gangetic plain. The name is simply shashthi, “the sixth” — the lunar day of the main offering.

Chhath is gratitude to the life-giver — Surya, source of energy and health, and Chhathi Maiya, protector of children, to whom families vow for progeny and the family’s welfare. Its most striking feature is that the first great offering is made to the setting sun, before the dawn arghya completes the circle — reverence for the sun’s whole arc. It is one of the most demanding of all Hindu vows: a roughly 36-hour waterless fast, strict purity, and satvik prasad (above all thekua) cooked without onion, garlic or even salt. And it is famously egalitarian and priest-less — there is no Brahmin mediator and no idol; every family makes the same prasad and offers directly to the sun and water, rich and poor side by side at the ghat. From Mithila and Bihar it has spread across eastern India, the Nepal Tarai and the diaspora; India has moved to nominate it for UNESCO recognition (in progress, not yet granted).

Chhath’s soul is its women’s songs — sung in chorus at home, in the procession to the water, and at the ghat, to the dholak, jhaal and harmonium, in Maithili, Bhojpuri, Magahi and Angika. The modern canon was defined by one voice: Sharda Sinha (1952–2024), the “Bihar Kokila,” who recorded some sixty Chhath songs and whose “Kelwa ke paat par,” “Pahile pahil Chhathi Maiya” and “Ho Dinanath” are inseparable from the festival. Many are old anonymous lok-geet she arranged and made immortal. In a stroke of poignancy, her final Chhath song, “Dukhwa mitai Chhathi Maiya,” was released on the eve of Chhath in 2024 — and she died the very next day, during the festival she had sung for half a century.