Festival lookup: any festival date, for your city

What it is

Most Hindu festivals are set by the tithi, the lunar day, in a particular lunar month: Ganesh Chaturthi on the fourth of the bright half of Bhadrapada, Diwali's Lakshmi Pujan on the amavasya of Ashwin or Kartik, depending on how the months are counted. Because the lunar year is about eleven days shorter than the English one, those days move against the English calendar each year, and every few years an extra month moves them back.

The day a festival is kept also depends on the place. A tithi does not begin at midnight; it can begin at any hour and run across two sunrises, or begin and end between them. So the panchang of each region decides which day keeps the festival by the sunrise of that place, and regional traditions add their own rules. That is why two families in two cities may keep the same festival a day apart, both correctly.

What you enter

The form asks what you are looking for. Its fields, as the web app shows them:

• Name, the festival's name as you know it.
• From and Up to, the dates to look between, if you want a particular stretch.
• Tradition, the regional tradition whose festival rules to follow, or Any tradition.

The answer has its own link, so you can keep it or send it to the family group.

What you get

The tool finds a festival by name and shows its dates in the stretch you asked for, for your city, each with its own day. When many dates match, it shows the first ones and a button to see more.

That result is free. If you would like more, a written reading of the festival and its date is a paid extra that the web app offers after the result; you never need it to see the dates.

How it is worked out

Each festival is kept in our calendar by its rule, the tithi and month it falls on and the region's own rules, and the tool reads the day each rule picks for your city's sunrise. Each festival in the app says why it falls on its date. The same dates are on our calendar, month by month for each region, free without an account.

Every answer comes from our own panchang engine, worked out for the city you choose and read on the sidereal zodiac with the Lahiri ayanamsa, the one the Calendar Reform Committee of India adopted. The same engine prints the dates and times on our calendar and panchang pages, so the tool and the calendar never disagree with each other. How we compute explains the method, and why a printed almanac from your town may differ from it by a minute or two.

Before you begin

The tool is free with a Bhagya Card account. If you are not signed in, the button above takes you to sign in first, with your mobile number or your email, and then straight to the tool.

Choose your region in the app's settings, so the dates follow the calendar your family keeps. The festivals of the year are also listed for each region on our calendar.

Questions