Baisakhi

Punjab's harvest festival and solar new year, and the founding day of the Khalsa in 1699 — bhangra in the fields, langar in the gurdwaras.

When it falls

13 or 14 April, the day the Sun enters Meṣa (Aries) and the first day of the solar month of Vaiśākha. Unlike most Indian festivals it hardly moves on the civil calendar.

The Phala almanac gives the exact day for your own city; the lunar and solar rules above are what it computes from.

The story

For Punjab's farmers the day is the wheat harvest: the rabi crop is cut, the granaries fill, and the year turns. For Sikhs it is the birthday of the Khālsā. At Anandpur Sahib on this day in 1699 Guru Gobind Singh asked the assembled crowd for a head; five men came forward one by one into his tent, and came out as the Pañj Piāre, the five beloved ones, the first initiated into the Khālsā with the five Ks and the name Singh.

Vaisākhī is also the day of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre of 1919 in Amritsar, when the crowd gathered for the festival was fired on; the garden is a memorial.

Sikh communities keep the day in Vancouver, Surrey, Toronto, Southall and Kent as much as in Punjab; the Surrey Nagar Kīrtan draws more than half a million people, the largest outside India.

How the day is kept

Prayers at the gurdwārā from early morning, an unbroken reading of the Guru Granth Sāhib (akhaṇḍ pāṭh) ending today, and the initiation (amrit sañcār) of new Khālsā members.
Nagar Kīrtan: the scripture carried through the streets on a float under a canopy, led by the five beloved ones with drawn swords, with gatkā (Sikh martial art) displays along the way.
Langar, the free kitchen, feeds everyone who comes; volunteers cook for tens of thousands.
Bhaṅgṛā and giddhā danced in the fields and the fairgrounds, to the dhol; the harvest fairs (melā) run through the week.