Independence Day (India)

When it falls

15 August every year, a national holiday. The Prime Minister's address from the Red Fort begins the day at about seven-thirty in the morning.

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

The story

At midnight between 14 and 15 August 1947 British rule ended and India became a dominion, with Pakistan created the day before; Nehru's speech to the Constituent Assembly at that hour, the tryst with destiny, is the founding text. The next morning he raised the flag at the Lahori Gate of the Red Fort, and every Prime Minister since has raised it there and spoken from the ramparts.

The date was chosen by Mountbatten as the second anniversary of the Japanese surrender. The astrologers of the time found it inauspicious, and the ceremony was moved to the midnight hour so that the transfer fell on the fourteenth by their reckoning and the fifteenth by the clock.

How the day is kept

• The flag hoisting at the Red Fort with a twenty-one-gun salute and the Prime Minister's speech; flag hoistings in every state capital, school, office and housing society through the morning.
• Kites over Delhi and the towns of the north all afternoon, a custom said to go back to kites flown in defiance during the freedom movement.
• The national anthem and patriotic songs at school assemblies, and sweets distributed after; a dry day in most states.
• The tricolour on every house since Har Ghar Tirangā in 2022, flown from the thirteenth to the fifteenth.

More national days