Karva Chauth

When it falls

The fourth lunar day (caturthī) of the dark half of Kārttika (Āśvina by the southern count), about nine days before Dīpāvali, in October or November. The fast ends at moonrise, which the almanac gives for each city.

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

The story

Karvā is the clay pot with a spout that the women exchange, and cauth the fourth day. The fast is kept by married women for their husbands' long life, and it is the festival of the north-west: Punjab, Haryana, Rajasthan, Delhi and the western Uttar Pradesh.

The story told at the pūjā is Queen Vīrāvatī's. Weak with hunger, she was tricked by her seven brothers with a mirror in a tree into thinking the moon had risen, broke her fast, and her husband died at once; she kept the fast again in full and he was restored. The fast is not to be broken before the true moon.

The day may have begun as the women's day before the men went to war, or as the friendship day on which a new bride chose a sister-friend in her husband's village; both readings survive in the customs.

How the day is kept

• Sargī before dawn: the mother-in-law sends a meal of fruit, sweets and feniyā (vermicelli) that the woman eats before sunrise; nothing after, not water, until the moon.
• Hands are decorated with mehndī the evening before, and the day is spent in new clothes, often the wedding ones, with the bangles and sindūr of a married woman.
• In the afternoon the women sit in a circle with their pots and thālīs and pass them round while the story is told (the Karvā Chauth kathā).
• At moonrise the moon is seen through a sieve, then the husband's face through the same sieve; he gives her the first sip of water and the first bite, and the fast is over.

More fasts and vigils