Chhath Puja 2026 Sandhya Arghya Time: Your Sunset, Not Patna's

The hardest part of Chhath is not the fasting. It is the standing. By the third afternoon the parvaitin has been without water for more than a day, she has walked to the ghat carrying or following the daura, and she then goes into the river up to her waist and stays there facing west, holding the soop above the water, waiting for the sun to go down. Everything in the vrat converges on that minute. And that minute is not the same in Patna as it is in Delhi.

This is the plainest example in the whole Hindu calendar of a festival whose central act is a local astronomical event. The Sandhya Arghya is offered to the setting sun. Not at an auspicious hour chosen by a priest, not in a window computed from a tithi. At sunset, where the devotee is standing. A published time from another city is not a small inaccuracy in this vrat. It is the wrong event.

Chhath 2026 dates, with the tithi behind each day

All four days sit in the shukla paksha of Kartik. These are the tithi boundaries computed with Swiss Ephemeris on sidereal Lahiri ayanamsa, given in IST.

| Day | Date | Tithi | Tithi window | | --- | --- | --- | --- | | Nahay Khay | Friday 13 November 2026 | Kartik shukla chaturthi | ends 20:43 on 13 Nov | | Kharna | Saturday 14 November 2026 | Kartik shukla panchami | ends 23:24 on 14 Nov | | Sandhya Arghya | Sunday 15 November 2026 | Kartik shukla shashthi | ends 02:01 on 16 Nov | | Usha Arghya and parana | Monday 16 November 2026 | Kartik shukla saptami | ends 04:20 on 17 Nov |

Notice the fourth row. The shashthi ends at two in the morning on 16 November, so the Usha Arghya offered at sunrise a little after six is technically made during the saptami. That is not a scheduling error and it is not something to correct. The morning arghya has always been the completion of the shashthi vrat performed on the following dawn, and the vrat is named for the shashthi, which is where the word Chhath comes from. Any calendar that moves the Usha Arghya back to 15 November to keep it inside the tithi has misread the observance.

The main day, 15 November, also carries Uttara Ashadha, whose nakshatra lord is the Sun. On the one day of the year when several million people stand in water to offer water back to Surya, the moon happens to be passing through the Sun's own star until 23:29 that night. It changes nothing about the vidhi. It is simply a good detail to know.

Sandhya Arghya, Sunday 15 November 2026, by city

Sunset computed for each city's coordinates, centre-of-disk, which is the convention panchang authorities use rather than the upper-limb convention a weather app or a newspaper prints. Expect a difference of a minute or two against those. All times IST.

The Chhath heartland

| City | Sunset, 15 Nov | | --- | --- | | Bhagalpur | 16:53 | | Muzaffarpur | 16:58 | | Patna | 16:59 | | Jamshedpur | 17:00 | | Gaya | 17:01 | | Ranchi | 17:02 | | Gorakhpur | 17:05 | | Varanasi | 17:09 | | Lucknow | 17:14 |

Where the migrant ghats are

| City | Sunset, 15 Nov | | --- | --- | | Guwahati | 16:32 | | Kolkata | 16:51 | | Delhi | 17:26 | | Jaipur | 17:35 | | Hyderabad | 17:39 | | Indore | 17:41 | | Bengaluru | 17:49 | | Ahmedabad | 17:54 | | Pune | 17:56 | | Surat | 17:56 | | Mumbai | 17:59 |

Read those two tables together and the problem is obvious. Inside Bihar and eastern UP the spread is twenty-one minutes, from Bhagalpur to Lucknow, which is small enough that a family reading a Patna time will not be badly wrong. Step outside and it stops being small. Delhi is twenty-seven minutes after Patna. Mumbai is a full hour after Patna. The Yamuna ghats at Kalindi Kunj and the Juhu and Madh Island ghats in Mumbai now hold very large Chhath gatherings, and a household there working from a Patna figure is out of the water and finished before the sun has gone down where they are.

Usha Arghya, Monday 16 November 2026, by city

Sunrise, same method, IST.

| City | Sunrise, 16 Nov | | --- | --- | | Guwahati | 05:43 | | Kolkata | 05:50 | | Jamshedpur | 05:59 | | Bhagalpur | 06:00 | | Ranchi | 06:04 | | Gaya | 06:07 | | Patna | 06:08 | | Muzaffarpur | 06:08 | | Varanasi | 06:16 | | Gorakhpur | 06:17 | | Lucknow | 06:27 | | Pune | 06:42 | | Ujjain | 06:42 | | Delhi | 06:45 | | Mumbai | 06:47 | | Jaipur | 06:48 | | Ahmedabad | 06:54 |

Patna to Delhi is thirty-seven minutes on the morning arghya, slightly wider than the evening gap. Families usually enter the water well before sunrise for this one, so the error is less dangerous than the evening error, but it still decides how long you stand in a November river.

At Patna the two arghyas are thirteen hours and nine minutes apart. That is the last stretch of the fast, and it is the reason people ask about the timing with such urgency.

The 36 hours, measured honestly

The nirjala stretch does not run for four days. It runs from the Kharna meal on the evening of 14 November to the parana after the Usha Arghya on the morning of 16 November. In Patna that is roughly thirty-six hours, which is where the familiar figure comes from, and it is thirty-six hours without water rather than without food, which is the part that makes it one of the severest household vrats kept anywhere in India.

Day one, Nahay Khay on 13 November, is a bath in the river and a single restricted meal, usually kaddu-bhaat, cooked without onion or garlic and with limited spice. Day two, Kharna on 14 November, is a full day's fast broken after sunset with kheer made of gur and rice, roti and banana, cooked on a fresh chulha with mango wood. The moment that meal ends the nirjala fast begins.

The vidhi at the ghat

The prasad is made over two days and is the real labour of the festival. Thekua, wheat flour and gur pressed in a wooden mould and fried in ghee. Rice laddus, seasonal fruit, whole sugarcane with the leaves still on, coconut, and the daura, the bamboo basket carried on the head of a male member of the family from the house to the ghat and never set down on the way.

At the ghat the parvaitin enters the water and stands facing the sun. Milk and water are poured as arghya from a vessel while the soop, the winnowing fan holding the offerings, is raised toward the setting disc. The family circles the water and lights the diyas. On the intervening night many households keep the Kosi, sugarcane sticks tied into a canopy over a set of earthen lamps in the courtyard, lit and watched through the dark. Then everyone returns to the same ghat before dawn for the morning arghya, the parana, and the end of the fast.

There is no priest. There is no idol. There is no mantra a householder is required to have learned. The festival is conducted by the women who keep it, and the geet, the Chhath songs in Bhojpuri and Maithili, carry most of the liturgy that in other festivals would come from a text.

Who keeps it, and where

The core is Bihar, Jharkhand and eastern Uttar Pradesh, with the Mithila districts and the Bhojpuri belt as the densest ground, and the Terai of Nepal keeping it identically on the same days. Beyond that, Chhath has travelled with the largest internal migration in the country. Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Surat, Ludhiana and Jamshedpur all now hold ghats organised by Purvanchali associations, and in several of those cities the municipal corporation builds artificial ponds for it.

Two things that are commonly said and are worth correcting. Chhath is not a Diwali sub-festival. It falls in the same lunar month and roughly a week after, and it has a different deity, a different rite and a different social base. And it is not exclusively a women's vrat. It is overwhelmingly kept by women, mothers in particular, often for thirty or forty consecutive years, but men keep it too and the tradition does not bar anyone.

What the sources actually support

Chhath does not have a single scriptural charter, and content that gives it one is inventing it. What can be said honestly is more interesting than the invention.

The worship of the sun with water offered from cupped hands or a vessel is old and well attested. The Surya hymns of the Rigveda's first mandala are the earliest layer of it, and the offering of arghya to the sun is part of the daily sandhya rite in the classical nitya karma tradition, which is the ritual grammar Chhath is written in. The specific practice of standing in water and offering to the sun over a long vow has its clearest Puranic charter in the Samba Purana, and in the Brahma Parva of the Bhavishya Purana, both of which carry the account of Krishna's son Samba, cursed with a skin disease, healed by prolonged sun worship on the Chandrabhaga, and the founding of the sun temples that follow from it.

Chhathi Maiya is the presiding goddess of the vrat and is identified in the tradition with Shashthi, the goddess of the sixth day and the protector of children, and in some tellings with Usha, the dawn. That identification is regional and is not a Puranic equation you can point at a verse for.

The two stories most often attached to Chhath online should be labelled. The tradition that Karna, Surya's son, was the first to offer arghya standing in the Ganga at Anga is Magadh oral tradition. It is not in the Mahabharata. The tradition that Draupadi kept the vrat on the advice of a sage during the exile is likewise a folk attribution with no textual locus. Both are told at ghats every year and both are worth knowing as tradition. Neither is scripture, and citing them as scripture is the sort of thing that makes an astrology site untrustworthy on everything else.

What a practitioner tells families before Chhath

Do not let an elderly parent take the nirjala vow for the first time in their seventies because a younger relative cannot keep it. The thirty-six hours are genuinely hard on the body, and November river water in Bihar at four in the morning is cold. Blood pressure, diabetes and heart conditions are all reasons to keep a modified vrat, and the vrat allows it: the sankalpa is taken in the form you can complete.

Fix your own city's sunset and sunrise the week before, write them on the wall, and reach the ghat forty-five minutes early rather than five. The crowd at a large ghat means the last stretch to the water can take twenty minutes on its own.

And keep the prasad-making separate from the fast. Households that put the parvaitin in the kitchen frying thekua on the second afternoon are asking a person with no water in them to stand over hot oil for three hours.

The Sun in your own chart

Surya in Jyotish is the atmakaraka in the natural scheme, the significator of the self, the father, vitality, authority and the spine of a person's confidence. Chhath is the one festival in the year built entirely around him, which makes it the natural moment to ask where he actually sits for you.

Compute a free kundali and look at the Sun's house, sign and dignity, and whether you are running a Sun period. Then Ask Acharya what a weak or well-placed Sun means for the things you are dealing with this year. You can ask in Hindi and get the answer in Hindi, and the follow-up questions are free, which is where most of the useful reading actually happens. For the raw numbers rather than the reading, the panchang gives sunrise, sunset and the day's windows recomputed daily for your city.

If you want the wider story of the festival, its austerity, and what four generations of a family standing in the same water actually produces, that is treated separately in Chhath Puja: the four-day Sun worship that defines Bihar.

The one number that matters

Everything else on this page is context. The number is your city's sunset on Sunday 15 November 2026, and your city's sunrise on Monday 16 November 2026. Patna at 16:59 and 06:08 is Patna's. Delhi's is twenty-seven and thirty-seven minutes later. Mumbai's is an hour later in the evening. Find yours, write it down, and get to the water early.

Sources

• Surya hymns of the Rigveda, first mandala, and the arghya to the sun in the classical sandhya rite, which is the ritual grammar the Chhath arghya belongs to
• Samba Purana, and the Brahma Parva of the Bhavishya Purana, which carry the account of Samba cured by prolonged sun worship on the Chandrabhaga and the founding of the sun temples that follows from it
• The Karna and Draupadi attributions commonly made for Chhath are Magadh and folk oral tradition. Neither is in the Mahabharata and neither is presented as scripture here.
• Sunset, sunrise and tithi boundaries computed by Vidhata's panchang engine: Swiss Ephemeris, sidereal Lahiri (Chitrapaksha) ayanamsa, centre-of-disk rise and set, per-city coordinates