Chhath Puja 2026 Usha Arghya Time: Your Sunrise, and the Parana After

By the time the parvaitin walks back into the water for the Usha Arghya, she has not slept properly in two nights, has taken no water since the Kharna meal on the evening of the 14th, and this is the third time she has stood in a river or a pond since then. The first was Nahay Khay, the ritual bath before any of this began. The second was the Sandhya Arghya the evening before, facing west as the sun went down. This one faces east, into a sky that is still more grey than gold, and it is the one that ends the vrat. Everything about Chhath builds toward this specific sunrise. Get it wrong and you are either standing in cold water for longer than you need to, or you are not there when the sun actually comes up.

This piece is the companion to Chhath Puja 2026 Sandhya Arghya Time, which carries the full four-day tithi table and the sunset times for the evening offering. That piece is the one to read for the calendar behind the festival. This one is about the morning that closes it: the sunrise itself, city by city, why it falls in a different tithi than the vrat it completes, and what happens at the ghat once the sun is finally up.

Usha Arghya, Monday 16 November 2026

The tithi in force through the night carries into the morning offering. Kartik shukla saptami begins at 02:01 IST on 16 November and runs until 04:20 IST on 17 November, so it is already running well before any sunrise in this table and stays in force through the whole of Usha Arghya day. The nakshatra is Shravana, running from 23:29 IST on 15 November to 02:17 IST on 17 November.

That saptami detail is the one thing about this offering that trips people up, so it is worth stating plainly. Chhath is a shashthi vrat, undertaken on Kartik shukla shashthi, which in 2026 is Sunday 15 November. Shashthi itself ends at 02:01 IST the following morning, well before sunrise. By the time the parvaitin enters the water for Usha Arghya, saptami has been running for hours. That is not a flaw in the observance and it is not a reason to move the morning offering back to the 15th to keep it inside shashthi, which is what some calendars do. The vrat is named for the tithi it is undertaken on, not the tithi its final act happens to fall in. The Usha Arghya has always been the completion of the shashthi vow, performed at the dawn that follows it, whatever tithi that dawn belongs to. A calendar that moves the morning arghya to stay inside shashthi has misread the observance, not corrected it.

Sunrise, city by city

Sunrise below is centre-of-disk, the convention panchang authorities use, computed for each city's own coordinates. A weather app or a newspaper uses the upper-limb convention and will read a minute or so earlier. All Indian cities are IST.

Patna and Varanasi anchor the belt where Chhath is kept most densely, so start there. The companion piece on the Sandhya Arghya carries a wider table of Bihar and Jharkhand towns for the evening offering; the set below is the pan-India spread, useful if your city is not one of the heartland towns already covered there.

Patna and Varanasi are eight minutes apart, which is close enough that neither household loses anything by borrowing the other's time. Delhi is thirty-eight minutes after Patna, and by the time you are in Ahmedabad it is forty-six minutes later than Patna's sunrise. That is not a small gap when you are standing in November water waiting for the sky to lighten. Chennai lands on exactly the same minute as Patna this year, a coincidence of longitude and date rather than anything meaningful, but it means a family that has moved south does not need to adjust at all.

Households abroad

Chhath now travels with the diaspora as much as it travels within India, and the offering is still made at local sunrise, in whatever country that is.

Every city above sits in saptami at its own sunrise except Sydney, where shashthi is still running locally when the sun comes up on the 16th. A household there keeping the tithi rather than the calendar date will find the Usha Arghya lands a day later than it does in India, because the tithi boundary falls between the two local windows. This is not a mistake to fix. It is what happens when a lunar tithi, fixed by the moon's position relative to the sun and identical everywhere on Earth at the same instant, is read against a local clock on the far side of the world. Offer at your own sunrise and let the tithi fall where it falls.

What happens at the ghat

The family reaches the ghat before first light, the daura carried again on a male relative's head, the same basket that went down the evening before now returning with what is left of the prasad after the Sandhya Arghya. The parvaitin enters the water and faces east this time, holding the soop toward a sky that is still dark at the edges. Milk and water are offered as the light comes up, the same arghya gesture as the evening before, mirrored toward the opposite horizon. There is no separate liturgy for the morning offering distinct from the evening one. It is the same act, performed twice in twelve hours, facing opposite directions, to the same sun on its way down and on its way back up.

Once the sun has cleared the horizon and the offering is complete, the parana begins. The parvaitin takes water first, usually handed to her by the eldest woman present or by whoever has stayed closest to her through the four days, and then a piece of thekua or a portion of whatever prasad has made it back in the daura. A full meal follows later, once the family is home and the kitchen is going again, but the water and the first bite at the ghat are what actually end the vow. Nothing about this involves a priest. It never has. Chhath has no idol and no officiant at any of its four days, and the Usha Arghya, the moment that closes the whole vrat, is conducted the same way the rest of it was: by the women who kept it, for the god they kept it for, with no one standing between the two.

By this point the parvaitin has gone without water for roughly thirty-six hours, a figure worked out in the companion piece from the Kharna meal on the 14th to this parana on the 16th. What that figure does not capture is the state of the last few hours specifically: two nights with little or no real sleep, a Kosi vigil kept by many households through the dark between Sandhya and Usha, and now a third entry into cold November water on an empty, thirsty body. It is worth saying plainly that this is one of the physically hardest vrats kept in any household calendar in India, sustained overwhelmingly by women, often for decades running, without complaint and largely without an audience beyond their own family and the ghat around them. Anyone who has stood at a ghat at that hour and watched it happen does not come away thinking of it as a minor festival.

If you also want the fuller story, the more general read on Chhath's austerity and where it comes from is in Chhath Puja: the four-day Sun worship that defines Bihar. For the tithi table across all four days and the Sandhya Arghya sunset times, see the companion piece.

The Sun in your own chart

Surya is the atmakaraka in Jyotish, the significator of the self, the father, vitality and standing, and Chhath is the one festival built entirely around him. The Usha Arghya in particular, the offering that opens the day rather than closes it, is a natural point to look at where your own Sun actually sits.

Generate a free Kundali and check the Sun's house, sign and dignity, and whether a Sun period is running for you. Then take the specific question to Ask Acharya: what a strong or weak Sun means for your year, whether this is a good season to start something that needs steady authority behind it, or anything else the placement raises. Ask in your own language, and keep asking until the answer actually settles the question rather than half-answering it.