Naraka Chaturdashi 2026: The Pre-Dawn Bath, and Why It Shares a Date With Diwali

In a Chennai or Hyderabad household the biggest morning of the year is the one that begins in the dark. The oil is warmed the night before and set aside. Someone wakes the children at half past four and complains about it. Sesame oil goes on the crown of the head first, then the ubtan, and the bath is finished before the sun comes up. Then the crackers, then the sweets, and by nine in the morning the festival is largely over.

That morning is Naraka Chaturdashi. In the north it is the smaller of two nights and goes by Choti Diwali. Across Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Karnataka and Goa it is Deepavali itself, the main day, and the pre-dawn bath is the festival rather than a preliminary to it. Of the five days of the Kartika sequence this is the one most often folded into a paragraph inside somebody else's Diwali article, which is odd, because for a very large part of the country it is the day that carries the year.

The date, and the thing about 2026 that confuses people

Naraka Chaturdashi 2026 falls on Sunday, 8 November.

So does Diwali. Both are published on the same Gregorian date this year, and that is correct, not a typo. The reason is worth spelling out because it explains how tithi-based dating actually works.

Computed at Delhi, the chaturdashi of the krishna paksha begins at 10:48 IST on 7 November and ends at 11:28 IST on 8 November. The amavasya begins the moment the chaturdashi ends, at 11:28 on 8 November, and runs until 12:32 on 9 November.

Now lay the two rituals over that. The abhyanga snan, the ritual oil bath, is performed before sunrise. Sunrise on 8 November is between 05:37 and 06:53 depending on where you are, and the chaturdashi is running through all of it. The Lakshmi puja is performed in the pradosh window, the stretch after sunset, and sunset on 8 November is between 16:35 and 18:01, by which time the amavasya has been running for five or six hours. One calendar day, two tithis, two rituals, each landing in the tithi it requires. Nothing has gone wrong.

This is also why almanacs that print a single tithi per day mislead people every year. The tithi is not a day. It is a window with a start and an end, and it ends at the same instant everywhere on earth. What differs by city is where sunrise and sunset fall inside it.

The abhyanga snan is timed to your own sunrise

The instruction in the tradition is that the bath is taken before sunrise, in the last watch of the night, the stretch called arunodaya. There is no clock hour attached to it, because there cannot be one. Sunrise on 8 November 2026, computed for each city's own coordinates with Swiss Ephemeris, centre-of-disk, in IST. The tithi boundaries above are on the sidereal Lahiri ayanamsa.

| City | Brahma muhurat | Sunrise | | --- | --- | --- | | Guwahati | 04:01-04:49 | 05:37 | | Kolkata | 04:09-04:57 | 05:45 | | Bhagalpur | 04:19-05:07 | 05:55 | | Patna | 04:26-05:14 | 06:02 | | Chennai | 04:29-05:17 | 06:05 | | Varanasi | 04:35-05:23 | 06:11 | | Bengaluru | 04:40-05:28 | 06:16 | | Hyderabad | 04:42-05:30 | 06:18 | | Lucknow | 04:45-05:33 | 06:21 | | Ujjain | 05:00-05:48 | 06:36 | | Pune | 05:02-05:50 | 06:38 | | Delhi | 05:03-05:51 | 06:39 | | Jaipur | 05:06-05:54 | 06:42 | | Mumbai | 05:07-05:55 | 06:43 | | Ahmedabad | 05:13-06:01 | 06:49 | | Amritsar | 05:17-06:05 | 06:53 |

Seventy-six minutes separate sunrise in Guwahati from sunrise in Amritsar. A Bengaluru family finishing the bath at six is comfortably inside the rule. A Delhi family doing the same thing at six is also inside the rule, with more than half an hour to spare. Both of them are wrong if they follow a printed time from the other city.

Brahma muhurat is given alongside because it is the computed window nearest to arunodaya as the panchang expresses it, and it is what most households actually use in practice. It is a fixed proportion of the night before sunrise, so it moves with your sunrise, exactly as the rule requires.

What the bath actually consists of

It is worth being specific, because the bath has a fixed sequence and every step in it carries meaning.

Warm til oil, sesame, is applied first to the head and then the body, and in many households the eldest woman applies it to everyone in turn. Ubtan, a paste of gram flour, turmeric, and often sandalwood or a little curd, goes on after and is scraped off in the wash. Before the bath, leaves of the apamarga plant, chirchita or latjeera in Hindi, are circled over the head three times and set aside. Then the bath itself, before sunrise, which the tradition counts as equivalent to a bath in the Ganga on that morning.

In Tamil Nadu the whole thing is called Ganga snanam, and the phrase families use is that Ganga is in the oil that morning. New clothes go on after. In Tamil households the first thing eaten is the Deepavali marundhu, a bitter-sweet digestive paste of dry ginger, pepper, ajwain, jaggery and ghee, made specifically to survive the day's sweets.

In Maharashtra and Gujarat the same morning is Narak Chaturdashi and Roop Chaudas, roop meaning form or beauty, and the oil and ubtan are understood as a rite of restoring the body before the year turns. Rajasthan keeps it as Roop Chaudas too.

Bengal keeps the same tithi as Bhoot Chaturdashi, which is a different festival on the same day. Fourteen lamps are lit for fourteen generations of ancestors, and fourteen leafy greens, the choddo shaak, are cooked and eaten. The Kali Puja follows on the amavasya night.

The story, and which version is which

Narakasura held Pragjyotishpura, in what is now Assam, and had taken sixteen thousand one hundred women captive. Krishna rode out on Garuda with Satyabhama beside him, and the demon fell. Dying, he asked that his death be remembered with lamps and colour rather than mourning, and the day before the new moon was lit accordingly.

The core account, the ride to Pragjyotishpura, the killing, and the freeing of the captives, is in the Bhagavata Purana, Canto 10, chapter 59, the chapter titled the killing of the demon Naraka, with parallels in the Vishnu Purana, Book 5, and in the Harivamsha. In the Bhagavata, Krishna rides Garuda with Satyabhama beside him and takes off the demon's head with the discus. The dying request that the day be kept with lamps rather than mourning is part of the popular telling and is not in that chapter.

The version most people know, in which Krishna is struck and falls into a swoon so that Satyabhama must take up the bow and kill Naraka herself, is a regional recension. It is strongest in the Telugu and Assamese tellings, and it is oral and dramatic rather than textual. The Kalika Purana, the Assam text that carries the fullest Naraka cycle, does not give Satyabhama the killing blow either. The Satyabhama version is the better story, and it is the reason the day carries a particular charge for Telugu and Assamese readers. It is not what the Bhagavata says, and anyone who tells it as Bhagavata is passing off a recension as the source text.

The freeing of the captive women, and Krishna's subsequent acceptance of them into his household so that they would not be turned out with no standing anywhere, is in the canonical account and is usually the part that gets dropped.

The evening, and what belongs to which day

On the evening of the chaturdashi a lamp is set at the doorway, and in most households that is the whole of it, with the large Lakshmi puja kept for the pradosh window that follows on the amavasya. There is a genuine regional split over which evening carries the Yama Deepam, the lamp placed facing south for the lord of death. Most north Indian households light it on the trayodashi evening with the Dhanteras puja, and that account and its story are in Dhanteras: significance, pooja vidhi, and why we buy gold. Others keep it for the chaturdashi. The lamp observances of this month sit in the Kartika mahatmya, carried in the Uttara Khanda of the Padma Purana and in the Skanda Purana; which evening a household chooses is regional custom rather than something the text settles. Both practices are current and neither is a mistake.

One practical note for 2026. The eighth of November is a Sunday, and Rahu Kaal on a Sunday falls in the last eighth of the daylight, which computes to 16:08 to 17:30 in Delhi and 16:20 to 17:43 in Ujjain. That sits immediately before the evening puja hour rather than during it, but it is close enough that households which route around Rahu Kaal should have the lamps and the thali ready earlier in the afternoon rather than starting the preparation at four. The Lakshmi puja itself, and the pradosh window it belongs to, are treated in Diwali and Lakshmi Pooja: the five-day festival explained.

Regional shape, briefly

Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Karnataka. This is Deepavali. The Ganga snanam before dawn, new clothes, crackers at first light, the marundhu, and visits through the morning. The amavasya night that the north calls Diwali is a quieter evening here.

Goa. Effigies of Narakasura, built by neighbourhood groups over the preceding weeks and judged in local competitions, are burnt before dawn on the chaturdashi. It is the most literal survival of the story anywhere in the country.

Maharashtra, Gujarat, Rajasthan. Narak Chaturdashi and Roop Chaudas, the oil bath, the ubtan, and the faral sweets. In Gujarat this sits inside the run-up to Bestu Varas, the Gujarati new year, which follows Diwali.

North India. Choti Diwali, the smaller lighting, the house finished and swept for the next night, and in many homes the fourteen lamps of the chaturdashi.

Bengal. Bhoot Chaturdashi, as above.

Which day is good for you, rather than which day it is

The five days of Kartika are read in Jyotish as a sequence of shifts rather than a single event. The chaturdashi belongs to the clearing out, and the amavasya that follows is the darkest tithi of the month and the one most closely tied to ancestors and to what is being carried forward.

The reasonable personal question is not what time to bathe. It is what this stretch of the calendar is doing over your own chart, which depends on your running dasha and on where the transiting planets are sitting relative to your Moon rather than on the festival at all. Compute a free kundali and look at the current mahadasha and antardasha, then Ask Acharya what that period means for the year that is opening. It answers in ten Indian languages and the follow-ups are free, which is where the reading gets specific. For today's own tithi, sunrise, sunset and windows in your city, the panchang recomputes daily.

The one instruction

Take the bath before your own sunrise, not before somebody else's. On 8 November 2026 that is 05:45 in Kolkata, 06:05 in Chennai, 06:16 in Bengaluru, 06:39 in Delhi and 06:53 in Amritsar. Set the alarm against the right number and the rest of the morning takes care of itself.

સ્રોતો

• Bhagavata Purana, Canto 10, chapter 59, the killing of Narakasura, with parallels in Vishnu Purana, Book 5, and in the Harivamsha
• The telling in which Satyabhama looses the killing arrow is a regional recension, strongest in the Telugu and Assamese versions. It is named as a recension here rather than attributed to the Bhagavata, which gives the killing blow to Krishna.
• Kartika Mahatmya, carried in the Uttara Khanda of the Padma Purana and in the Skanda Purana, for the lamp observances of the Kartika month
• Sunrise, sunset, Brahma muhurat, Rahu Kaal and tithi boundaries computed by Vidhata's panchang engine: Swiss Ephemeris, sidereal Lahiri (Chitrapaksha) ayanamsa, centre-of-disk rise and set, per-city coordinates