Festivals in India

India’s festival calendar is dense almost year-round, but a small number of festivals are genuinely national in scale — celebrated across most states, across religious lines in many cases, and recognized internationally. Diwali and Holi anchor the year for most of the country; regional festivals like Durga Puja in Bengal, Onam in Kerala, Pongal in Tamil Nadu, and Ganesh Chaturthi in Maharashtra are national in visibility even where they’re regional in origin.

Two things make Indian festival dates genuinely hard to get right. First, most major Hindu festivals follow the lunar calendar, so their Gregorian date shifts by roughly ten to twelve days each year, and occasionally jumps by a full lunar month when an adhik maas (leap month) is inserted to keep the lunar and solar years aligned. Second, the same festival can be observed a day apart in different regions depending on whether local tradition uses sunrise-based or midnight-based tithi rules. Where that matters, the pages below say so directly instead of presenting a single date as universal.