Six days after Tihar's lights go out, the riverbanks of the Terai fill with a festival that outdoes it in discipline and, many would say, in beauty. Chhath parva is the great festival of Nepal's Madhesh. It spans four days of purity rules and a fast that runs past thirty-six hours without water. Its offerings are made standing waist-deep in a river, as the sun goes down and again as it rises. This year the main day falls on Kartik 29, which is Sunday, November 15, 2026 — a public holiday, listed on our holidays calendar. It is the only major puja in the Hindu calendar that honors the setting sun before the rising one.
Who Chhath worships
Chhath is addressed to Surya, the sun, and to Chhathi Maiya, the mother goddess of the sixth day, protector of children and giver of offspring. There are no idols and no priests at the center of the ritual. The devotee — the vratalu, most often a woman keeping the vow for her family's welfare — deals with the sun directly, and the river or pond is the temple. That directness is part of why Chhath commands such loyalty: it is a festival a household performs itself, start to finish.
The four days
Day one, Nahay Khay, is the day of bathing and eating. The vratalu bathes in the river, brings home its water, and eats a single pure meal — typically rice, chana dal and bottle-gourd curry, with no trace of onion or garlic. Day two, Kharna, tightens the vow. After a full day's fast, the vratalu breaks it at dusk with kheer of jaggery and rice, eaten once. From that moment the great fast begins. No food and no water until the morning of day four.
Day three is the festival's heart. Through the day, families prepare the offerings. There is thekua — the wheat-and-jaggery biscuit that is Chhath's signature — plus rice laddus. Winnowing baskets are stacked with fruit, sugarcane, coconut and lotus roots. At dusk the whole community walks to the ghat. The vratalu stands in the water and offers the sandhya arghya, the evening libation, to the setting sun. The baskets are raised one by one. Folk songs in Maithili and Bhojpuri carry over the water. The ghats are lit with lamps and, these days, strings of electric lights. On day four, before dawn, everyone returns for the bihani arghya to the rising sun. When the libation is poured, the fast ends — usually with ginger and water on the ghat itself, then thekua shared out to everyone within reach.
Why the setting sun comes first
Every other solar ritual salutes the sunrise. Chhath honors the evening sun first, and the reversal is deliberate. The setting sun stands for what has already been received — the harvest gathered, the year survived, the debts of gratitude accumulated. Thanking the sun in its decline before petitioning it at its rise is the festival's whole theology in one gesture: gratitude precedes request. Coming right after the rice harvest, Chhath is the Terai's thanksgiving in the most literal sense.
Where to see it in Nepal
Chhath's homeland in Nepal is the Madhesh — Janakpur's Ganga Sagar pond, the rivers of Birgunj, Biratnagar, Rajbiraj and every Terai town, where the ghats are scrubbed, decorated and lit for days ahead. But the festival has long since climbed the hills: in Kathmandu, thousands gather at the Bagmati ghats, at Gaurighat and around the Kamal Pokhari and Ranipokhari ponds for the arghya evenings. The valley's Chhath crowds grow every year, a measure of how central Madheshi life is to the capital. Wherever you watch, the etiquette is simple: keep the water clean, do not step between a vratalu and the sun, and accept thekua if it is offered — refusing prasad is the only way to get it wrong. The tithis behind the four days are on the daily panchang; the festival follows Kartik Shukla Chaturthi through Saptami, which is why its AD date shifts each year.