Igas Bagwal Festival Garhwal’s Diwali, kept eleven days after everyone else’s.

English

Igas Bagwal

गढ़वाली

इगास · बग्वाल

Only the names actually in use are listed. A blank script is not an omission: the day may simply not be kept there, or be kept under a different festival's name.

1. Saturday, 21 November 2026
2. Wednesday, 10 November 2027
3. Sunday, 29 October 2028

See the whole year on the calendar →

Worked out for Chennai, Lahiri ayanamsa. A date is a function of the place: set yours above and the next three come back for where you are.

Garhwal’s Diwali, kept eleven days after everyone else’s. The bhailo, a bundle of cheer pine splinters bound with hemp rope, is lit and swung round the head in circles in the dark while the Bhailo songs are sung and the jhumelo and thadiya are danced; the cattle are washed and given the first roti, and the house eats pakoda, swale and arsa. The story told in the Nagpur and Chandpur valleys is that the news of Madho Singh Bhandari’s return from the Tibet campaign reached them eleven days late, so the lamps were lit eleven days late and have been ever since.

Deity

Lakshmi, Vishnu, the cattle

Kind

Festival Days of celebration: the house is decorated, a feast is cooked and the temple is visited.

Kartika Shukla Ekadashi at sunrise, eleven days after the Diwali new moon and the same tithi the north keeps as Devuthani Ekadashi. The bhailo is swung after dark.

Sunrise 06:10, sunset 17:39, UTC+5.5. These are the instants the rule is read at, not the temple's own puja times, which every temple prints for itself.

The Ekadashi fast is kept by the households that keep every Ekadashi; for the rest the day is a feast, and the cattle are fed before the household.

Garhwal’s own, and kept in the upper Nagpur, Chandpur and Rawain valleys more than in the towns; the Uttarakhand government has pushed it since 2021 and it is now kept in Dehradun too. Kumaon does not keep it: Bagwal there is the stone fight at Devidhura on the Shravana full moon, a different day under the same word. The same tithi is Devuthani Ekadashi in the Hindi belt and Tulsi Vivah in the Deccan.

The dates above are the Himachal · Uttarakhand reckoning, because that is the calendar this key belongs to. Switch the tradition on the calendar page to see how another one dates the same day.

Every date here is computed from the Sun and Moon for the place entered, by the rule printed beside it. A printed panchangam can differ by a day where an almanac reads a tithi at a different instant, and a family's own custom always comes first. Where the practice genuinely varies, the text says so rather than choosing for you.