Khatarua · Sair Festival The bonfire at the end of the monsoon, lit on the evening the rains are held to break and the cattle come down off the high bugyals.

English

Khatarua · Sair

कुमाउँनी

खतड़ुआ

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. Friday, 17 September 2027
2. Saturday, 16 September 2028
3. Monday, 17 September 2029

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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.

The bonfire at the end of the monsoon, lit on the evening the rains are held to break and the cattle come down off the high bugyals. Kumaon builds a pyre of cheer pine and thorn at a crossroads or above the village, throws a cucumber into it and shouts bhail khatarua, and the children carry burning torches once round the cattle shed against what the wet months left in it. Himachal keeps the same morning as Sair, setting walnuts, a cob of maize, durva grass and the season’s flowers before the house deity and giving the walnuts to the elders.

Deity

Surya, the gram devta

Kind

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

The first day of the solar month of Asoj, which is the gate day the Sun enters Kanya, in the middle of September.

This day carries no instant that can be put on a clock: it is fixed by the tithi or the nakshatra running at sunrise, or by a moonrise the app does not compute. The rule above is the whole of it.

No fast. The cucumber and the new maize are the food of the day, with ghee and curd, and the Himachali Sair plate is walnuts, maize and the first of the season’s fruit.

One ingress under two names on either side of the Sutlej: Khatarua in Kumaon with the fire, Sair in Shimla, Solan, Mandi, Bilaspur and Sirmaur with the walnuts, and Garhwal keeps it lightly. Sair is a Western Pahari word and is carried here in English rather than in a Devanagari tag of its own. The story Kumaon tells, that the fire is for the Chand army’s victory over a Garhwali commander named Khatar Singh, is a later reading of a cattle and harvest rite.

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.