Nuakhai Festival The harvest festival of western Odisha, on which the nua, the first rice of the season, is offered to the village deity and then eaten by the household.

English

Nuakhai

ଓଡ଼ିଆ

ନୂଆଖାଇ

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. Sunday, 5 September 2027
2. Thursday, 24 August 2028
3. Wednesday, 12 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 harvest festival of western Odisha, on which the nua, the first rice of the season, is offered to the village deity and then eaten by the household. The hour of the nuakhai is announced in advance from the Samaleswari temple at Sambalpur, the whole family gathers for it wherever it is working, and when the offered rice has been eaten the juhar begins: the young touch the feet of every elder in turn and the whole village greets every other house. Sambalpur, Bolangir, Kalahandi, Sundargarh and Jharsuguda keep it as their largest day of the year, and the Sambalpuri folk songs and dances run for the week after.

Deity

Samaleswari, Lakshmi, Jagannath

Kind

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

Bhadraba Sukla Panchami, the tithi running at sunrise, which is the day after Ganesh Puja. The lagan, the hour of the offering, is fixed by the Samaleswari temple pandits and announced beforehand.

Sunrise 05:58, sunset 18:17, 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.

No fast is kept. The new rice is cooked with the arisa pitha, the kheeri and the mutton or fish curry of the district, and nothing of the new crop is eaten before the offering.

Western Odisha keeps Nuakhai; coastal Odisha keeps the first rice as Nabanna instead, Bengal and Assam keep their own Nabanna and Nabanna Utsav after the main harvest, and Chhattisgarh and the Odia border districts keep Nuakhai with Odisha.

The dates above are the Odisha 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.

• Maa Samaleswari Temple, Sambalpur 1,012 km
  Odisha

  The entry for this day names Sambalpur. The gazetteer line for this temple names the day. The hour of the nuakhai is announced in advance from the Samaleswari temple at Sambalpur, the whole family gathers for it wherever it is working, and when the offered rice has been eaten the juhar begins: the young touch the feet of every elder in turn and the whole village greets every other house.

A temple is listed here only where the gazetteer's own line names this day, or where this day's own entry names the town, or where the day belongs to the ancestors or the nagas and the temple is recorded for that rite. Where neither table says anything, nothing is listed. Your family's own temple comes first, and its calendar is the one that decides.

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.