Diwali: The Festival of Lights and the Story Behind the Lamps

On Diwali night in Ahmedabad, a shopkeeper sets a new account book in front of a small shrine. It’s bound in red cloth. He draws a swastika on the first page in red kumkum powder and writes two words beside it, shubh and labh, auspicious and profit. Then he prays over a ledger that doesn’t have a single entry in it yet.

I love that picture. A whole trading year starts with a blank book and somebody asking for a blessing on what goes into it.

The ledger is only one of the things Diwali carries. More than a billion people celebrate it, by the count New York’s governor gave when she signed the law closing the city’s schools for it, and they’ve got different reasons, with different stories, in different languages. Almost all of those reasons come back to light winning against dark. And the most famous of them is a story, the oldest epic in Sanskrit, about a prince coming home.

What is Diwali, the festival of lights?

Diwali, or Deepavali, is the festival of lights. The name comes from the Sanskrit for a row of lamps. Small clay oil lamps called diyas line the windows and doorsteps, and rangoli patterns in colored powder decorate the door. The fireworks start after dark.

Hindus celebrate it. So do Sikhs and Jains, and some Buddhists, each with a story of their own.

It runs five days, and the main night is the third. The table follows the North Indian calendars most American temples use. Regional calendars can shift a day here or there, so your local temple’s schedule wins over this table.

How is the date of Diwali decided?

By the moon.

Diwali falls on amavasya, the new moon night, in the Hindu month of Kartik, and the Hindu calendar is lunisolar: months follow the moon, and the year gets nudged back into line with the sun every few years. So it lands somewhere between mid-October and mid-November. In 2027 it’s October 29. In 2028 it’s October 17.

The darkest night of the month gets the most lamps. I can’t think of a better choice of date for a festival about light.

Christians fight the same arithmetic every spring, and I wrote about it in why Easter moves. A lunar rule laid over a solar year never divides evenly, and anybody who plans a calendar has to live with that.

What story does Diwali celebrate?

The best known is the return of Rama.

In the Ramayana, Prince Rama of Ayodhya is cheated out of his throne by palace politics and sent into exile in the forest for fourteen years. His wife Sita and his brother Lakshmana go with him. The demon king Ravana kidnaps Sita and carries her off to Lanka. Rama gets her back with an army of monkeys and bears, kills Ravana, and comes home.

When he reaches Ayodhya, the people light rows of lamps to guide him in. Hindus have been lighting them ever since.

I’m a sucker for a homecoming story, and this one’s got everything. Fourteen years gone, a war, a rescue, and a whole city that stayed up to light the road for him.

Other communities tell other stories on the same nights. In much of South India, the festival marks Krishna killing Narakasura. Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth, is the one prayed to on the main night. Sikhs mark Bandi Chhor Divas, the release of Guru Hargobind from Gwalior Fort, and their tradition says he refused to walk out unless 52 imprisoned kings went with him. The Golden Temple in Amritsar is lit with thousands of lights that night. Jains mark the night Mahavira attained nirvana.

The stories differ and the lamps stay the same, and I find that comforting.

Who wrote the Ramayana?

Tradition credits Valmiki, and Hindus call him the adi kavi, the first poet. Scholars put the oldest layers of the text somewhere between the eighth and fourth centuries BC, with later material added for centuries after. It runs about 24,000 verses in seven books.

The story of how it began puts most writers’ origin stories to shame.

Valmiki was walking to the river to bathe when he saw a pair of cranes together. A hunter’s arrow killed the male. The female cried over him until she died of grief. Valmiki was so angry and so heartsick that he cursed the hunter, and the curse came out of his mouth in a perfect meter. He’d never heard anything like it. That couplet is counted as the first shloka in Sanskrit, and he wrote the entire Ramayana in the same meter afterward.

Sanskrit poetry starts, by its own account, with a man too upset about a dead bird to keep quiet. I’ve spent my life around writers, and that’s the most accurate description of where good writing comes from that I’ve ever read. Somebody sees something unbearable and the words won’t stay in.

How many versions of the Ramayana are there?

Hundreds. Nobody has a final count.

Valmiki’s Sanskrit is the oldest full telling, and it isn’t the only one by a long way. Tulsidas retold it in the sixteenth century in Awadhi, the everyday language of northern India, and his Ramcharitmanas is the version millions of people grew up hearing. There are Tamil, Bengali, Kannada, Thai, Malay, Jain and Buddhist tellings, and in some of them the villains get far more sympathy than Valmiki gave them. Every village Ramlila puts on its own version every autumn.

The scholar A. K. Ramanujan wrote an essay about all this called “Three Hundred Ramayanas.” His point was that a story this loved doesn’t belong to one book. It belongs to everybody who tells it, and I couldn’t agree more.

In October 2011, Delhi University dropped that essay from its history reading list after students who objected to it vandalized the history department.

Who gets to decide which Ramayana is the real one?

An essay about how many people love a story got pulled from a university because some people only wanted one version of it read. Salman Rushdie called it academic censorship, and I think he was right.

I’ve written about book banning before, and the excuse always sounds the same: protecting the story. Damn it, the story survived 2,000 years of retelling without their help.

Television proved it’s still alive. Ramanand Sagar’s Ramayan ran on India’s state broadcaster from January 1987 to July 1988, 78 episodes on Sunday mornings, and reporters described streets going empty and shops closing while it aired. Some families bathed and hung garlands on the television set before an episode started. When the government reran it during the 2020 lockdown, Doordarshan claimed 77 million viewers watched on a single day.

Why do merchants open new account books on Diwali?

For many Hindu business families, especially Gujarati traders, Diwali ends the business year. Old books close, and new ones open on Diwali night in a ritual called Chopda Pujan, from chopda, the Gujarati word for an account book, and pujan, worship. Marwari merchants from Rajasthan do it too, and some Jain merchants open new books at the same time.

The new books are set before Lakshmi, Ganesha and Saraswati, the goddess of knowledge and the written word. Somebody writes shubh and labh on the first page and makes the first entry. The next day, November 9 this year, is Bestu Varas, the Gujarati New Year.

Plenty of shops now put a laptop in front of the shrine instead of a red ledger.

I like that too. The tool changed and the blessing didn’t.

I’ve opened a lot of blank books in my life, and I can tell you the first page is the scariest one in any of them. I think asking for help before you write the first line is wise.

Is Diwali a holiday in the United States?

Not a federal one.

Pennsylvania made Diwali an official state holiday in October 2024 when Governor Josh Shapiro signed a bipartisan bill, the first state to do it, though schools, government offices and businesses aren’t required to close. New York passed a law in November 2023 that closes New York City’s public schools for Diwali.

Here in Tampa Bay, the festival has been part of the calendar for decades. The Hindu Temple of Florida, on Lynn Road in north Tampa, was founded by local families in 1983. BAPS Shri Swaminarayan Mandir in Thonotosassa holds a large Diwali celebration, and in 2013 Tampa’s mayor proclaimed a Diwali Day for it.

How to mark Diwali this year

Read some of the Ramayana.

Pick up a modern translation of Valmiki, or an abridged retelling if 24,000 verses sounds like a lot for one weekend, and read about Rama coming home to a city full of lamps. If you like comparing how one story changes over time, I’ve written about how fairy tales survive centuries of retelling and how the carols of the Twelve Days of Christmas drifted by ear.

If you live near a temple, check whether its celebration’s open to visitors. Plenty of them are. Be a good guest, and don’t show up empty-handed or loud.

And if your family has stories it keeps telling every year, write them down before the only copy is somebody’s memory. My memoir process exists for exactly that. Start a new notebook, write something good on the first page, and light a lamp while you’re at it.

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