How Do We Celebrate the Day Before Diwali?

The day before Diwali, people celebrate Narak Chaturdasi or small Diwali. It features Diwali on a smaller scale, with fewer lights lit and fewer crackers burst. The morning after Chhoti Diwali, the women of the house make beautiful, colored rangoli in the doorway and courtyard.

They create tiny footprints made out of rice paste as a special feature of the rangolis made for Diwali. In Hindu homes, families perform a ritual puja to Goddess Lakshmi and also to Rama in the evening during Chhoti Diwali celebrations. They sing songs in honor of the god and perform aarti.

The story goes that the demon king Narakasur, ruler of Pragjyotishpur (a province to the South of Nepal), after defeating Lord Indra, snatched away the magnificent earrings of Aditi, the Mother Goddess (the ruler of Suraloka and a relative of Satyabhama, Lord Krishna’s wife), and imprisoned sixteen thousand daughters of the gods and saints in his harem.

Upon learning about this, Satyabhama became enraged by Narakasura’s malevolence towards women and appealed to Krishna to grant her the golden chance to destroy Narakasura. The legend also says that Narakasura received a curse stating that a woman would kill him.

Krishna granted Satyabhama a boon to fight Narakasura. With Krishna as her charioteer, Satyabhama entered the battlefield. During the war, Krishna swooned for a while, a preordained divine act designed to empower Satyabhama to kill the demon. After Satyabhama beheaded Narakasura, Krishna released the imprisoned women and agreed to marry them.

So on the day before Narakachaturdashi, Lord Krishna’s divine intervention led to the killing of the demon Narakasura and the liberation of the imprisoned damsels, as well as the recovery of Aditi’s precious earrings. As a symbol of that victory, Lord Krishna smeared his forehead with the demon king’s blood.

Krishna returned home in the very early morning of the Narakachaturdashi day. The womenfolk massaged scented oil onto his body and gave him a good bath to wash away the filth from his body. Since then, people have made taking a bath before sunrise on this day a traditional practice, especially in Maharashtra.

It is interesting to note that Bhudevi, mother of the slain Narakasura, declared that his death should not be a day of mourning but an occasion to celebrate and rejoice. Since then, people celebrate Deepavali every year with joyous celebrations filled with fun, frolic, and fireworks.

In South India, people celebrate the victory of the divine over the mundane in a very peculiar way. They wake up before sunrise, prepare a paste by mixing Kumkum in oil, which symbolizes blood, and after breaking a bitter fruit that represents the head of the demon king smashed by Krishna, they apply that mixture on their foreheads. Then they take an oil bath using sandalwood paste.

In Maharashtra, traditional early baths with oil and “Ubtan” (paste) of gram flour and fragrant powders are a must. Throughout the ritual of baths, deafening sounds of crackers and fireworks fill the air so that children enjoy bathing. Afterward, they serve steamed vermicelli with milk and sugar or puffed rice with curd.

Content for this question contributed by Jennifer Hartman, resident of Aptos, Santa Cruz County, California, USA