ਦੀਵਾਲੀدیوالی Diwali and Bandi Chhor Divas: why the lamps are lit

What is Diwali?

Diwali (ਦੀਵਾਲੀ, دیوالی, dee-VAA-lee, also spelt Divali), the festival of lights, is kept by Hindus, Sikhs and Jains on the new-moon night of Kattak, the month called Kartik in Hindi, which falls between mid-October and mid-November. The name comes from the Sanskrit dipavali, “a row of lamps”. For many Hindus, Punjab's among them, it is the night Ram came home to Ayodhya and the night of Lakshmi, the goddess of good fortune. For Jains it is the night Mahavira, the last of their great teachers, reached nirvana. For Sikhs it is also Bandi Chhor Divas, “the day of release”, which remembers the sixth Guru, Guru Hargobind, freed from the fortress of Gwalior in central India and coming home to Amritsar. Across Punjab and its diaspora it means clay lamps and fairy lights, a scrubbed house, new clothes, boxes of mithai and the crack of patake.

The lamp at the centre of it all is a diva: a shallow clay saucer with a pinched lip, a twist of cotton for a wick, and mustard oil. (Yes, a diva. In Hindi it's a diya; in Punjabi it has always been a diva, and it has never once been difficult.)

Bandi Chhor Divas: the Sikh night

For Sikhs the night belongs first to Guru Hargobind, the sixth Guru: the Guru who wore two swords, one for the spirit and one for the world, piri and miri, and who raised the Akal Takht, the Sikhs' seat of authority, facing the Harmandir Sahib. Sikh tradition says he came home from Gwalior to Amritsar at Diwali. The Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee (SGPC), which runs the Golden Temple, tells how Baba Budha, who had known Guru Nanak as a boy and served every Guru since, lit lamps across the city to welcome him. Sikh tradition

So on Diwali night gurdwaras are lit as well as homes, and there is langar for whoever comes. The greeting is “Bandi Chhor Divas diyan vadhaiyan”, and plenty of families say Diwali and Bandi Chhor Divas in the same breath.

What Sikhs take from the night is in the way the story ends: when the order came to free him, the Guru would not leave the fort without the fifty-two princes held there with him. Freedom, in this telling, is something you win for others too. Interpretation The theme has come back in the message the jathedar of the Akal Takht reads to the Sikhs on the day: in 2004 it asked for detainees in India and Pakistan to be freed, and in 2025 for the Sikh prisoners known as the Bandi Singhs, a name with bandi, captive, at its root.

The fort remembers him too. Gurdwara Data Bandi Chhor Sahib stands in Gwalior Fort, where he was held, and in 2021 a nagar kirtan, a procession behind the Guru Granth Sahib, set out from it for Amritsar to mark what its organisers called the 400th Bandi Chhor Divas.

When is Diwali this year?

Diwali is kept on massia, the new moon, of Kattak. Punjab counts its months by the moon as well as the sun (our calendar shows both), and twelve moons come to about eleven days short of a year, so the date moves: Diwali can fall anywhere from mid-October to mid-November. About two weeks later, the full moon that ends Kattak brings Guru Nanak's gurpurab.

The moon fixes the night; your sunset fixes the day. Diwali is the evening on which the new moon is in force at dusk, so in some years the same new moon reaches Vancouver's evening a day before Amritsar's, and in others it covers two evenings and calendars disagree.

Sending Diwali wishes? Lay a rangoli, put it on a card and send it, in a couple of minutes. Make a card ↓

The five days

Diwali is one night, but in North India it sits in the middle of five days, and the season around it starts weeks before. Here is the month on the moon:

Dussehra comes first, when Ravan is burned in effigy for Ram's victory. Then Karva Chauth, when many married women fast for their husbands' long life, without food or water from dawn until the moon rises; a new bride looks at it through a sieve. Then Ahoi, when mothers fast for their children until the stars come out. Then the five days themselves:

Invited? The short version

Nobody expects a guest to know any of this, and you'll be welcome whatever you get wrong. These eight will cover you.

1. Bring something sweet. A box of mithai, dry fruit or good chocolates. Leave the wine at home unless you know your hosts drink: some families keep the day of the puja meat- and alcohol-free.
2. Say it. “Happy Diwali” is the safe choice. To a Punjabi friend, “Diwali diyan vadhaiyan” (ਦੀਵਾਲੀ ਦੀਆਂ ਵਧਾਈਆਂ, دیوالی دیاں ودھائیاں): congratulations on Diwali. To a Sikh friend, “Happy Bandi Chhor Divas” too. In Pakistan you'll hear “Diwali Mubarak”.
3. Dress up. Bright and festive. Punjabi or South Asian clothes are a compliment, not a costume.
4. At a puja, follow the family. Shoes off, sit or stand quietly, and take the prasad, the blessed sweet, in cupped hands.
5. At a gurdwara, cover your head, take your shoes off and wash your hands. Sit on the floor, and stay for langar, the free meal, which is always vegetarian.
6. Say yes to food. It will keep coming.
7. Mind the fireworks. Keep a bucket of water handy, wear closed-toe shoes, keep children back, and check the local rules: many towns allow them only at set hours, or not at all.
8. Leave with more than you brought. You will be sent home with a box of someone else's sweets. This is the system working.

How Punjab keeps it

In Punjab the festival starts with a bucket. In the days before Diwali the whole house is cleaned, and often freshly painted: cupboards emptied, curtains washed, every corner made fit for a goddess. Then the shopping: new clothes, clay divas from the potter, sweets and presents for everyone you know, and bags of coloured powder for a rangoli, the pattern laid on the floor at the door. In the villages Diwali comes just after the paddy harvest is sold, and when the money is late, farmers say it will be a dark Diwali.

Try one: there is a rangoli floor at the end of this page, and your pattern can go on a Diwali card. Make a rangoli ↓

At dusk the lamps come out: a diva on the doorstep and along the edge of the roof, candles in the windows, and these days far more strings of electric lights than either. In a village a lamp goes to every place that matters, from the well and the pipal tree to the cattle trough and even the dung heap. Hindu families gather for the Lakshmi puja; many Sikh families go to the gurdwara for the evening prayer, the ardas, and come home to light their own lamps. After that, everyone ends up on the roof.

Diwali is mithai season: one estimate from 2003 put sales in Ludhiana alone at a million one-kilo boxes. In Amritsar the shops fill with pinni made with ghee and dry fruit, boondi laddoos and petha. Boxes go out to relatives, neighbours and colleagues, boxes come back, and somewhere in every street is a box of soan papdi, a flaky gram-flour sweet, that has been round the whole neighbourhood and come home again. Many families give dry fruit instead, which keeps, and raises fewer worries about adulterated sweets.

And then the patake: sparklers for the children, fountains, rockets, and the one enormous bang an uncle insists on setting off himself. They are the loudest part of the night and, these days, the most argued about: their smoke settles on top of the smoke from burning paddy stubble, and after Diwali in 2025 parts of Jalandhar, Ludhiana and Amritsar hit the top of the air-quality scale. In recent years India's Punjab has allowed only “green” crackers, and only from 8 to 10 pm on Diwali night. Not everyone listens.

In some homes the night ends over cards, on an old Punjabi belief that whoever wins tonight will win all year. Gambling at Diwali is an old Indian habit (a French traveller wrote about it in the seventeenth century), and in the run-up to Diwali the police in Punjab's cities raid a gambling den or two.

Across the border

In Pakistan's Punjab, Diwali belongs above all to its Hindu citizens and whoever they invite. It is not a national holiday in Pakistan: government staff who are not Muslim may take it as one of their optional holidays, and Sindh gives its Hindu staff the day off. Families light clay lamps at home. Lahore's main celebration is at the Krishna Mandir on Ravi Road, one of the city's two working Hindu temples, hung with coloured lights for the night; in 2025 Muslim, Sikh and Christian guests came to its ceremony. In 2024 the chief minister of Pakistan's Punjab, Maryam Nawaz, held a Diwali ceremony with Lahore's Hindu families, and in 2025 the prime minister hosted one in Islamabad.

Abroad

Abroad, families keep the night at home and at the mandir or gurdwara, with fireworks where the rules allow them and city displays where they don't. In Surrey families light clay divas; in Mississauga the Ontario Khalsa Darbar gurdwara has stopped using fireworks; and Canada's federal government and British Columbia's mark Bandi Chhor Divas with official greetings. Leicester's Belgrave Road puts on what is often called one of the biggest Diwalis outside India, London keeps Diwali on the Square in Trafalgar Square, and Brampton, which banned personal fireworks, held its first city Diwali fair, a mela, in 2023. New York City's public schools have closed for Diwali since 2024, and California added it to its state holidays from 2026.

One night, four stories

Which story you hear depends on whose house you're in. Each is the meaning of the night for the people who keep it, so the four doors below are drawn alike, in no order of rank. Choose one.

And the fifth answer

Around 1030 the scholar al-Biruni, a Central Asian who had measured the size of the earth from a hilltop in the Salt Range, in what is now Pakistan's Punjab, wrote a long book about India. In it he describes a festival called Dibali, on the new moon of Kartik. People bathe, dress up, give each other betel leaves and areca nuts, ride to the temples to give alms and “play merrily with each other till noon”, and at night light so many lamps “that the air is perfectly clear”.

The reason he was given? Once a year, on this day, Lakshmi lets Bali, a demon king held prisoner deep beneath the earth, out into the world; so the feast was called Balirajya, Bali's kingdom. Bali still has his day, the day after Diwali, in parts of India, and his is one of the oldest written explanations of the night. It, too, is about a prisoner set free.

Diwali in Amritsar

There is a Punjabi saying for this:

ਦਾਲ ਰੋਟੀ ਘਰ ਦੀ, ਦੀਵਾਲੀ ਅੰਬਰਸਰ ਦੀ دال روٹی گھر دی، دیوالی امبرسر دی Daal roti ghar di, Diwali Ambarsar di.

Literally, “dal and roti of home, Diwali of Amritsar”: nothing beats the food at home, or Diwali in Amritsar, or Ambarsar, as Punjabis say it. On Diwali night the Harmandir Sahib, the Golden Temple, is lit from top to bottom, and its reflection lies on the dark water of the sarovar, the pool around it. People come by the lakh, the hundred thousand. Families light their own small lamps at the places set aside along the walkway, the parikrama, a short display of fireworks goes up over the water, and the jathedar of the Akal Takht, the seat of Sikh authority facing the shrine, reads his annual Bandi Chhor Divas message to the Sikhs.

Some years the lights are kept low. In 2024, when the day fell on the fortieth anniversary of the killings of Sikhs in Delhi in November 1984, the Akal Takht asked for no fireworks, no electric lights and only a token of lamps.

Why the lamps?

Put the stories side by side and look at what happens in each. Ram comes home through the dark to a lit city. Lakshmi is let in at a door left open and lit. Guru Hargobind walks out of a fortress and, in the Sikh telling, fifty-two prisoners walk out with him. Mahavira is released, Jains believe, from the round of rebirth. Bali is let out of the underworld for a day. Interpretation

Every one of them is about a door: someone coming home through it, someone let in, someone let out. And every one is told of the darkest night of the month, when a lamp means most. On a night with no moon, a lamp on a doorstep does two things at once. It shows the way, and it says that someone is expected.

That, more or less, is what the cleaning is for (the house made ready), what the sweets are for (the welcome shared), and what the new things bought on Dhanteras are for (the good year asked in). Even the fireworks, a late addition to a very old festival, make sure that nobody, anywhere, can miss that tonight the town is lit.

Now look at the top of your screen. If you've read this far, every lamp in the row is lit. A row of lamps, in Sanskrit, is a dipavali. In Punjabi, Diwali.

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