Durga Puja 2026: the five days, and the date each one actually falls on

Durga Puja 2026 begins with Bodhon on the evening of Friday, October 16 and ends with Bijoya Dashami on Tuesday, October 20. Immersion follows on Dashami or shortly after, at a time each committee sets locally.

That is the answer, and the rest of this guide is about why it is not quite as simple as five days on a calendar. The Bengali festival is named for tithis — Shashthi, Saptami, Ashtami, Navami, Dashami — and a tithi is a lunar interval, not a civil day. It can begin at any hour and it can be longer or shorter than twenty-four hours, so it drifts against the calendar and the two only ever line up loosely.

Computed with our own panchang engine for Indian Standard Time: Saptami runs from 5:54 am on Saturday the 17th to 8:28 am on Sunday the 18th. Ashtami runs from there to 10:52 am on Monday the 19th. Navami runs to 12:50 pm on Tuesday the 20th, and Dashami to 2:12 pm on Wednesday the 21st. Shashthi is already running when this window opens; what matters for the schedule is that it ends at 5:54 am on Saturday.

Read those boundaries against the rites and the whole shape of the year falls out. Ashtami is running through Sunday morning, so the Ashtami pushpanjali — the offering of flowers, made standing, with the mantras said after the priest — is kept on Sunday the 18th. But Ashtami does not actually end until Monday mid-morning, and Sandhi Puja is fixed to that ending rather than to a day. So the anjali is on Sunday and the Sandhi is on Monday, a little before eleven. Committees ask about this every year it happens, and it is not an error in anyone’s calendar.

One more consequence worth naming early: because Navami begins at 10:52 am on Monday, the Navami rites and the Sandhi Puja share a single morning. If you are cooking, arranging flowers, or booking a priest, Monday the 19th is the compressed day.

Bodhon: waking a goddess out of season

The festival opens on Shashthi evening with Bodhon, literally an awakening. The goddess is invited (amantran), woken (bodhon), and then settled in through adhivas — an anointing in which the image is touched with a series of substances and objects, each named in the ritual manual, from earth and stone to conch, mirror, ghee and flowers. Only after that is she considered present in the image for the days to come.

The reason there is a waking rite at all is one of the better-known stories in Bengal, and it is worth telling accurately. The traditional calendar places the goddess’s proper worship in the spring, in the month of Chaitra — the Basanti Puja still kept by some families. The autumn worship, in Ashwin, falls in what the tradition calls the dakshinayana, the half of the year read as the gods’ night. Worship offered then is akal bodhan, an untimely awakening.

The story attached to it is that Rama performed exactly such an untimely invocation before facing Ravana, and that the goddess answered. It is worth being precise about where that account is found: it is carried in the Bengali Ramayana of Krittivasa and in Puranic retellings, not in Valmiki’s Sanskrit Ramayana. Bengal’s autumn Durga Puja takes its charter from that layer of the tradition. Saying so does not weaken the festival; it just keeps the attribution honest, which matters when the same story is repeated every year as though it came from the oldest text.

For a household puja the practical shape of Shashthi evening is small: the image or ghat is set, the bel tree branch invoked earlier in the day is brought in, lamps are lit, and the family does not begin the main offerings yet. Nothing on Shashthi is timed to the minute in the way Sandhi Puja is. If you want the full kalash-and-sankalpa form of the opening as it is kept outside Bengal, our Navratri nine-nights guide sets out Ghatasthapana step by step.

Maha Saptami and the Nabapatrika: nine plants, and the figure who is not Ganesha’s wife

Saptami begins at 5:54 am on Saturday the 17th, and the first rite of the day happens at dawn, usually before most of the pandal is awake. Nine plants are bound together with the white aparajita creeper, taken to a river or tank, bathed with the prescribed waters, dressed in a red-bordered white sari, and installed to the right of Ganesha in the pandal. This bundle is the Nabapatrika — nava patrika, the nine leaves.

Because it stands beside Ganesha wrapped in a sari with a vermilion mark, it is popularly called Kola Bou, the banana bride, and half of Bengal will cheerfully tell you it is Ganesha’s wife. It is not, and the ritual is explicit about what it is: each of the nine plants is invoked as a form of the goddess herself. The bundle is Durga in her vegetal aspect — the harvest standing in for the divine — which is a far older idea than the joke, and a much better one. The banana plant simply happens to be the tallest of the nine and the one the sari is draped around, so it is the one people see.

The pairing of plant to goddess given in the Bengali ritual manuals runs as follows. Lists vary slightly in order between manuals, so treat this as the common form rather than the only one:

After the bath the rest of Saptami proceeds: the goddess is invoked into the image, the navapatrika is established, and the first full anjali and bhog of the festival are offered. In many households this is also the day the kitchen scales up — the Saptami bhog is the one most often cooked for the whole para.

• Kadali, the plantain — Brahmani
• Kachu, the arum or taro — Kalika
• Haridra, turmeric — Durga
• Jayanti — Kartiki
• Bilva, the wood apple — Shiva’s consort, Shivā
• Dadimba, the pomegranate — Raktadantika
• Ashoka — Shokarahita, the sorrowless one
• Mana, a second arum — Chamunda
• Dhanya, paddy — Lakshmi

Maha Ashtami: the anjali, Kumari Puja, and the Saptami that owns two sunrises

Ashtami is the fullest day of the festival, and in 2026 its morning rites fall on Sunday the 18th. Ashtami tithi arrives at 8:28 am that day and runs through the rest of it, so the pushpanjali — offered standing, in batches, with flowers held in cupped hands and returned to the goddess’s feet — is kept through the late morning. Many keep a partial fast until they have made theirs.

The other rite of the day is Kumari Puja, in which a young girl is worshipped as a living form of the goddess. It is kept in temples, maths and some households, and it is most publicly associated with Belur Math, where the Ramakrishna Mission has kept it since Swami Vivekananda instituted the observance there at the turn of the twentieth century. The theological point is the same one the Nabapatrika makes in a different key: the goddess is not only in the image.

Now the calendar oddity behind this year’s dates, because it is worth understanding rather than memorising. Saptami in 2026 spans two sunrises — it is running at dawn on Saturday the 17th and still running at dawn on Sunday the 18th. A tithi that owns two sunrises is called vriddhi, an increase. When that happens, everything after it is pushed later relative to the calendar than a naive count would suggest, which is why Maha Ashtami lands on the 18th and Maha Navami on the 19th rather than a day earlier.

This is also why a day map built by asking only "which tithi is running at sunrise?" gives the wrong answer this year. The rule that actually settles these days is the tithi prevailing at the hour the rite is prescribed for — which for most of the Durga Puja rites is the morning, and for Dussehra is aparahna, the fourth of the day’s five daylight parts. Our Dussehra 2026 guide works that rule through in full, including the year the two readings disagreed in public.

Sandhi Puja: forty-eight minutes that belong to neither tithi

Sandhi means junction, and Sandhi Puja is offered across the seam between Ashtami and Navami: the last twenty-four minutes of the one and the first twenty-four of the other. Forty-eight minutes in total, and it is the single most precisely timed thing in the whole festival.

For 2026 that window is 10:28 to 11:16 am IST on Monday, October 19 — Ashtami ends and Navami begins at 10:52 am, and the rite brackets it. Because a tithi boundary is an astronomical instant rather than a local clock time, this is the same moment everywhere on earth; only the local reading of it changes. In London it is 5:58 to 6:46 am, and in New York 12:58 to 1:46 am, both on the 19th.

The rite itself is unmistakable: 108 lamps lit together, 108 lotuses offered, and in many pandals a drum roll and a conch that carry through the neighbourhood. What it commemorates is a specific episode. In the Devi Mahatmya, the goddess confronted by the generals Chanda and Munda blackens with wrath and Kali issues from her brow; having destroyed them she is given the name Chamunda. Sandhi Puja marks that moment of manifestation, which is why the offering is made to the fiercer form and not the serene one on the pandal’s central image.

The practical warning is simple: this is the one appointment in the five days you cannot be late for, and in 2026 it lands mid-morning on a working Monday. If you are keeping it at home, have the lamps counted out the night before. If your city is not Kolkata or Delhi, the window shifts with your clock rather than with your tithi — ask for your own city rather than working from an IST table.

Bijoya Dashami: darpan visarjan, sindoor khela, and the immersion nobody can time for you

Dashami begins at 12:50 pm on Tuesday, October 20 and runs to 2:12 pm on Wednesday the 21st, and Bijoya Dashami is kept on the Tuesday. The morning belongs to the closing rites and the afternoon to the farewell.

The first of those rites is darpan visarjan, the immersion of the reflection. A mirror or a vessel of water is held so the goddess’s face is reflected in it, and that reflection is immersed — the departure performed symbolically before the image itself is moved. It is a quietly extraordinary piece of ritual design: the farewell is completed while she is still visibly present, so nothing about the physical immersion later has to carry the theological weight.

Then sindoor khela, in which married women offer vermilion to the goddess and then mark one another with it, and boron, the formal send-off with sweets and betel. In recent years several Kolkata pujas have opened sindoor khela to widows and to women outside that description, a change made deliberately and discussed openly; it is a live practice rather than a fixed one, and worth knowing about if you are describing it to someone who last saw it decades ago. What follows is the visarjan procession, the dhak, and in many places the Dhunuchi naach — the dance with a censer of burning coconut husk and incense held in the hands, and sometimes in the teeth.

We deliberately publish no time for Durga Visarjan, and it is worth saying why. Unlike the Sandhi window, the immersion is not fixed by a computable rule. It is set by the puja committee, the police, the river, and the queue of other pandals — locally, every year, differently. Printing an authoritative-looking minute for it would be inventing precision that does not exist. For what happens on this same tithi elsewhere in the country, our Dussehra guide covers Ravana Dahan, Shami Puja and the Vijaya Muhurat.

Which panjika is your pandal following — and keeping the days abroad

If you compare two Bengali almanacs this year and find them printing different day maps, you have not found a mistake. Bengal has two living panjika traditions, and they compute the tithi differently. One follows the older Surya Siddhanta figures; the other, the Bishuddha Siddhanta, follows modern astronomical computation — drik, "as observed". When a tithi boundary falls near a sunrise or near a prescribed rite hour, the two can land the same rite on different days, and individual pujas follow whichever their family or their priest has always followed. The times in this guide are computed drik, which is also what our live panchang serves.

The honest practical advice is: ask your pandal or your purohit which panjika they keep, and follow that. Both are legitimate, both are internally consistent, and the one thing that genuinely goes wrong is a family splitting its own observance because two people read two different almanacs.

Keeping the days abroad has a different complication. The tithi boundaries above are astronomical instants, so they convert cleanly to any time zone — but the local sunrise does not move with them, and the rite hours are defined relative to local daylight. In practice, a tithi that ends at 10:52 am in India ends in the small hours in North America, which can move a rite onto the previous local day. That is exactly what happens to Sandhi Puja in 2026 for the Americas: 12:58 am on the 19th in New York, in the middle of the night. Most diaspora pujas therefore keep the rites on the nearest weekend and are open about doing so, which is a reasonable accommodation and has a long precedent.

For planning the rest of the season around these five days, the Festival Calendar 2026 carries the dated list, the Navratri 2026 guide covers the nine nights as they are kept elsewhere, and the Saraswati Puja sequence explains the four nakshatra-fixed days that overlap Durga Puja in the south and east. If you want something to sing on the days themselves, Jai Ambe Gauri is the aarati most often used in Devi worship, with the Devanagari, a transliteration and a plain-English sense of each verse.