The day with two defensible dates

If you look up Choti Diwali 2026, you will find November 7 in some places and November 8 in others. It is tempting to assume one of them is simply wrong. They are not — or rather, each is right about a different part of the day, and neither usually says which part it means.

Naraka Chaturdashi is unusual among Hindu festivals in carrying two observances at opposite ends of the daily cycle. There is the abhyanga snan (अभ्यङ्ग स्नान) — the ceremonial oil bath taken before sunrise, which is the rite the day is actually defined by — and there is an evening observance of lamps and, in several regions, a tarpan (water offering) to Yama. In most years the tithi covers both on the same date and nobody notices the distinction. In 2026 it does not.

This guide computes the tithi window, shows exactly which rite lands on which date and why, and then gives the vidhi. The short version, if you only want the answer: in India the bath is Sunday, November 8, before dawn. In the United Kingdom and everywhere in the Americas it is Saturday, November 7. The evening observance in India belongs to Saturday the 7th.

This is day two of five. For the whole arc, see our five-day Diwali guide; day one is covered in depth in our Dhanteras 2026 guide, and the Festival Calendar 2026 carries the year around it.

Naraka Chaturdashi 2026: the computed tithi window

Hindu festival days are tithis — lunar days, measured by the angle between the Moon and the Sun — and a tithi almost never lines up with a midnight-to-midnight date. We computed this one with the same swisseph-based panchang engine that powers our live Panchang.

Krishna Paksha Chaturdashi in 2026 begins at 10:48 am IST on Saturday, November 7 and ends at 11:28 am IST on Sunday, November 8. (Public panchang sources give 10:47 am and 11:27 am — agreement to the minute.)

Now look at what that does to Saturday morning. Sunrise in Delhi on November 7 is 6:37 am. The Chaturdashi does not begin until 10:48 am — four hours and eleven minutes later. So at the hour when the abhyanga snan is meant to be taken, on Saturday, the running tithi is still Trayodashi: it is still, technically, Dhanteras. A bath taken then is not a Naraka Chaturdashi bath at all.

Sunday, November 8 is the opposite. The pre-dawn window that morning runs roughly 5:02 am to 6:38 am in Delhi, and the Chaturdashi is running throughout it, with four hours and fifty minutes still to go before it expires at 11:28. There is nothing marginal about it.

That is the whole finding, and it is worth stating plainly because listing sites rarely do: the tithi begins too late in the day on the 7th for the 7th to hold the bath.

Why the evening and the morning disagree

The same window that rules Saturday out for the bath rules Saturday in for the evening. By sunset on November 7 — about 5:32 pm in Delhi — the Chaturdashi has been running for nearly seven hours, and it covers the whole of that evening’s pradosh, the twilight window that begins at sunset and runs roughly two hours and twenty-four minutes.

By sunset on Sunday the 8th, the Chaturdashi has already expired at 11:28 that morning. That evening belongs to Amavasya, the new moon — which is to say it belongs to Diwali itself, and to the Lakshmi Puja.

So the two halves of Naraka Chaturdashi genuinely separate in 2026: the evening observance on Saturday the 7th, the abhyanga snan before dawn on Sunday the 8th. A listing that prints a single date has to pick one, and most pick the 7th because that is where the tithi starts.

This is not a quirk of this festival. It is the general rule that festival dates are decided by a kala — the specific moment a rite belongs to — rather than by the tithi’s presence at sunrise. Dhanteras is fixed by pradosh, Janmashtami by the midnight muhurta, Akshaya Tritiya by midday, and Naraka Chaturdashi’s bath by the arunodaya, the last stretch of night before sunrise. Ask the right question of the tithi and the apparent contradictions in festival listings mostly dissolve.

One note on month names, because it reliably confuses people: North Indian almanacs call this tithi Kartik Krishna Chaturdashi, while Maharashtra, Gujarat and the South call it Ashwin Krishna Chaturdashi. It is the same tithi — the two systems simply begin the lunar month at different points. Neither is wrong and neither changes the date.

Which morning is your abhyanga snan?

The tithi is a single global window — it opens and closes at one instant everywhere on earth. What differs is which local pre-dawn happens to fall inside it. Because the window opens at 10:48 am IST on the 7th and closes at 11:28 am IST on the 8th, whether your city catches it on Saturday or Sunday depends entirely on your offset from India.

The result is a clean reversal. India, Nepal, the Gulf, South East Asia, Australia and New Zealand all take the bath on Sunday, November 8. The United Kingdom and every city in North America take it on Saturday, November 7 — because their Saturday pre-dawn falls, in Indian terms, on Saturday afternoon and evening, comfortably inside the tithi, while their Sunday pre-dawn arrives after the window has shut.

Windows below are the arunodaya — computed here as the four ghatis (about ninety-six minutes) before local sunrise, which is the widest of the common definitions. Times are local to each city.

• Sunday, November 8 — Delhi 5:02–6:38 am · Mumbai 5:05–6:41 am · Kolkata 4:08–5:44 am · Chennai 4:28–6:04 am
• Sunday, November 8 — Bengaluru 4:39–6:15 am · Ahmedabad 5:12–6:48 am · Varanasi 4:33–6:09 am · Guwahati 4:00–5:36 am
• Sunday, November 8 — Kathmandu 4:43–6:19 am · Dubai 4:54–6:30 am · Singapore 5:10–6:46 am · Sydney 4:12–5:48 am · Auckland 4:32–6:08 am
• Saturday, November 7 — London 5:28–7:04 am · New York 4:57–6:33 am · Toronto 5:25–7:01 am · Chicago 4:54–6:30 am
• Saturday, November 7 — Houston 5:03–6:39 am · Denver 4:59–6:35 am · San Francisco 5:05–6:41 am · Los Angeles 4:42–6:18 am · Vancouver 5:34–7:10 am

The one close call: London

Twenty-one of the twenty-two cities above clear their nearest tithi boundary by three hours or more, which is far too wide for any reasonable difference in method to matter. London is the exception, and it is worth being honest about it.

London’s sunrise on Saturday, November 7 is 7:04 am GMT, so the four-ghati window opens at 5:28 am. The Chaturdashi begins at 5:18 am GMT — the same instant as 10:48 am IST. London therefore qualifies for Saturday by nine minutes and thirty-six seconds.

That margin is small enough that the definition you use decides it. Many almanacs treat the arunodaya more narrowly — as the final muhurta of the night, about forty-eight minutes before sunrise. Under that narrower reading London’s window opens at 6:16 am, a comfortable fifty-eight minutes inside the tithi, and the answer is the same but no longer close.

So Saturday, November 7 is correct for London under both the wide and the narrow definition. We flag it only because a reader in London who bathes very early — before about 5:18 am — would technically be doing so in the last minutes of Trayodashi. Nine minutes is not something to lose sleep over, but it is the sort of thing our guides would rather state than quietly round away.

The abhyanga snan, step by step

The bath is the festival. Everything else on Naraka Chaturdashi — the lamps, the sweets, the early fireworks — is arranged around it, and unlike most Hindu observances it needs no priest, no purchase and no elaborate setup. Twenty minutes before dawn is enough.

Abhyanga (अभ्यङ्ग) means anointing the body with oil; snan (स्नान) is the bath. The combination is ordinary Ayurvedic practice for the season — the point of doing it on this particular morning is that the tradition treats it as a purification with a specific intention attached, not merely as self-care.

The sequence below is the common form. Regional manuals differ in detail, and where they do we have said so rather than presenting one lineage’s practice as universal.

• Rise inside the arunodaya window — the stretch of night before sunrise given for your city above. Doing it after sunrise is not wrong, but it is no longer the prescribed time.
• Warm til (sesame) oil and apply it to the head first, then the body. Sesame is the traditional oil for this season; coconut is usual in the South.
• Apply ubtan — a paste of besan (chickpea flour), turmeric and a little cream or milk. This is the element that gives the day its other name, Roop Chaturdashi or Roop Chaudas, “the fourteenth of beauty”.
• Many nibandha (digest) manuals prescribe circling an apamarga twig — prickly chaff, Achyranthes aspera — over the head three times during or just before the bath. It is the one gesture specific to this morning, and it is genuinely optional if the plant is not available to you.
• Bathe, and state a sankalpa — a plainly worded intention. It does not need Sanskrit; saying what you are doing and why, in your own language, is a complete sankalpa.
• Light a single lamp afterwards and offer namaskar to the rising sun. Some families add a tarpan (water offering) to Yama at this point; where that is not the household custom, the lamp alone is complete.

Narakasura: the story, and where it actually comes from

The name Naraka Chaturdashi comes from Narakasura — also called Bhaumasura, “son of Bhumi”, the earth goddess. The killing of Naraka is narrated in the Bhagavata Purana, Canto 10, chapter 59, and told again in the Vishnu Purana and the Harivamsha. It is a real textual story, not a folk attribution, which is worth saying because a great deal of festival writing invents provenance.

In the Bhagavata’s account Naraka, ruling from Pragjyotisha in the north-east, has seized the earrings of Aditi and imprisoned thousands of women. Krishna rides against him with Satyabhama, kills him, and releases the captives — sixteen thousand one hundred, in the text’s reckoning. Krishna then marries them, which the tradition reads not as conquest but as the restoration of women whom society would otherwise have refused to receive back.

Two details that circulate widely deserve a more careful label. The first is that Satyabhama personally struck the fatal blow; the Puranic text has her present and fighting alongside Krishna, and the reading that she delivers the killing blow is a well-established interpretive and regional tradition rather than a flat statement of the Sanskrit. The second is the much-repeated line that Naraka, dying, asked that his death be remembered with lights and festivity — a devotional layer that appears in later retellings rather than in the Purana’s own narration. Both are worth telling; neither should be presented as though the Bhagavata says it outright.

What the story is doing in the middle of Diwali is the more interesting question. The five days move from health, to the removal of what obstructs, to the invitation of prosperity, and this second day is the removal. The bath is the domestic form of the same act: the demon is killed at dawn in the story, and at dawn in your bathroom you scrub off what you would rather not carry into the new year. It is a modest ritual with a large idea behind it.

Kali Chaudas, Roop Chaudas, and the South’s Deepavali

The same tithi carries genuinely different festivals in different regions, and flattening them into one is a common failure of festival writing.

In Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and Karnataka, this day is Deepavali itself — not a lesser prelude to it. The observance is the ganga snanam, the pre-dawn oil bath, which is precisely the abhyanga snan under another name; new clothes are worn straight after, and the celebration is in the morning rather than the evening. For a household keeping the southern reckoning in 2026, the festival is Sunday morning, November 8, and there is no “choti” about it.

In Gujarat and parts of Rajasthan and Maharashtra the evening is Kali Chaudas, an observance directed to Kali or Mahakali, with a distinctly protective and in places tantric character. It shares the tithi with Naraka Chaturdashi but is not the same festival, and in 2026 its evening falls on Saturday, November 7.

In much of North India the day is simply Choti Diwali — the small Diwali — with a few lamps lit in the evening as a rehearsal for the next night, and the snan kept quietly in the morning. Roop Chaudas, the beauty reading centred on the ubtan, runs across several of these regions rather than belonging to one.

None of these is the correct version. They are parallel traditions on a shared tithi, and the honest answer to “what is done on Naraka Chaturdashi” is: it depends on whose house you are in. If you want to know what your own family’s tradition prescribes, that is a good question to put to Purohit Ji, who can work from your region and community rather than a national average.

Planning November 8, which carries two festivals

For readers in India, Sunday November 8 is the day that needs actual planning, because it holds the Chaturdashi’s bath at dawn and Amavasya’s Lakshmi Puja after sunset. That is not a conflict — the two rites belong to different tithis and different parts of the day, and both are correctly kept on the same date. But it does make for a long day, and it helps to know that in advance rather than at 5 am.

A workable shape: the abhyanga snan before sunrise, ideally finishing by 6:30 am; the house cleaned and the rangoli laid during the day; the Lakshmi Puja in the pradosh window after sunset, which in Delhi opens at about 5:32 pm. Almanacs usually publish a narrower Lakshmi Puja muhurat inside that window — most often the portion overlapping Vrishabha lagna, considered steady for invoking Lakshmi — and because that is genuinely local, use the muhurat finder for your own city rather than a number computed for someone else’s.

The full Lakshmi Puja sequence is set out step by step in our five-day Diwali guide, and the Lakshmi puja vidhi pillar carries the longer ritual form with its samagri list. If you like to have the aarti words in front of you rather than half-remembered, Om Jai Lakshmi Mata is there with the full text.

One practical note for the diaspora, since the reversal above puts the bath on Saturday: in the UK and the Americas the snan lands on Saturday, November 7, while the Lakshmi Puja pradosh still falls on the evening of Saturday, November 7 local time in the Americas and Sunday the 8th in some longitudes. That is a genuinely awkward pair of answers, and it is exactly the case where asking for your own city beats reading a table.

The rest of the 2026 corridor — and the empty ninth

Because each of the five days is fixed by its own decisive moment rather than by counting forward from Diwali, 2026 does not run one festival per day. It spreads across six dates and leaves one of them empty.

Dhanteras is Friday, November 6, fixed by that evening’s pradosh — the reasoning is worked through in our Dhanteras 2026 guide. Naraka Chaturdashi splits, as above: evening on Saturday the 7th, bath before dawn on Sunday the 8th. Diwali’s Lakshmi Puja is that same Sunday evening, the 8th, when Amavasya covers the pradosh.

Then comes the gap. Monday, November 9 carries no observance at all. Govardhan Puja is kept on Kartik Shukla Pratipada in the pratahkala, the first fifth of the day after sunrise — and Pratipada does not begin until 12:32 pm on the 9th, well after that morning has passed. It runs until 2:00 pm on Tuesday the 10th, so the 10th is the morning that holds it: the pratahkala window there is about 6:39 to 8:49 am.

Bhai Dooj follows on Wednesday, November 11. It is kept on Dwitiya during the aparahna, the afternoon window, and while Dwitiya begins at 2:00 pm on the 10th it only clips the tail of that afternoon. On the 11th it covers the aparahna window — about 1:09 to 3:19 pm — in full, which is what settles the date.

If you have seen November 9 and 10 given for these two, that is the ordinary consequence of counting days forward from Diwali instead of asking each rite for its own moment. In most years counting works. In 2026 it does not, and the corridor genuinely runs November 6 to 11.

Keeping the day when nothing around you is celebrating

Choti Diwali is the easiest day of the five to keep abroad, precisely because its core rite is a bath. It needs no holiday, no gathering and no shopping, and it is finished before the working day starts. For a family in London, Toronto or Melbourne with no Diwali holiday and a full week ahead, that matters more than it sounds.

A minimum that is genuinely complete: rise inside your city’s window, oil, ubtan, bathe, say the sankalpa in your own words, light one lamp. If children are old enough, telling them why — the Narakasura story takes two minutes — does more for continuity than any amount of decoration.

If the timing is impossible — a night shift, a small child, a household that simply cannot be up at five — take the bath as early as you can and keep the intention. The tradition’s own preference is clear, but its practicality is older than any of us; the observance is not forfeited by being late.

Our panchang will give you the day’s tithi and timings wherever you are, the calendar shows the corridor in place around your month, and the Festival Calendar 2026 has the year’s festivals with the reasoning behind each date. For the days on either side, the Dhanteras 2026 guide covers day one and the five-day Diwali guide carries the whole arc. Further out, Dev Uthani Ekadashi and Tulsi Vivah reopen the wedding season on November 20–21, and Kartik Purnima closes the month on the 24th.

The last word is the one worth keeping: this is a small ritual with a large idea inside it. Something is removed before anything is invited. That is the whole architecture of Diwali, and Naraka Chaturdashi is where it happens.