Dev Diwali 2026: Kartik Purnima Date, the Varanasi Ghats, Tripurari Purnima & What to Do at Home

Last updated: September 2026 · By Acharya Alok Pandit for Divine Hindu, Jayanagar 3rd Block East, Bengaluru 560011 · ~17 min read

Fifteen nights after Diwali, when the lamps of Lakshmi Puja have long been put away, Varanasi lights up again — and this time, the tradition says, it is not for us. Dev Diwali is the night on which the gods are believed to keep their own festival of lights on the banks of the Ganga, and the city of Kashi, which understands itself as the place where heaven touches the river, keeps it on their behalf. It is the last night of the sacred month of Kartik, the night the month's dawn baths and evening lamps reach their climax, and the one night in the year when the entire crescent of ghats, from Assi to Rajghat, is lit from the water's edge to the temple steps. This guide sets out the 2026 date and tithi, the two legends behind the night, what actually happens at the ghats, how deep daan is offered, how the day is kept at home by families nowhere near Kashi, and how Kartik Purnima, Dev Diwali and Guru Nanak Jayanti relate to one another when they fall, as they do this year, on the same Tuesday.

Dev Diwali 2026 date and tithi

Dev Diwali is fixed by a tithi, not a calendar date: it falls on Kartik Purnima, the full moon of the month of Kartik, in the evening. In 2026 the Purnima tithi begins late on the night of Monday, 23 November and runs through the whole of Tuesday, 24 November until after sunset, so it is current at the evening pradosh hour on the Tuesday, which is what fixes the festival. Because the tithi ends only after sunset on the Tuesday, there is no split between cities this year; Varanasi, Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru and Kolkata all keep it on the same day.

The two panchang sources we checked give the same tithi times to the minute, which is unusual enough to be worth noting; the tithi is generous this year and the date is not in dispute. Sunset and moonrise vary by city, and the exact pradosh window for lighting lamps is a local calculation, so take those from a current panchang for your own city on the day rather than from any published list. If the whole month looks late — Diwali on 8 November, Dev Diwali on 24 November — it is because an extra lunar month was inserted into 2026 between May and June, moving every tithi-based festival in the second half of the year about three weeks later than in 2025; the full explanation is in our Dhanteras 2026 guide, and the whole month is mapped in the Kartik month 2026 guide.

Why the gods are said to come down to the Ganga on this night

The name explains the belief. Dev Diwali — or Dev Deepawali — means the Diwali of the devas, and the tradition of Kashi holds that on Kartik Purnima the gods descend from their heavens to bathe in the Ganga at Varanasi and to keep the festival of lights on its banks. The lamps the city lights are understood as its welcome: the ghats are lit for the gods' arrival, in the same way a home is lit for Lakshmi a fortnight earlier. Several strands of tradition are woven into this. Kartik is held in the Puranas to be the month most beloved of Vishnu, and its Purnima the most meritorious day of it; a bath in the Ganga on Kartik Purnima is traditionally described as carrying the merit of a bath on every other day of the year together, which is why the pre-dawn Kartik snan that thousands keep through the month ends here. Varanasi, in its own understanding, is Avimukta, the city Shiva never leaves, and the place where the Ganga, flowing north for the one stretch of her course, is closest to heaven. Put those together and the idea that the gods choose this river, on this night, follows naturally.

The tradition also gives the night to the ancestors and to the light itself. The akash deep, the sky lamp hoisted on a bamboo pole at the ghats through Kartik and believed to guide the departed, is offered for the last time on Dev Diwali, and the great festival of lamps is understood as the culmination of a month of daily deep daan. Whatever the strand a family follows, the common thread is that Kartik Purnima is a night for lamps offered outward — to a river, to the sky, to the gods — rather than for lamps that decorate one's own house. That distinction, more than anything else, is what separates Dev Diwali from Diwali.

Tripurari Purnima: the Tripurasura legend

The older name for the day, and the one the Puranas use, is Tripurari Purnima or Tripurotsav — the festival of Tripurari, "the enemy of the three cities," which is a name of Shiva. The story is told in the Shiva Purana and, in different forms, the Mahabharata and the Bhagavata Purana, and it is worth telling properly because the lamps of the night are traditionally explained by it.

Three asura brothers — Tarakaksha, Kamalaksha and Vidyunmali, the sons of Tarakasura — performed austerities so severe that Brahma granted them a boon. They asked for immortality; Brahma refused, and they settled for the next best thing. They would live in three cities, one of gold in the heavens, one of silver in the sky and one of iron on the earth, built for them by the asura architect Maya, and these three cities, Tripura, would move independently and align only once in a thousand years. Only when they stood in a single line could they be destroyed, and only by a single arrow. Secure in this, the brothers and their people grew powerful and then oppressive, and the devas, driven from their own realms, went to Shiva. Shiva agreed to act, but the task needed the whole cosmos to be turned into a weapon. In the traditional telling the earth became his chariot, the sun and moon its wheels, Brahma its charioteer, Mount Meru his bow, Vasuki the bowstring and Vishnu himself the arrow. When the alignment came — on the Purnima of Kartik, the tradition says — Shiva loosed the single arrow and burned the three cities to ash. The gods, delivered, lit lamps in celebration, and that first festival of lamps is held to be the origin of Dev Diwali. Shiva took the name Tripurari and, in the Kashi tradition, the night became his.

There is a gentler reading that many teachers add. The three cities are understood as the three bodies — the gross, the subtle and the causal — or the three gunas, or the three states of waking, dream and deep sleep; the single arrow is knowledge; and the lamps lit on Tripurari Purnima are lit for the burning of one's own inner cities. That reading is why a lamp on this night is traditionally offered to Shiva as well as to Vishnu and the Ganga, and why Shiva temples across Maharashtra, Gujarat and the south hold their own deepotsav on the same Purnima. Neither reading is presented in tradition as history; both are presented as the meaning of the lamp.

The Varanasi ghats on Dev Diwali: what actually happens

Varanasi's Dev Diwali in its present form is younger than most people assume. The Ganga's ghats have been lit on Kartik Purnima for as long as there are records, but the organised city-wide Dev Deepawali Mahotsav, with every ghat lit at once, began at Panchganga Ghat in the mid-1980s and spread ghat by ghat until, by the turn of the century, the whole crescent was included. Today the district administration, the ghat committees and thousands of volunteers coordinate it, and the count of lamps is reported each year in lakhs — the numbers vary with the year and with who is counting, and we deliberately do not print one. What does not vary is the shape of the evening.

Two ghats carry special weight. Panchganga Ghat, where five rivers are traditionally said to meet, is where the modern festival began and where the tall stone lamp-pillars — the hazara, each holding a thousand or more diyas — are lit on Kartik Purnima and on no other night. Dashashwamedh Ghat is where the great Ganga aarti is performed and where, in recent decades, a tribute to the armed forces has been folded into the evening, with lamps offered in memory of soldiers who died in service. Beyond these, each ghat has its own committee and its own character: Assi Ghat draws the students and the morning crowd, Kedar Ghat is lit for Shiva, Manikarnika and Harishchandra, the cremation ghats, are lit too, since in Kashi death is not excluded from the festival of the gods.

If you are planning to go. Varanasi on Dev Diwali is very full. Hotels and boats are booked out weeks or months in advance, the ghats are closed to vehicles for a wide radius, and the crowd on the steps in the hour after dusk is dense enough that families with small children and the elderly should choose a boat, a rooftop or a ghat away from Dashashwamedh rather than the centre. Boat prices on the night are many times the ordinary rate and are best arranged the day before through a known boatman or hotel. Wear shoes you can walk in for hours, carry water, keep valuables close, and agree a meeting point in case you are separated. The lighting is at dusk, which in late November falls a little after five; being on the ghats an hour before is enough.

Deep daan on Kartik Purnima

Deep daan, the gift of a lamp, is the central act of the night, and it is what a pilgrim at the ghats and a family on a balcony in Bengaluru have in common. The tradition holds that a lamp offered in Kartik carries particular merit, and that a lamp offered on Kartik Purnima is the fullest form of the month's offering — the Padma Purana's praise of the Kartik lamp is the passage most often quoted. In practice the deep daan of Dev Diwali takes a few forms, and most families keep more than one.

The first is the lamp on the water: a diya set in a small boat of leaves or a paper cup and floated on the Ganga, or on any river, tank, lake or even a large bowl of water at home, with a short prayer. The second is the lamp at the ghat or the temple, in a count of five, eleven, twenty-one, fifty-one or 108, set out in rows on the steps or around the shrine; the counts are customary rather than scriptural, and one lamp lit with attention is held in tradition to be a complete offering. The third is the lamp at the Tulsi, at the door and in the home mandir, which is the daily Kartik lamp lit for the last time and, on this night, multiplied. The fourth is the akash deep, taken down after its final evening. Tradition prefers a clay diya with a cotton wick and either ghee or sesame oil; ghee is customary for the deity and oil for the door, the river and the akash deep, and our guide on ghee versus oil diyas covers wicks and burn times. A lamp floated on water goes out when it will; that is understood to be part of the offering, and no one need fish it back. What the tradition asks for is that the lamp be lit for someone or something beyond oneself — for the gods, the river, the ancestors, the departed — rather than as decoration, and that is what makes it daan.

The culmination of the Kartik snan and the Kartik vrat

For the many who have kept the Kartik snan — the daily pre-dawn bath from Sharad Purnima on 26 October to Kartik Purnima on 24 November, thirty mornings — Dev Diwali is the finishing line. The last bath is taken in the brahma muhurat of the Tuesday, at the river for those who can reach one and at home with Ganga jal added to the water for those who cannot. After it, the bather faces the rising sun, offers arghya, lights a lamp at the Tulsi and, in most families, takes a closing sankalp of thanks for the month completed, releasing the vow taken at its start. Those who kept the Kartik vrat of one meal a day through the month, or the Bhishma Panchak fast of the last five days from Dev Uthani Ekadashi to the Purnima, break it on Kartik Purnima with a Satyanarayan puja and a meal shared with family and, customarily, with Brahmins or the poor. The reading of the Kartik Mahatmya, a chapter a day, ends on this day too. In Vaishnava homes the month's evening singing of the Damodarashtakam and the lamp offered to Damodar-Krishna are concluded with a final, fuller offering. The Kartik month guide sets out the whole month's rhythm; Dev Diwali is the last day of it.

Kartik Purnima, Dev Diwali and Guru Nanak Jayanti: three names, one full moon

This causes more confusion than anything else about the day, so it is worth being precise. Kartik Purnima is the tithi — the full moon of Kartik — and it is a sacred day in its own right across Hindu, Sikh and Jain calendars. Dev Diwali is the Hindu festival kept on that tithi, above all at Varanasi and in the Vishnu and Shiva traditions of the north and west. Guru Nanak Jayanti, or Guru Nanak Gurpurab, is the Sikh observance of the birth anniversary of Guru Nanak Dev Ji, which the Sikh calendar places on the full moon of Kartik — Katak Puranmashi — every year, and which is therefore always on the same day as Dev Diwali. They are not the same festival and do not share a story, a scripture or a mode of worship: Dev Diwali is a night of lamps for the gods on a river; Guru Nanak Jayanti is a day of Akhand Path, kirtan, Nagar Kirtan and langar at the gurdwara, and Sikhs do not keep it as a Hindu festival. What they share is the date, and in 2026 that date is Tuesday, 24 November for both. We have written a separate, respectful guide to the Sikh observance — Guru Nanak Jayanti 2026: Gurpurab and Prakash Utsav — and readers in mixed neighbourhoods, or with Sikh colleagues and friends, will find there how the day is kept and how a non-Sikh may take part.

What is done at home on Dev Diwali if you are not in Kashi

The great majority of families who keep Dev Diwali will never see the Varanasi ghats on the night, and the tradition does not ask them to. The day at home follows the shape of every Purnima in Kartik, with the lamps multiplied at dusk. Here is the household form; adapt it to your own family's practice.

The lamps are what make the day. A family with no river within reach can still keep the whole of Dev Diwali with a bowl of water and a handful of diyas on a terrace, and the tradition holds that offering to be complete. The meaning of the diya and the etiquette of lamps in the home are set out in our guide; keep every flame away from cloth and curtains, never leave floating lamps unattended near children, and prefer a lantern to a bare flame at any height.

Samagri for Dev Diwali at home

Dev Diwali across India: regional forms of Kartik Purnima

The full moon of Kartik is kept almost everywhere in India, and it changes its name and its meaning as it travels. In Uttar Pradesh and Bihar the day belongs to the Ganga: Varanasi lights its ghats, and Patna, Haridwar and Prayag hold their own Kartik Purnima snan, with the great cattle and pilgrim fair at Sonepur, on the Gandak's meeting with the Ganga, opening on the Purnima. In Rajasthan the Pushkar fair ends on Kartik Purnima with a dip in Pushkar lake, held in tradition to be the day Brahma performed his yajna there, and the Brahma temple sees its largest crowd of the year. In Maharashtra, Gujarat and Goa the day is Tripurari Pournima or Tripurotsav, kept for Shiva's victory with lamps at every Shiva temple and, in Goa and the Konkan, with the burning of effigies of Tripurasura at dawn on the following morning. In Odisha it is Boita Bandana: before sunrise on Kartik Purnima, families across the state float miniature boats made of banana stem, paper or cork, each carrying a lamp, betel and rice, on rivers, tanks and the sea, in memory of the sadhabas, the merchant sailors who once set out on this day for Bali, Java and Sumatra with the north-east monsoon; the Bali Jatra fair at Cuttack, on the bank of the Mahanadi, opens the same day and is among the largest in eastern India. In Bengal, Manipur and the Braj region the same Purnima is Raas Purnima, kept for Krishna's raas with the gopis, with the Raas Yatra at Nabadwip and the Raas Mela at Cooch Behar. In Andhra, Telangana and Karnataka the whole amanta month of Kartika is a month of lamps, and its Purnima is Kartika Pournami, with the Jwala Thoranam — a great arch of flame — lit at Srisailam and lamps of 365 wicks lit at home to represent the year. In Tamil Nadu the lamp festival is Karthigai Deepam, fixed by the Krittika star in the solar month of Karthigai rather than by the lunar Purnima, so that in most years it falls a week or more after Dev Diwali — but in 2026 the two coincide, and the Maha Deepam on Arunachala at Thiruvannamalai will be lit on the same evening the Varanasi ghats are lit; our guide on Karthigai Deepam covers the Tamil festival on its own terms. In the Jain tradition Kartik Purnima ends Chaturmas and opens the pilgrimage to Shatrunjaya at Palitana. And among Sikhs it is Guru Nanak Gurpurab, a separate observance on a shared full moon. All of these are lamps lit on one night for different reasons, and the tradition has never found that a contradiction.

The 2026 run-up to Dev Diwali

Dev Diwali is the last landmark of the Kartik festive season, and it helps to see the final fortnight together, since a household that keeps Tulsi Vivah is usually keeping the Purnima five days later.

Every date above is a tithi mapped onto a calendar day and can move by one with your city's sunrise, so confirm against a current panchang before you observe. The full-moon days of the whole year are in the Purnima and Amavasya 2026 list, the year's festivals in the Hindu Festival Calendar 2026, and the Purnima that opened the Kartik snan a month earlier in our Sharad Purnima 2026 guide.

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A brass diya is traditionally used for the evening aarti on Kartik Purnima and kept lit in the mandir while the clay lamps burn outside; if your family does not have one set aside for the Kartik lamps, the brass aarti diya is the kind most households keep for Dev Diwali and for daily use through the year. Browse diyas and lamps for the night's deep daan, or visit Divine Hindu Store, Jayanagar 3rd Block East, Bengaluru 560011. Related reading: Kartik Month 2026 · Karthigai Deepam · Guru Nanak Jayanti 2026

This guide is for educational and devotional purposes and reflects traditional practice, which varies by region, community and family. The descent of the gods, the merit of the Kartik bath and the lamp, and the events of the Tripurasura legend are matters of traditional belief and personal faith, not guaranteed outcomes. Tithi-to-date mapping shifts with sunrise and location; confirm the 2026 dates and local sunset with a current panchang for your city. Nothing here is medical advice; consult a doctor before fasting.