Anant Chaturdashi

What Anant Chaturdashi is

Anant Chaturdashi is the fourteenth day of the bright fortnight of Bhadrapada, and it carries three observances that most people meet as one day. The oldest of them is the Anant vrat: a fast kept for Vishnu in his form as Anant — the one without end — worshipped here as Anant Padmanabha, reclining on the serpent Shesha on the ocean of milk. The word anant is the whole point of the day: what has no beginning and no end, and by extension a blessing that does not run out.

The second observance is the one the whole country now sees on television: Ganesh Visarjan. The ten-day Ganeshotsav that began on Ganesh Chaturthi, 14 September 2026, ends on this date, and the murtis installed in homes, housing societies and public pandals are carried out in procession and immersed. Households that keep Ganpati for one and a half, three, five or seven days have already done their visarjan; Anant Chaturdashi is the last and largest of the immersion days, and the day the big public pandals empty.

The third is Jain. In the Digambara tradition the ten-day Das Lakshana Parva — the ten days of dharma, the Paryushan observance — reaches its final day on Anant Chaturdashi, with fasting, temple worship, scriptural reading and the practice of asking and granting forgiveness that the season is built around. Different Jain traditions count Paryushan differently, so the closing day is not identical everywhere; in the Digambara reckoning it is this one.

The three sit together more naturally than they look. Each is about finishing something — a fourteen-year vrat renewed for one more year, a ten-day guesthood ended with a farewell rather than a fade-out, a ten-day discipline closed by asking forgiveness. Bhadrapada Shukla Chaturdashi is, in every one of its versions, a day of completion.

The Anant vrat katha — Sushila and Kaundinya

The katha read on this day is told in nearly every household that keeps the vrat, and it is a story about the difference between receiving a blessing and recognising it. Sushila, daughter of the sage Sumantu, was married to the sage Kaundinya. Travelling with her husband, she came upon a group of women on a riverbank keeping the Anant vrat. She asked what it was, was told, and kept it herself — tying the fourteen-knot sutra on her arm.

From that time the household prospered. Kaundinya, seeing the wealth grow, took the credit for it as the fruit of his own learning and tapas. When he noticed the thread on his wife’s arm and was told what it was, he was offended — angry that a piece of coloured string should be thought responsible for what he had earned. He pulled it off and threw it into the fire.

What followed is the part the katha lingers on. The wealth went, the household fell into want, and Kaundinya set out to find Anant and ask forgiveness. He wandered until he was exhausted and ready to give up his life, and along the way he put his question to a mango tree heavy with fruit no one ate, to a cow and calf, to two bullocks, to a lake, to a donkey and an elephant — each of them suffering in its own way and none able to help. At the end, when he had abandoned the search, Vishnu appeared to him as an old brahmin and revealed himself, explaining that every creature he had met was itself someone who had broken a vow in a former life. Kaundinya was told to keep the vrat for fourteen years, and did — and what had been lost returned.

A second katha is told alongside it: that during the exile, when the Pandavas had lost their kingdom at dice and Yudhishthira asked what could be done, Krishna prescribed the Anant vrat. Both stories carry the same instruction — the vrat is not for people whose life is going well. It is for the point at which something has been lost and the way back is not visible.

This is the katha as it is recited in households and in the vrat kathas printed for the day; we retell it as tradition rather than attributing it to a particular verse. Details vary between versions — the number of creatures Kaundinya meets, and the order — and every family reads the version its own book carries.

The Anant sutra and its fourteen knots

The physical centre of the vrat is the sutra: a thread — cotton or silk, usually dyed with turmeric so it comes out yellow-orange, sometimes red — in which fourteen knots are tied. It is worshipped first, along with the image of Anant Padmanabha, and only then tied on: on the right arm for men, on the left for women in most households. It is worn until the next year’s vrat, or until it wears through, and is not thrown into a bin when it goes — it is given to flowing water or to the earth, with the old sutra removed only after the new one is in place.

Why fourteen? The number is read in more than one way, and no household is wrong for reading it its own. The most widely repeated reading is that the fourteen knots are the fourteen lokas — the seven worlds above and the seven below, the whole of creation strung on one thread, which is exactly what the name Anant claims. Others count fourteen years of the vrat, one knot for each; others still count the fourteen Manvantaras or the fourteen ratnas of the churning. The reading below is the loka one.

The names of the seven lower lokas are given in slightly different orders in different Puranic lists, and some families tie the knots while reciting the fourteen names, others simply count. Nothing in the vrat depends on getting the order right; the knot count does.

Anant Chaturdashi puja vidhi, step by step

The puja is done in the first half of the day in most households, after a bath and before the main meal, and it is a Vishnu puja from beginning to end — the yellow of Vishnu runs through it, in the thread, the flowers, the cloth and the offering. Nothing here needs a priest.

1. 1

   Bathe and prepare the place

   Bathe early, wear clean clothes — yellow if you have them — and clean the puja space. Spread a yellow or red cloth on a low wooden chowki and set a kalash of clean water on it.

2. 2

   Install Anant

   Place a picture or small murti of Vishnu reclining on Shesha. Where a murti is not kept, many households make a seven-hooded serpent from darbha grass or coil a length of kusha and worship that as Anant — a very old form of the puja that needs nothing bought.

3. 3

   Take the sankalp

   With water and a few grains of rice in the right palm, say aloud who you are, where you are, and that you are keeping the Anant vrat this year — and, if you are beginning it, that you intend to keep it for fourteen years. The sankalp is the vrat; everything after it is procedure.

4. 4

   Prepare and worship the sutra

   Take the cotton or silk thread, rub it with turmeric, and tie fourteen knots in it. Place it before Anant and offer it kumkum, akshat, flowers and durva along with the deity — it is worshipped before it is worn, never after.

5. 5

   Offer the puja

   Offer water, a yellow cloth or thread, chandan, yellow flowers, dhoop and deep, and then the naivedya — in many households this is puran poli or gud-based sweets, elsewhere kheer, and in Maharashtra and Gujarat the fourteen-fold offering: fourteen puris, fourteen sweets, fourteen fruits or leaves, following the number the day is built on.

6. 6

   Read the katha

   Read or hear the Anant vrat katha with the family present. This is not optional decoration — in the vrat traditions the katha is the part that carries the meaning, and children usually remember it long after they have forgotten the vidhi.

7. 7

   Tie the sutra

   After the aarti, tie the worshipped sutra on the arm — the right arm for men, the left for women in most households, though some families reverse this and some tie it on both. The old sutra from last year is removed only now, once the new one is on, and is given to water or buried at the root of a tree.

8. 8

   Give, then break the fast

   Feed a brahmin, a needy person or whoever your family’s custom names, give what you can, and only then take your own food. In households that keep the fast strictly, the parana is done after the puja and the katha are both complete.

Chaturdashi is counted from sunrise, and where the tithi begins late or ends early the puja time shifts with it — we do not print a muhurat here because it depends on your own city’s sunrise and that day’s Rahu Kaal. Check the live panchang for your city on the morning of the vrat.

Ganesh Visarjan — the other half of the day

For ten days Ganpati has been a guest in the house, not an idol on a shelf: woken, bathed, fed at fixed hours, sung to twice a day. Visarjan is the formal end of that guesthood, and it is done as a farewell, not a disposal. The murti is given a last aarti and naivedya, the family asks pardon for anything left undone or done wrongly in the ten days, a handful of rice or wheat and a coin are tied into a small bundle to travel with the murti, and it is lifted with the ‘Ganpati Bappa Morya, pudhchya varshi lavkar ya’ that gives the whole day its sound — come again next year, and come soon.

How the immersion itself is done has changed a great deal in the last decade, and the change has come from within the tradition rather than against it. A plaster-of-Paris murti with chemical paint does not dissolve; it breaks up and sits in the water. The options below are all in wide use, and none of them is a compromise on the ritual — visarjan means dissolution into water, and a bucket at home dissolves a clay murti as completely as a river does.

Nirmalya — the accumulated flowers, leaves, durva and prasad of the ten days — is traditionally not thrown away with household waste. Most cities now put out separate nirmalya kalash at the ghats, and what is collected is composted.

The Anant vrat: what is eaten, what is avoided

The Anant vrat is a single-day fast and, compared with Navratri or Ekadashi, a mild one — the emphasis is on the puja, the sutra and the sankalp rather than on how hard the fast is. What form it takes is a family matter: some keep nirjala until the puja is done, most keep a phalahar through the day and eat one satvik meal after the katha, and a good many simply avoid grain and salt until the sutra is tied.

• Eaten: fruit, milk, curd, dry fruit, sabudana, singhara or kuttu preparations, and after the puja a satvik meal — puran poli in Maharashtra, kheer or gud-based sweets elsewhere.
• Salt: sendha namak only, in households that keep the stricter form; ordinary salt returns with the parana.
• Avoided through the day: onion, garlic, non-vegetarian food, eggs and alcohol — and in most households grain until the puja is complete.
• The salt-free rule some families keep on this day extends to the naivedya as well — the fourteen puris and the sweets are made without salt where that custom is followed.
• Who need not fast strictly: pregnant and nursing women, children, the elderly, and anyone diabetic or on regular medication. The tradition itself makes this exemption — keep the puja, the katha and the sutra, and eat what your body needs.

How Anant Chaturdashi is kept across India

• Maharashtra — the largest visarjan day of the year. Mumbai and Pune move on foot for the whole day and much of the night, with the big mandals reaching the sea last. The Anant vrat itself is also widely kept at home, with puran poli as the naivedya.
• Gujarat and Rajasthan — the vrat is kept mainly as a Vishnu vrat, with the sutra and the fourteen-fold offering; Ganesh visarjan has grown large in Gujarat’s cities over the last two decades.
• Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and the Hindi belt — Anant Chaudas is a household vrat, remembered above all for the thread; in many families the eldest keeps it and ties a sutra for the others.
• Odisha and eastern India — Anant Chaturdashi is kept with the Anant sutra and, in some communities, tied to the worship of Ananta as the serpent form associated with Jagannath’s brother Balabhadra.
• The Jain observance — in the Digambara tradition this is the tenth and final day of the Das Lakshana Parva, kept with fasting, abhishek and shastra-swadhyaya at the temple. Kshama — asking and giving forgiveness — is the note the whole parva ends on.
• South India — the day is observed quietly where it is observed at all; the Ananta Padmanabha vrata is kept in parts of Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh, with the sutra called the Ananta doraka, and the connection to the Ananta Padmanabhaswamy tradition of Kerala is felt strongly there.

What Jyotish reads into Anant Chaturdashi

Almost every festival on the calendar is about beginning something. Anant Chaturdashi is one of the few that is entirely about finishing — and in Jyotish, finishing is a category with its own weight. A sankalp taken and completed is treated as an act with a result; a sankalp taken and abandoned is treated as an act with a different result. The whole Kaundinya katha is a story about exactly that, told to people who might otherwise treat a vrat as a habit.

That is why the tradition is careful about how a vrat is stopped. If a fourteen-year Anant vrat cannot be continued — illness, age, circumstance — it is not simply dropped. It is formally concluded: the last year is completed with the udyapan, the closing rite, and the sutra is given to water. Passing the vrat on to a son, a daughter or a daughter-in-law is the other accepted way, and in many families that is how it has moved for generations. Abandoning it silently is the one thing the katha warns against.

The symbolism of the day is unusually tight. Anant is Vishnu as the endless — the sustainer, the graha-side association being Guru, the planet of dharma, blessing and expansion, and Thursday, which is what 24 September 2026 happens to fall on, is Guru’s own weekday. The fourteen knots make the point again: the whole of creation, above and below, on a single unbroken thread. And the murti that goes into the water the same evening belongs to Ganesha, the remover of obstacles, who is honoured at the start of every rite and here is being seen off at the end of one. A day that both closes a cycle and asks it to come again next year is, in the tradition’s own logic, the right day to close anything you have been carrying too long.

• Traditionally a day for closing rather than opening: finishing a paath or japa you began, doing the udyapan of a vrat, settling something that has been pending.
• Kept most often by those going through a period of loss — the katha places the vrat exactly there, and people running a difficult dasha or a Sade Sati are commonly pointed to it.
• Guru-related observance by association: yellow cloth, gud and chana daal, and giving to a teacher or a student are the customary daan of the day.
• The Purnima that follows opens Pitru Paksha, so this is also the last of the shubh days before that fortnight — one reason families finish pending auspicious work before it.

All of this is what the day means in tradition, not a reading of your chart. Whether this year is a year to begin a fourteen-year vrat, and which graha in your own kundli is actually asking for attention, depends on your running dasha, your transits and the houses involved — a free kundli will show you that much before you take a sankalp of fourteen years.

Do’s and don’ts on Anant Chaturdashi

• Do worship the sutra before you wear it. The thread is not a wristband bought and tied — the fourteen knots are made and the puja offered to it first.
• Do take a sankalp you can keep. Fourteen years is the traditional length; if that is not realistic, say clearly at the outset that you are keeping it for this year, or for as long as you are able.
• Do finish the visarjan properly — the last aarti, the pardon asked, the bundle of rice and the coin, and the murti carried out rather than left standing in a corner after the ten days.
• Do carry the plastic back. Thermocol decorations, polythene, plastic flowers and the cloth on the murti do not belong in the water, and every ghat now has somewhere to leave them.
• Don’t remove last year’s sutra before the new one is tied. The custom is that the arm is never bare of it — the old thread comes off after the new one is on.
• Don’t throw an old or broken sutra in the bin. Give it to flowing water or bury it at the root of a tree, as with any worshipped object.
• Don’t drop a vrat halfway without concluding it. If you cannot continue, do the udyapan or pass it on within the family — the katha is quite specific that this is the part that matters.
• Don’t take the immersion procession into the night without thinking about who is with you — the crowds are enormous in Mumbai, Pune and Hyderabad, and children and elders are best sent home after the ghat.

What follows Anant Chaturdashi

Anant Chaturdashi is the last bright-fortnight day of Bhadrapada. The Purnima immediately after it opens Pitru Paksha, the fortnight of shraddh, in which the pitrs are offered water and food and in which new and auspicious beginnings are traditionally held back. That is the practical reason families finish what they can before this date — a griha pravesh, a vehicle purchase, a shop opening or an engagement will usually either be done before Anant Chaturdashi or held until Navratri, which begins when Pitru Paksha ends.

So the shape of the season is: ten days of Ganeshotsav closing here, a fortnight given to the ancestors, and then nine nights of Navratri opening the biggest festival stretch of the year. Anant Chaturdashi sits exactly on the hinge.

Whether a particular act must wait for Pitru Paksha to end is not a blanket rule — routine work, medical treatment and anything already begun continue as normal in most families, and the restriction is understood to apply to new mangal karya. If you have a date in mind, check the muhurat for that specific act rather than assuming the whole fortnight is closed.

Frequently asked questions