ಸರಸ್ವತ್ಯಾವಾಹನ | Saraswati Avahana

Saraswati Avahana is the invocation with which the Saraswati worship of Navaratri begins. Avahana means inviting a deity to be present in an image or an object, and here the objects are books, manuscripts, instruments and the tools of a craft.

It falls in the month of Ashwina, inside Navaratri, on the day the moon enters Mula nakshatra. Like Rig Upakarma, it is fixed to a nakshatra and not to a tithi, so Anudina’s rule for it carries no tithi at all. In most years Mula falls around the sixth or seventh day of Navaratri, but the day it lands on is determined by where the moon stands and not by the count of the festival.

Four nakshatras, four days

The reason a nakshatra was chosen becomes clear when you look at what follows it. Mula, Purva Ashadha, Uttara Ashadha and Shravana are four consecutive nakshatras, and the Saraswati rite runs across all four:

• Mula: Avahana, the invocation. The books are gathered, arranged, and the goddess invited into them.
• Purva Ashadha: Saraswati Puja.
• Uttara Ashadha: the principal worship and offering.
• Shravana: Visarjana, the taking of leave, after which the books are picked up again.

Between the invocation and the leave-taking the books are not read and the instruments are not played. That is the substance of the observance: study stops for the days the goddess is seated in the books, and resumes when she is dismissed. Children in Karnataka and Kerala households learn the festival chiefly as the few days the schoolbooks are out of reach.

What is placed and how

The books are cleaned, stacked and set before a lamp with a picture or an image of Saraswati, on a cloth, with flowers, a coconut and the day’s offering. A veena, a tambura, a mridanga, a carpenter’s tools, a tailor’s machine and a farmer’s implements are placed and worshipped in the same way where the household lives by them.

In Kerala the corresponding placing of the books is called Puja Vaippu, and the taking up again on the tenth day is Vidyarambha, when children are made to write their first letters in rice. The same is done in coastal Karnataka. Inland, the first writing is more often kept for Vijayadashami itself.

Where it sits among the Navaratri days

Ayudha Puja, the worship of implements, falls on Mahanavami, and Vijayadashami follows. The Saraswati sequence overlaps these but is reckoned separately, which is why an almanac prints the Saraswati days by nakshatra and the others by tithi.

One confusion

This is not the Saraswati Puja of Vasant Panchami, the fifth tithi of the bright fortnight of Magha, which is the great Saraswati day in Bengal and much of North India and falls about four months later. Both are worship of the same goddess; they are different observances on different rules, and the southern one is the Navaratri sequence described here.