ಋಷಿ ಪಂಚಮಿ | Rishi Panchami

Rishi Panchami falls on the fifth tithi of the bright fortnight of Bhadrapada, the day after Ganesha Chaturthi, and is decided by the tithi running at sunrise. It is kept chiefly by women, and it is a vrata of purification rather than a festival. Nothing is installed, nothing is processed, and in most houses it passes quietly.

Who is worshipped

The seven rishis: Kashyapa, Atri, Bharadvaja, Vishvamitra, Gautama, Jamadagni and Vasishtha, with Arundhati, the wife of Vasishtha, worshipped alongside them. They are invoked in an image drawn or set out for the day, often seven small heaps of rice or seven darbha figures, and given a simple puja.

What the vrata is for

The purpose stated in the texts is atonement. Ritual impurity incurred during the year, knowingly or not, and in particular the touch of things during the monthly period, is held to be cleared by the observance. This is the plainest way to put what older sources say, and it is worth stating plainly rather than leaving the reader to guess why a day of bathing and fasting sits here at all. How much weight a household gives that reasoning now varies a great deal, and many who keep the day keep it simply as a day of respect for the rishis and for the line of teachers.

The observance itself has three parts. A bath, traditionally with the twigs and leaves of apamarga, the plant Kannada calls uttarani, applied to the body a set number of times. A fast through the day. And a single meal that avoids grain raised by ploughing, since the plough is held to injure the earth and the ox that draws it. In practice that meal is made of what grows without tillage or of what can be gathered: in Maharashtra and the north it is famously a meal built around the leaves and root of the taro plant, sometimes with a red rice that is not ox ploughed. Karnataka households that keep the day usually keep a lighter form of it, a bath, a fast and a meal without grain.

Two things it is not

It is not Naga Panchami, which falls on the fifth tithi of the bright fortnight of Shravana, a month earlier, and is the serpent observance with milk offered at anthills. The two are separated by a full lunar month and share nothing but a tithi number.

Nor is it only a Hindu day. In Digambara Jain practice the same tithi begins the Dasa Lakshana Parva, the ten days of the ten virtues, which run to the chaturdashi and close on the same day as Anant Chaturdashi. A reader in Karnataka is likely to meet both observances named against the one date, and they are unrelated.

In Nepal and among Nepali speaking communities the day is the third and last of the Teej sequence and is kept far more widely and more strictly than it is here, with a public bath in a river. Its scale there is no guide to its scale in Karnataka.