ಶ್ರೀಕೃಷ್ಣ ಜನ್ಮಾಷ್ಟಮಿ | Krishna Janmashtami

Janmashtami marks the birth of Krishna, held to have taken place at midnight in the prison at Mathura, in the eighth tithi of the dark fortnight, under the nakshatra Rohini.

Why two almanacs print two dates

This is the clearest case in the whole calendar of a festival whose date depends on which condition you apply, and the Smarta and Vaishnava observances can genuinely fall a day apart. Neither is a mistake.

The reference moment here is nishita, the middle of the night: the eighth of the fifteen muhurtas of the night, astride the midpoint between sunset and the next sunrise, lasting about forty-eight minutes. It is not midnight by the clock, and it moves with the season. See Nishita Muhurta.

The Smarta rule is that the day is the one whose nishita carries Ashtami. Because nishita falls late in the day, this frequently selects a day whose sunrise tithi is still Saptami, which is why the printed date can look wrong to someone checking only the sunrise tithi.

The Vaishnava rule adds Rohini. It requires Ashtami to be joined with Rohini nakshatra, and where the two do not coincide it prefers the day on which both conditions are best satisfied, which is often the following day. The fast is then broken at a parana time computed from the ending of Ashtami and of Rohini, so that a Vaishnava household may still be fasting on the morning after the Smarta observance is over.

Anudina reckons the day by nishita, which gives the Smarta date. The Udupi Sri Krishna Matha, being Madhva, keeps the Vaishnava day, and in coastal Karnataka the two dates are a visible fact of the season rather than a technicality.

What is done

The fast runs through the day and is broken after the midnight worship. The house is cleaned, a cradle or a small seat is prepared, and tiny footprints are drawn in rice flour from the threshold inwards, as though the child had walked in. The puja is at nishita, with an arghya offered to the moon where the tradition includes it.

The offering is chiefly butter, curd and beaten rice, the food of the cowherd household: avalakki in several forms, seedai, chakkuli, kodubale, tambittu and payasa. The Bhagavata’s tenth book is read.

In Udupi the following day is Vittala Pindi, when the pot of curd is strung up in the street and broken, and tableaux of Krishna are taken out. The pot-breaking is the same custom that is called dahi handi in Maharashtra.

Names and month

The day is also called Gokulashtami, Krishna Jayanti and Ashtami Rohini. In the purnimanta reckoning of North India the dark fortnight belongs to the following month, so the same night is described as Bhadrapada krishna ashtami there and Shravana krishna ashtami in Karnataka. The tithi and the night are identical; only the month name differs. See Masa: the lunar month.

One further caution. Because the drik and Surya Siddhanta reckonings can place the boundary of Ashtami up to about two hours apart, and nishita is a window of under an hour, this is an observance where the two reckonings separate more often than most. Check which one the app is set to before arguing with a printed panchangam.