ಶ್ರೀರಾಮ ನವಮಿ | Rama Navami

Rama Navami marks the birth of Rama, the son of Dasharatha, in Ayodhya. The tradition is precise about the hour: he was born at midday, in the nakshatra Punarvasu, with Karkataka rising. That precision is the reason this festival is dated differently from most of the others in the calendar.

Why midday decides the date

The general convention is that a day carries the tithi that is running at sunrise. Rama Navami does not use it. The reference moment here is madhyahna.

Madhyahna is not noon by the clock. The interval from sunrise to sunset is divided into five equal parts, and madhyahna is the third of them, the part that straddles the middle of the day. On a day with twelve hours of light each part is a little under two and a half hours, so madhyahna runs from about an hour and a quarter before the midpoint of the day to about the same distance after it. The exact boundaries move with the season and with your longitude.

The rule follows from that. The day that carries Rama Navami is the day on which Chaitra Shukla Navami is running during madhyahna. Two consequences are worth stating plainly, because they are what produce disagreements between calendars:

• If the navami begins in the afternoon of one day and is still running through midday of the next, the second day carries the festival, even though the first day had navami at sunrise for none of its morning.
• If the navami ends shortly before madhyahna begins, so that no day has it at midday at all, the observance falls back to the ordinary rule and is kept on the day that had navami at sunrise.

A calendar that prints Rama Navami against the sunrise day without checking midday will be wrong perhaps one year in several. This is the single commonest source of a one-day difference between two almanacs for this festival. Some Vaishnava traditions add a further condition, preferring the day on which Punarvasu also obtains, which can move the date again.

What is done

In Karnataka the day is kept less by fasting than by distribution. Panaka, jaggery and water with cardamom, dry ginger and lemon, kosambari of soaked moong dal with cucumber, and buttermilk are prepared in quantity and given out at pandals, temples and street corners through the afternoon. The choice of food is seasonal common sense: Chaitra is the beginning of the hot months and all three are cooling.

Recitation of the Ramayana, begun earlier in the month in many households and mathas, is concluded on this day. In Bengaluru the festival carries a month of classical music, the Ramotsava concert series held in Chamarajpet and now in many other localities, which has become one of the largest annual gatherings of Karnatak music anywhere.

Elsewhere the emphasis differs. In Ayodhya and across the North the day closes Chaitra Navaratri, the spring nine nights, and is kept with a fast broken after the midday arati at the hour of the birth. At Bhadrachalam in Telangana and in many Tamil temples the day is a wedding rather than a birthday: the Sita Rama Kalyanam is performed, with the marriage rites read out in full.

A note on the name

Navami as a tithi returns twice every month, and the ninth of the bright fortnight of Ashwayuja is Mahanavami of Navaratri, an entirely different observance. Rama Navami is specifically the navami of bright Chaitra.