ಲೋಹ್ರಿ | Lohri

Lohri is the bonfire festival of Punjab, kept on the evening and night before Maghi, which is Punjab’s name for Makara Sankranti. It usually falls on 13 January, and on the 14th in years when the sankranti is kept on the 15th. It is kept in Punjab on both sides of the border, and in Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Jammu and Delhi, by Hindus and Sikhs alike. It is a solar festival, counted from the sun’s entry into Makara and not from a tithi, which is why it barely moves in the Gregorian calendar.

The bonfire

At sunset a bonfire is lit in the village square or before the house. Sesame, jaggery, rewri, peanuts and popcorn or puffed rice are thrown into it, and people sit round it, sing and dance, and some walk round it in reverence to the fire and the sun. The same foods are eaten together afterwards: rewri and gajak, made of sesame and jaggery, peanuts and radish, and the new jaggery of the sugarcane harvest, with sarson da saag and makki di roti as the meal of the season.

The songs, and Dulla Bhatti

Groups of children go from house to house singing Lohri songs and are given sweets, snacks and sometimes money, and to send them away empty-handed is thought to bring ill luck. The best known of the songs is about Dulla Bhatti, a Punjabi folk hero of the Mughal period, who is remembered for rescuing girls who were being sold and for arranging their marriages. A house with a new bride or a newborn child keeps its first Lohri with particular celebration.

Harvest and the turn of the year

Lohri comes when the hardest work of the winter crop, the rabi, is done, and with the sugarcane harvest of January. It is also a midwinter festival, of the sun’s return and the lengthening days, and some see in the food given to the fire the close of the old year before the sankranti. The next day, Maghi, is the sankranti itself. At Sri Muktsar Sahib, Maghi brings a large gathering, with a dip in the sarovar and kirtan in the gurdwaras, in memory of the Chali Mukte, the forty who gave their lives in the battle there.

Which day Anudina gives

Anudina gives Lohri on the day before Makara Sankranti, that is, the day before the day on which the sun’s entry into Makara is kept. When the sun enters Makara after sunset, the bath and dana of the sankranti move to the next day’s daylight, the sankranti is kept on that day, and Lohri moves with it. That is why Anudina gives 14 January for 2027: the sankranti that year is kept on the 15th.

The same night is, in most years, the eve of the harvest days across India: Bhogi in the Tamil and Telugu country, the eve of Pongal, and the last day of Dhanurmasa in Karnataka. In Assam, Uruka, the feast night before Magh Bihu, falls on the same night or the one after, since the Assamese calendar counts its month from the sankranti by a rule of its own. Lohri is a Punjab observance. Anudina shows it under the North Indian custom, and under the South Indian custom only when “Show festivals of other regions too” is turned on.