ಪುತ್ತಾಂಡು, ತಮಿಳು ಹೊಸ ವರ್ಷ | Puthandu, Tamil new year

Puthandu is the Tamil new year, the first day of Chithirai, the first month of the Tamil solar calendar. It is also called Varusha Pirappu, the birth of the year. Chithirai begins when the sun enters Mesha, the first rashi, so Puthandu falls in the middle of April, on the 14th in most years. It is kept across Tamil Nadu, by the Tamils of Sri Lanka, and wherever Tamil families have settled.

A solar new year, not a lunar one

Readers in Karnataka keep their new year at Ugadi, the first tithi of the bright fortnight of Chaitra. That is a lunisolar new year: it follows the moon, and so its date moves through late March and April from one year to the next. Puthandu follows the sun alone. It is counted from the sankranti, the moment the sun crosses into Mesha, and since the Gregorian calendar is also solar, the two keep step. That is why Puthandu hardly moves.

The same solar moment opens the year as Vishu in Kerala, Pohela Boishakh in Bengal, Bohag Bihu in Assam and Baisakhi in Punjab, and on the coast of Karnataka it is Bisu, the new year of the Tulu calendar. Ugadi and Puthandu are answers to the same question from two different clocks, and neither is a corruption of the other. The Tamil year still carries a name from the sixty-year cycle, the same names that change at Ugadi.

How the day is kept

The house is cleaned, a kolam is drawn at the entrance in rice flour, and mango leaves are hung over the door. Many families set out a tray the night before, the kani: fruit, among them the three fruits of the Tamil country, mango, banana and jackfruit, with betel leaves and areca nut, gold or silver, coins, flowers and a mirror. On waking, an elder leads the family to it, so that it is the first thing seen in the new year. After the bath and new clothes, children seek the blessing of their elders, and the family goes to the temple.

The meal is meant to hold every taste of the year to come. Mango pachadi, raw mango cooked with jaggery, and in many homes a pachadi of neem flower or leaf with tamarind, chilli and jaggery, set the sweet beside the sour and the bitter. It is the same thought as Karnataka’s bevu bella at Ugadi. The new panchangam is placed before the deity, worshipped and then read, and in some temples its forecasts for the year are read out to those who gather.

Which day Anudina gives

Anudina gives Puthandu on Chithirai 1 as the Tamil calendar reckons it. The Tamil rule for which day opens a month is this: if the sun enters Mesha after sunrise and before sunset, that day is Chithirai 1; if it enters after sunset, the next day is. Anudina finds the moment of the sankranti by the drik, observational, reckoning. Many Tamil almanacs and the Tamil Nadu government’s list of holidays work instead from the vakya tradition of the Surya Siddhanta, whose sankranti can fall some hours away from the drik one. In a year when that moves the day, Anudina shows the vakya date beside its own. For 2027 it gives 14 April.

Each region has its own rule for the first day of a solar month, so the solar new years do not always fall together. The Kerala rule moves the day on if the sankranti comes after three fifths of the daylight, and the Bengali rule opens the month on the day after the sankranti. In 2027 Anudina gives 14 April for Puthandu and 15 April for Vishu, Pohela Boishakh and Bohag Bihu.

Puthandu appears under the South Indian custom, and under the North Indian custom when festivals of other regions are shown.

A note on the date of the new year

In 2008 the Tamil Nadu government moved the official Tamil new year to Thai 1, the day of Pongal in January. Many people went on keeping Chithirai 1, and in 2011 the next government restored the April date. Puthandu in Chithirai is the day the almanacs and most households keep.