The Sun Rises For Everyone: Chhath Puja and the Song of a People

‘पहिले पहिल छठी मइया, व्रत तोहार…”

(First and foremost, O Chhathi Maiya, this fast is yours…)

‘केलवा के पात पर उग हे सूरज देव…’

(O Sun God, rise upon the banana leaf…)

These lines by Sharda Sinha still arrive before the dawn does. The smell of incense, the rustle of sugarcane, the trembling reflection of the first rays on river water, everything begins with her voice. For millions across Bihar, eastern Uttar Pradesh, the Nepali Terai, and the diaspora scattered from Madhubani to Manhattan, Chhath is not just a festival. It is homecoming, in sound, in scent, in sun.

The river remembers

I come from the borderland, Madhubani district, where Bihar leans gently into Nepal. Here, rivers are less boundaries than bridges. The Kamla, the Kosi, the Balan, all of them know our songs, and when Chhath arrives, they transform into temples.

In the first pink of dawn, women, draped in vibrant sarees, heads covered step barefoot into the cold water, balancing bamboo baskets (pathia and sup) laden with fruits, thakua, and lighted diyas. The air smells of wet clay and jaggery. Men stand behind them silently, sometimes humming along to the faint melody rising from someone’s radio:

‘सोना सटकुनिआ हो दीनानाथ, घूमै छह संसार…’

(O Lord of the poor, O golden Satkunia, you traverse the whole world…)

It is devotion distilled to its purest form, without idols, without priests, without walls. Only water, sunlight, and the human body bowed in gratitude. Chhath is perhaps India’s most ecological festival, where the worship of nature is the worship of life itself.

A faith older than religion

Long before the temples of brick and marble rose, this ritual existed. Archaeologists trace elements of Chhath back to the Vedic period, to hymns of Surya worship and to Chhathi Maiya (Shashthi), the mother goddess associated with fertility and prosperity. In the agrarian landscape of Mithila, where survival depends on the cycle of the sun and the rhythm of water, this worship became not just spiritual but ecological necessity.

The rituals, bathing in rivers, preparing offerings from seasonal produce, fasting for purity, are also acts of conservation and renewal. No plastics, no waste, no extravagance. Just earth, grain, and gratitude.

When the city-dwellers talk of sustainability, the women on these ghats smile quietly. They have practiced it for centuries, without naming it so.

Memory and the making of belonging

For those of us who grew up in the villages of northern Bihar, Chhath was less an event and more a season. The preparations began weeks ahead, cleaning courtyards, polishing brass utensils, drying grains, shaping earthen lamps. Evenings filled with rehearsals of songs, the scent of jaggery syrup, and the nervous chatter of children awaiting prasad.

My earliest memory is of my grandmother’s trembling hands lighting a diya by the pond, her reflection merging with the sun’s fading glow. The women around her sang in unison, voices rising and falling like the ripples in water. Even as a child, I sensed something sacred in that silence.

Every Chhath since then has been a return to that moment, the balance of devotion and endurance, the human body negotiating with nature.

From Mithila to the metropolis

But Chhath refuses to stay confined to rivers. It travels, folded into train journeys, wrapped in steel trunks, packed with thekua and memory. Wherever the people of Bihar and Purvanchal go, Chhath follows.

In Delhi, the Yamuna banks transform into temporary ghats every year. Migrants from Darbhanga, Siwan, Sasaram, Bhabhua, Gopalganj, Gorakhpur and Deoria gather at dawn, their feet dipped in polluted yet sacred waters, their eyes fixed eastward. The air, thick with smog, glows briefly in faith’s orange hue.

In Kolkata, the ghats along the Hooghly resound with Bhojpuri songs. In Mumbai’s suburbs, Chembur, Borivali, Dadar, the chawls and open grounds are decked with banana trees and sugarcane. In Surat, Chennai, and Coimbatore, community groups hire municipal tanks, fill them with clean water, and recreate home. Even in tech-heavy Bangalore, I have seen ponds near Bellandur and Yelahanka lined with diyas, as migrant workers, engineers, and teachers gather in silence before sunrise.

The craze for Chhath among domestic migrants is not just about faith; it is about belonging. The vrat (fast) becomes a bridge between lost roots and new soil. For a few hours, city boundaries blur; the Yamuna becomes the Ganga, a rainwater tank becomes the Kamla River, and memory becomes geography.

The global ghat

And then there is the diaspora, the new custodians of nostalgia. From Madhubani to Manhattan, Patna to Perth, Darbhanga to Dubai, Muzaffarpur to Mauritius, the rituals replay across time zones.

In Edison, New Jersey, Bihari families gather near lakes, carrying offerings flown in from India. In London and Toronto, local parks become makeshift ghats. In Doha and Abu Dhabi, where open water is scarce, devotees perform arghya in steel tubs or swimming pools, singing along to YouTube streams of Sharda Sinha.

This is more than devotion, it’s cultural survival. For second-generation migrants, who may never have seen the Kamla or the Ganga, Chhath is a portal to their parents’ stories. The festival binds them to a land they left behind but still call their own.

There’s a quiet beauty in that persistence, the sun rising simultaneously over Bihar and over Brooklyn, worshipped by the same people divided by oceans but united by memory.

The social soul of Chhath

At its heart, Chhath is a women’s festival, but its impact spreads across society. In villages, the entire community participates – men fetch bamboo, children gather mango leaves, neighbours share firewood. The vrat (fast) itself demands immense physical and mental discipline: no water, no food for 36 hours, no anger, no complaint.

That endurance becomes metaphorical; it represents the collective resilience of Bihar’s people. A society often dismissed in stereotypes of migration, poverty, and politics finds in Chhath its most dignified mirror: silent, spiritual, self-reliant.

Even Muslim families, who joyfully accept prasad and seek blessings for their loved ones, join in this shared prayer. Chhath, in this way, is not just a ritual; it is a living experiment in social harmony, a celebration of collective belonging. The festival teaches patience, equality, and ecological balance, all without sermon.

Politics of the sacred

But in India, where identity often turns political, Chhath too has become a symbol of power.

In Delhi, parties compete to sponsor ghats, arrange artificial ponds, and print banners wishing ‘Happy Chhath’ in bold Hindi fonts. For a city where Bihari and Purabiya migrants make up nearly 30% of the working-class population, Chhath is political gold. A candidate’s presence at a ghat can tilt municipal elections.

In Mumbai, where migrants from Bihar and eastern UP form a significant vote bloc, local leaders know that ignoring Chhath can mean electoral backlash. Each year, the city’s civic authorities scramble to provide clean water and safe enclosures for the ritual, because the ‘Purabiya vote’ counts, and Chhath is its loudest expression.

Chhath and the ecology of devotion

What makes Chhath remarkable, is its deep ecological consciousness. It celebrates water bodies, respects natural elements, and insists on cleanliness and simplicity.

Yet, urban Chhath has also exposed our environmental contradictions. Polluted rivers, artificial tanks, plastic packaging, all threaten the purity of the ritual. Governments now clean rivers and ban plastic before the festival, but largely as a symbolic gesture, often more for optics than for the ritual’s ecological needs.

If Chhath is to survive as nature worship, we must let the rivers breathe again. The worshippers’ instinct is already ecological, their offerings biodegradable, their rituals water bound. What they need is a clean canvas, not one blackened by industrial waste.

In many villages of north Bihar, local youth groups now volunteer to clean ponds before the festival and replant trees afterward, a quiet, grassroots environmentalism born from faith. Chhath, in that sense, could be the model for an Indian environmental ethic rooted not in law but in devotion.

What the Sun sees

Every year, as the sun sets on the first day of arghya, a hush falls over the ghats. The air turns golden. Water shivers under the light. And as the women fold their hands, eyes half-closed, you can almost hear the collective murmur of generations – gratitude for harvests, for children, for endurance.

I’ve watched it on both sides of the border, India and Nepal. The same sun, the same songs. Chhath transcends lines on a map. The festival belongs to a civilization that believes salvation lies not in temples but in rivers, not in noise but in silence.

Even as urban India modernises, builds skyscrapers and metros, this ritual endures. Because in its simplicity lies the deepest truth: we are what we revere.

Sama Chakeva: Songs of siblinghood and nature

No sooner does Chhath end than Mithila prepares for another festival Sama Chakeva, the celebration of sibling love and sacrifice.

As winter begins to bite and migratory birds return to the plains, young girls gather to sculpt clay figurines of Sama and Chakeva, a sister and brother whose tale embodies loyalty beyond death. They decorate them with natural colours, place them in baskets lined with grass, and sing into the evening light:

‘गाम के अधिकारि तोहे बड़का भइया हो, भइया हाथ दस पखरी खुना दिया, चम्पा फूल लगा दिया हो…’

(O chief of the village, you are the elder brother; you gave your hand with ten birds’ feathers, and adorned it with champa flowers…)

Once again, it is Sharda Sinha’s voice that gives the ritual its tune. In Mithila, the songs of Sama Chakeva are cultic, sounding through courtyards, evoking freshly harvested fields, and renewing the emotional ecology of siblings.

But the festival is also a parable of environmental awareness. The clay birds are immersed only after days of play, symbolising the cycle of migration, birth, and return. Children learn that the sky’s travellers cranes, swans, herons, are kin too.

Together, Chhath and Sama Chakeva form the moral continuum of Mithila’s culture: reverence for nature, gratitude for kinship, and resilience amid change.

The sun also belongs to migrants

For millions who left their villages for survival, rickshaw pullers in Delhi, factory workers in Surat, garments workers in Chennai, software engineers in Bangalore, Chhath is the one ritual that equalises distance.

They may not return home every year, but on that morning, when they stand barefoot in some borrowed pond, they are back in their childhood. They are back by the Kamla or the Kosi.

In a time of global migration and fractured belonging, such rituals become lifelines. They hold together what economy and politics often tear apart.

The sun, after all, rises for everyone, and Chhath reminds us of that most democratic truth.

Epilogue: What we offer the sun

When Sharda Sinha sang, she did not merely sing of the sun, she became the festival’s voice. Her songs filled trains, courtyards, and radios; her words bound generations. She turned folk music into emotional cartography.

Now that she’s gone, Chhath feels quieter. At ghats this year, loudspeakers still play her recordings. People pause when her voice rises:
‘उग हे सूरज देव, अरघ कबुल करि ल…’

(O Sun God, rise and accept this offering…)
Some women wipe their eyes. The sun rises, but for many, the festival seems a little incomplete. Memory, however, continues the song even after the singer is gone.

Her voice drifts still, over rivers, over rooftops where lamps shimmer, over digital screens where diaspora families play her songs to feel closer to home.

She once said Chhath songs are never written, only remembered. They live in the air of villages, in the speech of mothers, in the laughter of sisters. That memory, like sunlight, never sets.

For many years, I have been far from home, from the pond where my families stood with folded hands, from the foggy banks where lamps trembled in the wind. In Bangalore, there are no ghats like those of Uren, Benipatti, Madhubani, no smell of burnt sugarcane or mustard oil hanging in the evening air. And yet, as the sun sets behind the city’s glass towers, I can almost see it, the water glimmering, the songs rising, the silhouettes of fasting women waiting in quiet devotion.

I close my eyes, and Sharda Sinha’s voice returns. The same voice that stitched together our childhood evenings, echoing from village loudspeakers over ponds and fields, making the festival itself breathe. Her songs made the festival breathe. Now, with her gone, there’s a silence that no speaker can fill. For decades, she was not merely the voice of Chhath, she was Chhath: its melody, its tenderness, its mother tongue. Without her, the festival feels a note short, a breath less.

As I imagine the arghya being offered, women lifting bamboo baskets toward the rising sun I see more than faith. I see endurance, grace, and the quiet strength of a people often misunderstood. Those who are mocked for poverty or migration show, through this ritual, their richest form of harmony: with nature, with community, with themselves.

I can almost see the diyas flickering on the water’s edge, the first light touching the faces of fasting women, the river mirroring both fatigue and faith. And as Sharda Sinha’s song fades into the dawn of memory, I am reminded that identity, like sunlight, cannot be contained.

Chhath is not a spectacle. It is a whisper to the sun, a thank you to the earth, a promise, renewed each year, even from afar, to remember who we are.

Ashutosh Kumar Thakur is a writer, literary critic, and curator based in Bangalore. He hails from the Nepal border of Madhubani district, Bihar.

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