Chhath: A prayer for society and a quiet act of resistance
Each year, as dawn breaks over the ghats of Bihar and eastern India, the riverbanks shimmer with the golden light of the rising sun, mirrored by thousands of diyas floating on the water’s surface. Men and women, rich and poor, farmer and bureaucrat, stand together — hands folded, faces serene, eyes closed in prayer. For those few moments, there are no hierarchies, no divisions, no power. There is only faith, and the sun.
Chhath is often described as a festival of devotion — an offering to the Sun God and Chhathi Maiya. But it is also something far deeper. Beneath the rituals of fasting, bathing, and offering arghya lies a profound social philosophy — a lesson in equality, sustainability, and humility that our fractured society desperately needs to remember.
The central symbol of Chhath — the Sun — is not just a deity; it is a metaphor for fairness. The sun shines on everyone, without preference or prejudice. It warms the fields of the farmer and the palaces of the powerful in equal measure. In that silent, golden glow, all boundaries blur — of religion, caste, class, and creed. In a world increasingly divided by identity, Chhath offers a radical simplicity: it reminds us that the most sacred force in our lives — light — is shared. No one owns it. No one controls it. The poorest woman standing waist-deep in the river, holding a soop (winnow) of fruits, thekua, and sugarcane, partakes in the same radiance that glints on the skyscrapers of cities far away. The cosmic democracy of sunlight humbles us all.
Unlike many festivals, Chhath has no priests, no temples, no elaborate idols. The connection between the devotee and the elements is direct. The river, the earth, the bamboo, the fruit — all become vessels of faith. The offerings are humble, the language of the prayers is colloquial, carried in Bhojpuri songs sung by women at dusk. There is beauty in this decentralization of divinity. There are no intermediaries, no hierarchy of access to the sacred. Chhath belongs to everyone — the woman who prepares thekua in a mud courtyard, the man who sweeps the ghat, the migrant worker who carries memories of home into distant cities. It dissolves privilege. For once, purity is not about lineage or birth, but about intent, intensity of faith, and rigorous discipline.
At its heart, Chhath celebrates resilience — especially of the women vratins. The four-day fast is one of the most rigorous in Indian tradition, observed without water. Yet it is done with quiet grace, not for personal gain, but for the wellbeing of family and community. In the soft rhythm of the rituals — bathing in rivers, offering fruits, lighting lamps — there is a profound ecological consciousness too. The festival honors the interdependence of life: the sun, the river, the soil, and the human being. It is a hymn to sustainability, centuries before we coined the term. And though women lead much of it, men join in solidarity. Families, neighbours, entire communities come together to clean the ghats, share food, and host travelers. Chhath, in its most authentic form, is about collective belonging — a rare experience in an era of isolation and division.
In today’s India, where lines of religion, caste, and privilege are being redrawn with alarming fervour, Chhath stands as a quiet act of resistance. It refuses exclusion. You cannot gatekeep sunlight. You cannot monopolize a riverbank. You cannot trademark faith that is rooted in the earth itself.
Chhath is not loud. It does not demand spectacle. But in its simplicity lies subversion. It reclaims the idea that sacredness is a common inheritance, not a privilege. It redefines spirituality as shared space — not fenced by rituals, but opened by empathy.
As the devotees standing motionless in the water at sunset, hands folded toward the sinking orb, you can sense the stillness of surrender. The moment asks each of us to look beyond the noise of identity, and to rediscover what binds us. Perhaps that is the real message of Chhath — that equality is experienced in moments of shared humility. The rising and setting sun are reminders that our existence is cyclical, not hierarchical. That the same light that births life will one day absorb us back into itself. In that recognition lies liberation — from ego, from division, from the illusion of control.
This Chhath, as the ghats of Bihar fill with chants and songs, let us pray not just for prosperity, but for perspective. For a world that remembers that the truest worship is not in grand rituals, but in small acts of fairness — in the willingness to stand beside, not above. If we could learn from the sun — to shine without discrimination, to give without expectation, to illuminate without burning — perhaps our festivals would cease to be relics of faith and become lessons in humanity.
And maybe, just maybe, as the first rays of dawn fall upon folded hands and tired faces, we will remember that we are all reflections of the same light.
