Fifteen nights after Diwali

The full moon of Kartik is the most crowded night in the Hindu calendar: Tripurari Purnima, marking Shiva's victory over Tripurasura; Guru Nanak's birth anniversary under the same moon; and in Banaras, the night the gods themselves are said to descend to bathe in the Ganga. The city receives them the way a host receives honoured guests — by lighting every step it owns. Diyas run the whole crescent of the riverfront, the traditional eighty-four ghats and the new ones besides, from Ravidas Ghat in the south to Rajghat and Namo Ghat in the north. In 2026 the night falls on Tuesday the 24th of November — book the month before, because the city has stopped fitting its visitors for this one night of the year.

A festival younger than it looks

Here is the finding that surprised even this desk: the great lamp-night of Banaras, which feels as old as the stone, is younger than most of the people standing on it. The tellings of its origin differ — and the Journal reports them side by side. One traces it to the mid-1980s at Panchganga Ghat, where a handful of teenagers are said to have lit the first rows with two donated cans of oil; another credits its formalisation in 1986 under the patronage of the Kashi Naresh; a third dates the Dashashwamedh celebration to 1991, organised by the founder of the Ganga Seva Nidhi, the trust that still conducts the great aarti and the martyrs' tribute there. Read together, they reconcile into one honest sentence: the festival in its modern form began at Panchganga in the mid-1980s and spread, ghat by ghat, until the whole riverfront burned. Everything else about the night is old — the Kartik moon, the snan, the deep daan. The scale is the part one generation built with its own hands, which, in a city that measures age in millennia, may be the most Banarasi fact of all: the stone is eternal, and the fire is always tonight's.

The count of lamps

The numbers, where they are official, are worth printing: recent years have set between ten and seventeen lakh diyas along the ghats by government count, with a lakh of them moulded from cow dung by women's self-help groups in the villages beyond the city; the potters of the region sell their work at two and three rupees a lamp and earn crores in the one week. The state has declared the night a provincial fair; thousands of volunteers lay the rows through the afternoon; and by the official arithmetic the evening moves economic activity in the region worth thousands of crores. Stand on a rooftop at six o'clock and watch the lighting move down the river like a slow fuse, and the number stops mattering entirely.

The sky lamps

The detail we most want you to look up for, because almost no visitor knows to: the akash deep. Through the whole month of Kartik, on tall bamboo poles along the ghats, lamps are raised at dusk in small cane baskets — hoisted into the dark like slow stars — lit, the custom holds, to light the way for one's ancestors. The scholarship on this city's ritual year records them tenderly; the boatmen will point them out if you ask. The great night gets the photographs, but the akash deep are the month's quiet masterpiece: a city keeping porch-lights burning for its dead, thirty nights running. If the lamps of the first Diwali essay are for Lakshmi, these are for memory itself.

An honest note, and a weaver's footnote

Is there a dress custom for the night? No — and we will not invent one; what Banaras does is simply wear its best, because the city is the host. (The month's full wardrobe, festival by festival, is in The Festive Fortnights.) And is there a weaving connection? Honestly: none that any record attests. The bridge is older and better — Kabir, the julaha of Banaras, the weaver-saint whose song of the finely woven sheet, jhini jhini bini chadariya, made the loom this city's oldest metaphor for the soul. On the night the ghats burn with a lakh of lamps, somewhere behind them, in Madanpura and Alaipura, the looms rest — and the city that weaves light by day watches it float by night.

Plain answers

What is Dev Deepawali?

Varanasi's "Diwali of the gods" on Kartik Purnima, when lakhs of diyas line the ghats for the gods said to descend and bathe in the Ganga.

When is Dev Deepawali in 2026?

Tuesday, 24 November 2026 — fifteen nights after Diwali, on the Kartik full moon.

How is Dev Deepawali different from Diwali?

It falls a fortnight later, is celebrated on the riverfront rather than at home, and belongs to Varanasi specifically.

How many diyas are lit?

Official counts in recent years ran between ten and seventeen lakh across the ghats.

Which ghat is best for Dev Deepawali?

Dashashwamedh for the grand aarti, Panchganga for the festival's origins, Namo Ghat for space — or a boat on the river for all of them at once.

What is akash deep?

Sky lamps raised in cane baskets on tall bamboo poles through the month of Kartik, lit to light the way for ancestors.