Navrātri — nine nights, and what the ninth is for
The popular claimNine nights are counted from a rule, not a calendar page.
Ask when Navrātri starts and most people will name a date. Ask why that date, and the answer is usually "the calendar says so". The calendar does say so — but the calendar is applying a rule, and the rule is short enough to hold in one hand.
Which nine nights
There are four Navrātris in the year, two of them observed widely. The spring one falls in Caitra and ends on Rāma Navamī. The autumn one — Śāradīya Navrātri, the one most people mean — runs through the bright half of Āśvina, from Pratipadā to Navamī, and Vijayādaśamī follows on the tenth.
Nine tithis, then — not nine calendar days. A tithi is the time the Moon takes to gain twelve degrees on the Sun, and it runs anywhere from about nineteen to twenty-six hours. So the nine nights sometimes span eight calendar days and sometimes ten, and the only way to know which is to compute where each tithi begins and ends.
The first day: the rule for the pot
The observance opens with ghaṭasthāpana — setting the pot, sowing the barley, lighting the lamp that is meant to stay lit. The nibandha texts are specific about when. The Dharmasindhu takes Pratipadā as the day on which that tithi is present at sunrise; where Pratipadā touches two sunrises, the first is preferred, and where it touches none, the day on which it is present in the morning is taken. The rite itself belongs to the morning, ideally the first part of the day, and the texts warn against carrying it past midday.
That is the whole rule. It does not care which weekday it is, and it does not care what the printed calendar on the wall says, because the printed calendar was made by someone applying exactly this.
2026, computed
Computed for Delhi by this site's panchang engine. The tithi boundaries are the same everywhere to within a few minutes; the sunrise they are measured against is not, which is the subject of the next section.
- Amāvasyā ends 9:20 PM, Saturday 10 October. Pratipadā runs from then to 9:31 PM, Sunday 11 October. It is present at sunrise on the 11th (6:20 AM) and at no other sunrise. Ghaṭasthāpana: Sunday 11 October, morning.
- Aṣṭamī runs from 8:28 AM, Sunday 18 October to 10:52 AM, Monday 19 October. It is present at sunrise only on the 19th. Durgāṣṭamī: Monday 19 October.
- Navamī runs from 10:52 AM on the 19th to 12:50 PM, Tuesday 20 October. Present at sunrise only on the 20th. Mahānavamī: Tuesday 20 October.
- Daśamī begins 12:50 PM on the 20th and ends 2:12 PM, Wednesday 21 October. Which of those two days is Vijayādaśamī is decided by a different rule — the afternoon rule — and it has its own page.
Nine tithis, ten calendar days: the 11th through the 20th. In 2026 no tithi is skipped and none is doubled, which is the simple case. It is not always the simple case, and the years when it is not are the years the argument in the family happens.
The join between the eighth and the ninth
There is one moment in the nine nights that is not a day at all. Sandhi pūjā is performed across the boundary where Aṣṭamī ends and Navamī begins — by the usual reckoning, the last twenty-four minutes of the one and the first twenty-four of the other. In 2026 that boundary falls at 10:52 AM on Monday 19 October, so the sandhi runs from roughly 10:28 to 11:16 that morning.
Notice that this is a clock time, not a date, and that it moves with the tithi and not with the sunrise. A rite fixed to a boundary cannot be moved to a convenient hour without ceasing to be that rite.
What the ninth is for
The nights carry a narrative, and it is worth saying which one. The Devī Māhātmya — thirteen chapters inside the Mārkaṇḍeya Purāṇa — tells three stories, and the middle one is the killing of Mahiṣāsura. The recitation of that text across the nine nights is the oldest thread in the observance that can be pointed at in writing. The later grouping of the nights into three sets of three — Durgā, Lakṣmī, Sarasvatī — is a devotional scheme that arrived afterwards. It is widely followed and there is nothing wrong with it, but it is not what the Purāṇa says, and this page keeps the two apart.
The ninth night is the end of the vrata. Whatever was undertaken on Pratipadā — the fast, the lamp, the daily reading — is completed on Navamī, and the pāraṇa, the formal breaking of the fast, follows once Navamī has ended, which in 2026 means after 12:50 PM on the 20th. Kanyā pūjā, the honouring of young girls, is placed by different families on Aṣṭamī or on Navamī; both are attested, neither is wrong. The tenth day, Vijayādaśamī, is not the tenth night of Navrātri. It is the day after, and it has its own rule.
Why the times above are not the times for you
The rule is "present at sunrise". Sunrise is a local fact. On 11 October the Sun rises in Delhi at 6:20 AM and in Toronto, in its own time zone, at a different clock moment on the same tithi — and the tithi boundaries themselves, converted to local time, shift by the time difference. A tithi that ends at 9:31 PM in Delhi ends at 12:01 PM in Toronto that same day. For most of the nine nights this changes nothing, because the tithi comfortably covers sunrise in both places. In the years when a boundary falls near dawn, it changes everything, and that is why the panchang on this site is computed for the city you type, not copied from Delhi.
What this page does not say
It does not say what the nine nights will do for you, and it does not attach an outcome to keeping them. The texts describe a rite and a story; they do not run a ledger. If you keep Navrātri, this page gives you the days it actually falls on, computed and shown with their working, so that what you do is done on the day the rule names. What it means to you is not ours to compute.
Source — Devi Mahatmya (Markandeya Purana, chapters 81-93) for the narrative the nights carry; Dharmasindhu and Nirnayasindhu on the pratipada-at-sunrise rule for ghatasthapana and on the ashtami-navami sandhi; the day's tithi boundaries computed by this site's own panchang engine for Delhi
Every claim on this site names its source, and every calculator shows its arithmetic.