Annaprāśana — the first solid food
The popular claimThe first mouthful is a rite, and the rite has a menu.
There is a moment in every child's first year when it eats something other than milk, and the tradition decided that moment should not pass unmarked.
What the sūtras give
Āśvalāyana and Pāraskara both place it in the sixth month — Manu agrees — and describe a meal cooked and offered into the fire first, then given to the child from the father's hand with a mantra for long life and strength. The food is specific. Pāraskara lists rice cooked with ghee, or with curd, or with honey, according to what is wished for the child: ghee for brilliance, curd for strength, honey for eloquence; and a mixture of all three. Āśvalāyana adds that the meat of a particular bird may be used by a family wishing for a particular quality — a detail almost universally dropped and worth recording only so that the reader knows the text is older than its modern vegetarian form.
The sixth month is not arbitrary. The Suśruta Saṁhitā, the medical text, gives the sixth month as the time to begin solid food, and the rite is the medical advice made ceremonial. A tradition that placed its ritual at the same point as its medicine was paying attention.
The living forms
This is one of the two saṁskāras that never went away. In Bengal it is the mukhe-bhāt — rice in the mouth — kept in the sixth month for a boy and the seventh for a girl by some families, with a spread of dishes the child is touched to in turn. In Kerala it is the chōṟūṇu, often performed at a temple, most famously at Guruvāyūr, where the first rice is temple prasādam. In Maharashtra, the uṣṭāvaṇ; in the Telugu country, annaprāsana with the name intact; in Nepal, the pāsnī, kept with particular care. The Tamil form is often folded into the first birthday.
What every one of these keeps from the text: the sixth month, rice, ghee, the father's or maternal uncle's hand. What every one of them adds: a party.
The objects on the tray
Nearly every living form ends with a game that is not in the sūtras. A tray is set before the child with a few objects — a book, a pen, a coin, a lump of earth, a ladle, sometimes jewellery — and whichever the child reaches for is read as a sign of inclination: learning, wealth, land, the kitchen. It is charming, it is old, and it is not in Āśvalāyana or Pāraskara. This site records it as the custom it is. A reader who wants to know what the text says can stop at the rice; a reader who wants to know what the family does can go on to the tray. Both are true accounts of Annaprāśana.
Timing
The texts say the sixth month; the muhūrta treatises, asked for a day within it, want a nakṣatra from the gentle or fixed groups, a fixed or dual rising sign, and the child's birth nakṣatra avoided. Tuesday and Saturday are refused by most. Families with a temple tradition follow the temple's calendar instead. The rite is not tithi-bound, and the sūtra's own instruction — the sixth month — is the only firm one.
What this page does not say
It does not say that a child fed rice on the wrong day, or before the sixth month, or without the fire, is any the worse for it. Suśruta's advice about the sixth month is the only part with a stated reason, and it is a medical one. The rest is a family's way of noticing a first.
Source — Ashvalayana Grihyasutra 1.16 and Paraskara Grihyasutra 1.19 on Annaprashana; the Manusmriti 2.34 on the sixth month; the Sushruta Samhita (Sharira-sthana 10) on weaning in the sixth month, which the rite follows
Every claim on this site names its source, and every calculator shows its arithmetic.